What should be at the heart of global

What should be at the heart of global learning

Navigating an uncertain landscape with certainty

By Rob Ford Iam determined not to mention the ‘C’ word when we are all looking forward to the future with the need for hope in the 2020s. Though we cannot pretend that the impact and legacy of the pandemic in 2020-21, where schools are concerned, hasn’t changed the face of education around the world, we should also not see it as a paradigm shift in education separate from what is already underway. It may well have accelerated seismic shifts already happening in technology, learning and classrooms across the world. Whatever happens as the next stage of the pandemic and uncertainty continues, we will still be looking at innovative ways to support young people in making sense of the world, to professionally develop educators and school leaders, and to continue to connect classrooms, communities and cultures worldwide.

The narrative in education is always about optimism and hope, but it is even more so in the current times. The role of education and educators has always been to offer alternative narratives and to draw upon history and examples so that the future never looks bleak, or cast in a certain way. We can fi nd our hope in education through looking at the development of more sophisticated global learning to provide a brighter light for our schools and communities in the darkness of a complex educational landscape.

Global learning, leading to national identity confidence and global citizenship.

The Canadian educational expert, Michael Fullan, once said ‘Some teachers taught the curriculum today. Others taught students. There lies the difference’.

The two questions we should be addressing to navigate a complex educational landscape in international education are 1) What is at the heart of global learning? and 2) What is it?

I want to begin by stating what it isn’t; it isn’t a fluffy and nebulous approach that, in effect, undermines understanding of global issues or how these are taught to students. The examples of ‘Hats for Haiti’ spring to mind from the humanitarian disaster a few years ago when schools, in good faith, collected money for disaster relief but students had no idea where Haiti was, its history, or even what the charity collection would do. International education can be simplistic, and often the most powerful examples of it are, but it cannot be ‘blind activism’ or learning. Neither is it about pointless curriculum mapping in the same way that Literacy (L) or Numeracy (N) or Citizenship (C) were once at the top of the agenda, with leadership teams and middle leaders adding these letters across schemes of work and sitting back satisfied that that had achieved ‘literacy’ or ‘numeracy’ because they had mapped the curriculum.

It isn’t an abstract or disconnected approach to the wider world or even subscription to an international curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate or International Primary Curriculum or Cambridge IGCSEs. These don’t automatically imply a global learning approach if schools look to collecting badges rather than implementing an actual international curriculum approach. It is not the preserve of an expert or guru to pronounce what global learning might be, especially as one of the main attractions of pursuing global learning is precisely that it is one of the best examples of an experiential strategy in education.

What is it?

There are 6 concepts that constitute a global learning approach in education: 1. It is the glue for a school community 2. Holistic curriculum – not only joining up subjects and learning but also ensuring nothing is taught in abstract or a silo 3. An outward facing school 4. A positive school culture 5. International mindedness 6. Futures orientated

What is really at the heart of global learning is ‘IDENTITY’

In a globalised world the very core of global learning’s importance is that, at the heart of it, it is global learning that allows us to work out and be proud of who we are – whether in Moldova, the Forest of Dean, Appalachia, or wherever – and link that to how we relate this to the wider globalised world: not in an ‘either/or’ split.

Why is it important?

Outside the now former British Council HQ, off Trafalgar Square in London, were two very powerful signs. One said ‘Connecting classrooms and cultures around the world’ and the other said ‘Changing lives through education’. I would suggest both are very good reasons for why international education is important. In my classroom I used to have a quote from HG Wells that said ‘Humanity is a race between education and catastrophe’. As we move into the 2020s, we are faced continuously with this question as we interact with our students: ‘how do we explain these times?’. Here are four reasons to illustrate why it is important:

a) Globalist vs Patriot Former US president Trump gave a speech to the UN in September 2019 where he declared ‘the future belongs to the patriot, not the globalist’. The challenge for all of us going forward into the 2020s is that this false binary choice is called out and that we, as educators, ensure through global learning that such zero sum politics have no place in our education. This is a huge challenge for schools where the obvious curriculum approach is to ignore and default to the abstract.

b) Climate Change Action – The Greta factor Our students’ generation is often castigated as the ‘snowflake’ generation, a generation full of apathy, and yet when they go on strike and demand change, they can be derided by powerful figures (as when the former US president mocked a 16-year autistic school girl on social media). The agency and mobilisation of young people is something that is only going to grow and be a key factor in global learning; most young people I know can recite the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the heart and are going to be unforgiving when they achieve the reins of power. More importantly, they also apply the SDGs daily.

c) Education for a greater purpose One of the key factors in favour of global education is that anyone who has ever been involved in it knows that it is more than the operational, mundane day-to-day. It isn’t about compliance education: often the schools that are the greatest 

The narrative in education is always about optimism and hope, but it is even more so in the current times.

advocates of global learning are also great advocates of literacy, student leadership, oracy, numeracy, digital, creativity, languages, sustainability and critical thinking. They also tend to have thriving modern languages throughout the school linked to global learning. Not an accidental correlation.

They are also schools that are often streets ahead on student and staff wellbeing. As a young history teacher in the mid-1990s, I became involved in global learning because a bored Year 9 class, not taking GCSE History, asked one day if German schools studied the Holocaust and if Russian schools knew America and Britain were in World War II. Within a short space of time, and using the very expensive but hardly used Polycom video-conferencing camera, we were talking live to schools in Cologne and Tomsk from Bristol and connecting classrooms across Europe and Siberia. It represented the most amazing professional development for colleagues in my history department too, and my then school became one of the first International Baccalaureate and international state schools in the South West of England.

d) Future preparations/future leaders A crucial reason for global learning is the development, within the current generation, of the leaders we want to see for the future with the values and beliefs of global learning at their core for a better, more stable and prosperous world built on collaboration and cooperation rather than on antagonism and falsehoods. One of the reasons I have spent much of my career working with post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Siberia is that, after the euphoria died down from that initial ‘bliss of the new dawn’ in 1989-91, the old system proved how ingrained it was in approaches towards LGBTQ, race, inequalities, nationalism, corruption, gender and just holding onto power, showing that there is still a long way to go.

The ‘end of history’ hasn’t quite happened as we now move through the 2020s, and believing in a casual inevitability about the world and finding global solutions has been a mistake many societies have made in the first part of the 21st century. Such uncertainty has led to many educators being unsure about what they should teach or how they should approach some of these issues. Preparing our young people as future leaders through global learning opportunities is key.

Conclusion

We are all in education because we believe in its transformative power as the ultimate, irreversible public good that will ensure a hopeful legacy for our children of decent values and the skills to navigate an increasingly complex and challenging world. Looking to how education should be in the next decade and beyond, it is clear that it has to be about global learning and not inward-looking. We have to ask ourselves constantly as educators what we are passing on to the next generation. The momentum we can create with young people is an unstoppable force and already the issues that have plagued this decade are coming apart at the seams; there will be valuable lessons going forward for us about not repeating mistakes or trusting the same players with power. The mission of global education to connect classrooms is worth signing up to; it is evangelical but it is also crucial that we teach our children to look outward and not fear diversity and difference.

I will finish with the words of one of my heroes, Kurt Hahn, someone who always saw the curriculum in a holistic way and linked to the future:

‘We are all better than we know. If only we can be brought to realise this, we may never be prepared to settle for anything less’.

Exposure to and education with global learning means we may never settle for anything less. We owe this education to all our young people as we prepare them to lead in their future. ◆

We are all in education because we believe in its transformative power as the ultimate, irreversible public good Rob Ford is Director of Heritage International School, Moldova. ✉ robert.ford@heritage.md