Learning the in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education
Edited by Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
Univ. of Calif. Press, Ross Institute, 2007
Ch. 1. From Teaching Globalization to Nurturing Global Consciousness. Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner
Basically, this is a long version of Thing Globally/Act Locally as an important educational goal. They did cases studies with 12 different teachers in different types of schools.
“Michael’s unit placed his students at the center of [one of] globalization’s core dilemma[s]”: “transnational of production and the destabilization of social, cultural, and natural capital that puts social cohesion and sustainable development at risk.”
Four core areas that embody globalizations: economic integration, environmental stewardship, cultural encounters, governance and citizenship. {These are similar to High Noon problems.}
As students gain information about how others lead their lives, do they need to engage affectively with others’ experiences? Or is emotional engagement an illusion of understanding? {I don’t think so. Student do need affective engagement.}
Film and literature powerfully inform student’s cultural imagination. {Remember this in history class.}
Students learned to post their thoughts on a public website “making them visible to the world” This rewarded them as “Being part of it.” {To gain global consciousness, students need to actually feel part of the process and not just handing in something for one teacher to read. Students need a larger audience.}
Global Consciousness:
- “The capacity and the inclination to place our self and the people, objects, and situations with which we come into contact with the broader matrix of our contemporary world.” The student “perceives herself as an actor in such a global context.”
- Global sensitivity: local experience is part of global developments
- Global understanding: ability to think in flexible and informed ways about worldwide issues
- Global self: perceive ourselves as global actors
Pay attention to issues marked by global interconnectedness.
Understand the world and the ways it is rapidly changing.
See yourself as an actor in the global matrix. *It’s hard to get students there…
Because teachers have subject specialties, schools need to a few global-view people to promote the message.
??Where do the three Rs fit in???
They “anticipate” that youth who have been directly exposed to experiences of globalization (such as migration, formal learning or social entrepreneurship) may exhibit greater global sensitivity
“The most important function of global consciousness for today’s individuals is to give coherence to otherwise fragmented experience. Ongoing breaking news from around the world….prove profoundly disorienting for students and adults alike.”
Other book: Globalization Culture and Education in the New Millenium. Suarez-Orozco and D. Qin-Hilliard, eds.
The Journal of Research in International Education
Ch. 2. Understanding Cultural Patterns. Peter Gardenfors.
Gardenfors’ article has three main points. It begins by explaining how “understanding consists of seeing patterns.” People search for patterns, and once we see a pattern, one cannot forget it. This trait, however, can lead to difficulty in perceiving the patterns of other cultures. (See the cartoon example.) Gardenfors then writes about how learning a language is beneficial to understanding a culture because it creates an awareness of different cultural patterns. (*Math is the universal language that describes and predicts patterns for people from different cultures?JM) He finishes by talking about how ICT and computer simulations can create a variety of experiences that a student cannot experience directly.
Understanding consists of seeing patterns:
- “it can also hamper our ability to approach [multicultural situations] with an open mind.”
- “a problem of globalization is the difficulty in perceiving the patterns of other cultures.”
- need to study cultural patterns as well as facts of other cultures.
- different patterns can create a sense of otherness
“Our visual system searches incessantly for patterns…..Once one sees the pattern, one cannot forget it.”
“the context determines how we interpret information our senses receive.”
- eg. Arabic (17 tones) or Indian (21 tones) music sounds confusing to western ears (12 tones) because the tones don’t fit western patterns.
- eg cartoon of headache medicine: left to right (western): medicine cures a headache, or right to left (Arabic): medicine causes a headache.
- eg: breakfast and prima colazione
“Learning a language is always beneficial for understanding cultural patterns….and also [a student’s] metacognitive awareness of conflicts between patterns.”
“Undervaluing the ability to interpret information is one of the negative consequences of the current information society.”
IT offers many opportunities for creating visual patterns for students.
- simulations: the Sims from different cultures. They depict a variety of situations that a student cannot experience directly.
- play an interactive game that requires understanding a culture to win.
J.F. Rischard. High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. Basic Books, 2002.
Overview:
This book is the basis of the NAIS 20/20 project: “Challenge 20/20 is an Internet-based program that pairs classes at any grade level (K-12) from schools in the U.S. with their counterpart classes in schools in other countries; together the teams (of two or three schools) tackle real global problems to find solutions that can be implemented at the local level and in their own communities.” (nais.org, 9/13/11)
The book does ask people to think globally and act locally, which is what the Challenge 20/20 promotes.
The argument starts with two new forces, demographic growth and an IT/networked/market based economy and the issues and opportunities those two forces create. It summarizes 20 global issues created by those two forces. It starts by advocating for local action on global issues and ends by promoting a type of networked governance as a way to address the new problems. As many have written, governance follows the mode of production.
Ch. 1: Two Big Forces
“Over the next twenty years, two big forces [demographic explosion & new world economy] will deeply change the world as we know it.”
- Demographic explosion brings only stresses.
- The new world economy brings a mixture of stresses and opportunities.
Ch. 2: The Demographic Explosion
“We will go from an already overstretched planet of 6B today to about 8B people in 2020-2025-in less than one generation.”
- Most of the added people will live in developing countries. Most will keep flocking to the cities.
- Food production will have to increase by 40%
- Energy consumption will rise….to where developing countries may be close to overtaking rich countries in total carbon emissions.
- EG/ China will need one new 1,000MW power plant every month. >>> global warming, acid rain
- Other stresses: infectious diseases, loss of forests, fisheries depletion, biodiversity losses, pollution, increasing water scarcity
- By 2020 people over sixty will compose 1/3 of the population in developed countries.
- Outbound migration pressures in poor countries could dwarf rich countries needs from inbound migration. There will migration pressures in both directions.
Ch. 3: The New World Economy
“In the past twenty years (1980-2000) we went from 1.5B people living in market economies to nearly 6B.” Virtually all countries have market-oriented policies now.”
“The technological revolution has made knowledge and creativity the number one factor of production—farm more important than capital, labor and raw materials.”
- Production processes can be flexibly attached, from anywhere at any time.
- The Indus. Rev. made production 10^3 faster. Computers increase communication by 10^5. And the new world has 80% of the way to go in terms of capacity.
- The new world economy is a “networked economy”. {Holderness has to figure out how to educate students for the networked economy.}
Ch. 4: Why the New World Economy Is So Radically Different
“In Morocco, workers assemble pants whose parts have been cut by a machine remotely controlled by a Netherlands-based computer, instantaneously reflecting the demand in the Dutch client’s stores.”
- There are 10x more alliances between companies than there were in 1990.
- The service sector is the most vibrant job-creating part of the economy.
- Products are becoming more like services. Rather than buying a car, you are buying the service that comes with it.
- Giving away things has become routine. Michelin, Motorola, Linux share technology to create new standards. {This trend affects intellectual property and academic honesty.}
- Bundling to come: multi-use smart cards with identity, health, credit, voter, etc, etc info.
Ch. 5: The Opportunities and Stresses of the New World Economy
Opportunities
- The demise of inflation }not tuition right now!}. Prices can be compared instantly.
- The old business cycle of overproduction to production cutbacks becomes more limited.
- Higher productivity growth! Productivity grew at 1.5%/year from 1973-1995. It’s been at 2.5%/year since 1995. {But that is not true for schools like Hold. At some point, we need to face tuition inflation and decreased productivity in our school. We are using more people and more machines to teach the same number of students.}
- Unprecedented catch up opportunities for the developing countries.
- Education: Monterrey Tech is offering each student in Latin America access to the same star professors. Teacher networking in remote areas, rapid exchange of best practices, etc.
Key qualities:
- Bent on speed, flows across national boundaries, highly knowledge-sensitive, hypercompetitive—you must be 100% reliable.
Stresses:
- The new economy could also aggravate rich/poor gap depending on a technology gap.
- The ratio between the top 1/5 and bottom 1/5 of US income jumped from 18:1 in 1990 to 24:1 in 2000 and the ration has continued to grow. {Holderness clients are in that top 1/5}
- Recurring bouts of financial market turbulence. “All the waves on the sea are becoming larger and more prone to suddenly change direction.” Networked financial markets move money & concepts quickly.
- “Excessive trust in the marketplace with the complacency that results from it.” John Maynard Keynes wrote about how much leeway to give to “the money-making and money-loving instincts as the main motive force of the economic machine.”
Ch. 6: A Crisis of Complexity
Demographics and the new economy are growing exponentially, but human institutsions (gov’ts, etc) are growing linearly. Governance can’t keep up with the new growth
Ch. 7: Three New Realities
“the future belongs to flatter, faster, more network-like organizations.”
“Hierarchies are just too slow, too ridid, too self-obsessed, and too mired in a sort of perpetual bad mood. And most of the time, their leaders are in over their heads.”
“In those flatter, more network-like organizations, people won’t be merely information transmitters—they will retain an important role: not through controls and detailed instructions but by instilling the basic vision, values, and objectives into the organization and by holding employees to performance contracts.”
- The nation-state is becoming outdated because it’s a territorial concept defined by a geographical border. The new economy straddles these borders. The environmental system crosses these borders. Human migration will cross these borders at much faster pace. The challenges to our traditional politics “produce a perpetual bad mood in political life.”
“Civil society (NGOs, etc) have become a powerful force.” Cross borders. Use new technology…
- Large protest coalitions online…..
“Large corporations have a huge advantage over governments—the advantage of being global.”
- CISCO has 500,000 students in its 10,000 “networking academies.”
Ch. 8: A Dangerous Gap
“We have two crises: a crisis of complexity, produced by the stresses from the demographic and new world economy, and a nasty twin, a crisis of governance arising from the rigidity of human institutions and from the sheer difficulty of getting the human institutions to [keep] up.”
- We need domestic policy on the scale of the planet. (Think globally. Act locally.)
Ch. 10
“Consider one effort that has worked—the international drive to phase out the substances that had opened the hole in the ozone layer that protects us from dangerous solar radiation.”
- The concept was simply defined
- There was no ground for conflict
- Commitments were needed only from a small number of countries
- The scientific base was firm
- Alternative technologies developed quickly
Ch. 11: Inherently Global Issues
These are the 20 issues:
“The first set has to do with cross-border effects and the physical confines or our living space. These issues have to do with how we share our planet.”
- Global warming, Biodiversity and ecosystem losses, Fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, maritime safety and pollution
“The second set has to do with social and economic issues…”
- Fight against poverty, peacekeeping/terrorism, education for all, infectious diseases, digital divide, natural disaster prevention and mitigation
“The third set deals legal and regulatory issues that must be handled globally because of free riders and leakages.”
- Reinventing taxation, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade/investment/competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, international labor and migration rules.
Ch. 12: Sharing Our Planet
This chapter has good summaries of the planet issues mentioned above.
- {where are places to act around Plymouth?}
Ch. 13: Sharing our Humanity
This chapter has good summaries of the social/economic issues mentioned above.
“The global elite, which represented 30% of the world population in 1950, will be down to less than 15% by 2020.” {that’s the Holderness population…}
- {Identify the poverty around Plymouth.}
- The peace dividend, 1989-2001, was $400B/year worldwide. We lost that peace dividend with Irag, Afghanistan, etc.
- Education for all: {How can Holderness reach out and teach other kids around the world…?}
Ch. 14: Sharing Our Rule Book: Issues Needing a Global Regulatory Approach
This chapter has good summaries of the legal and regulatory issues mentioned above.
- Intellectual property rights are in flux as the new technology makes it so easy to copy/move information and so much of the new technology is open and shared. {This topic directly affects “plagiarism” and academic honesty.}
- “People worldwide will increasingly work for many employees at a time through portfolio working. They will telecommute from great distances. They will need to upgrade their knowledge through lifelong learning. {This could apply to boarding schools soon: see A-language self-study program in the IB.}
Ch. 15: No Pilot in the Cockpit
It is not clear who is leading the work on global issues.
Ch. 16: Current Ways of Handling Global Issues Aren’t Up to the Job
- Treaties and conventions too parochial
- Big Intergovermental Conference have no follow-through
- G7, etc are too exclusive
- Global Multilaterals (World Bank, IMF, etc) cannot decide on their own and cut through disagreements.
Ch. 17: No Chance for a World Government
Ch. 18: Pointers Towards Solutions: Networked Governance
Ch. 19: Globals Issues Networks
Ch. 20: Good things about Global Issues Networks
- These chapters describe his method for addressing global governance. Take the networked model in the economic world and apply it to governance. GINs enlist members, define norms, and implement tasks. Think of how Wikipedia or Linux or Mozilla govern itself.
- Reputation effect has a big impact in this idea. Public rankings push weak institutions to act for fear of public exposure. {Reputation effect has a huge impact on private schools.}
- GINs have speed, legitimacy, diversity, compatibility with others, he says.
Ch. 21: Controversial Aspects
- Complexity of tasks
- Who decides? and democratic representation.
- Linkages between issues
Ch. 23: Conclusion
“What is needed is imagination.”
“We also need some really fast thinking.”
There is a “basic, undeniable failure of the entire international setup and world’s nation-state’s at the task of fast and effective global problem-solving.”
The Children Must Play, Samuel E. Abrams. The New Republic, 28 January 2011.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US, 18 October 2011
“The Finns have made clear that, in any country, no matter its size or composition, there is much wisdom to minimizing testing and instead investing in broader curricula, smaller classes, and better training, pay, and treatment of teachers.”
75 minutes of recess/day, in all weather. “They also mandate lots of arts and crafts, more learning by doing, rigorous standards for teacher certification, higher teacher pay, and attractive working conditions.”
They are scoring well on the PISA: Program for International Student Assessment
“The government agreed to reduce class size, boost teacher pay, and require that, by 1979, all teachers complete a rigorous master’s program.” They also made teachers pay equal to what fellow university graduates make on average. In the US, teachers make 65% of what other university graduates make, on average. They require teachers to get a Masters degree.
They cultivate talent from within. Administrators have all taught for at least four years.
They cap science classes at 16 to do labs.
Annual school exams are given to “a small but statistically significant samples of students” to offer data on how to improve teaching. This allows for more resources to classroom teaching. The big exams are much more rare than in the USA. They use PISA to get an outside evaluation.
Teachers use the national curriculum as a guide, not as a blueprint.
Students are not tracked through the 10th grade.
Ch. 7. How Computerized Work and Globalization Shape Human Skill Demand. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane.
“What education and skills are needed to earn a decent living in the labor market created by computers and globalization?”
What computers do: substitute for a human processing info when 1)the info can be represented in a form suitable to a computer and the process can be expressed in a series of inductive or deductive rules. (algebraic logarithm)
- Airline boarding pass, telephone directory, computerized imaging
- An internist talking to a patient and reading body language, or a truck driver on busy street are not representable to computers. “We can know more than we can tell.” (Polanyi 1966). This is pure pattern recognition.
In the past, “problem-solving” has focused on problems with rule-based solutions. (eg/algebra). This skill has little value in the labor market. “Schools must teach children how to solve new problems for which solution rules are not yet known.”
“…human interaction to establish context remains central to many occupations—managing, teaching, selling—and to working in teams in which the task it to exchange not just information but a particular understanding of information.”
- A globalized economy complicates this communication problem.
Areas of job growth:
- Service occupations—the inability to capture human optical recognition and many physical movements and tasks that must be performed at the site.
- Sales occupations—there’s an increased flow of new products & can’t make rules for the complex exchange of information in salesmanship.
- Professional, managerial and technical occupations. Unable to express high end cognitive rules such as formulating and solving new problems, exercising good judgement in the face of uncertainty and creating new products and services. (this is where many Holderness grads will end up.)
In contrast, many assembly line and clerical work can be described by rules.
The demand side of the market can change more rapidly than people can change their skills. Demand is shifting toward a higher-skilled, more flexible labor force.
What skills are now required?
- Expert thinking: solving problems with no rule-based solutions. Diagnosing an illness, creating a great meal. Computers can give helpful info, but not solve.
- Complex communication: manage motivating, gauging a reaction, explaining why a new design is better.
- Non-routine manual tasks: cannot be put into if x then y, require optical recognition and fine muscle control. Driving a truck,
What is out?
- Routine cognitive tasks (evaluating mortgage apps), routine manual tasks (robotics),
Educational Implications
Expert thinking:
Math: rules based solution is the second part of problem-solving process. The value is in the first part: recognizing which rule-based solution applies. This often relies on analogies with past experience. “Understanding consists of seeing patterns.” Go beyond traditional assignments in which the student knows that the problems at the end of a chapter on long division can all be solved using long division—no need to think about which rules apply.
History and literature: teach the underlying relationships among narrow facts. (Span Arm ex).
Complex Communication: making effective oral and written arguments requires additional emphasis and time—the time need to compose, review and grade. This means less time on content and recall of facts. (with computers, people who can recall fact are less valuable.)
Ch. 8. The Postindustrial Workplace and Challenges to Education. Kai-ming Cheng, Professor of Education-University of Hong Kong.
“I argue that education should return to its original premise of broadly preparing young people for their future.”
Employers are organizing around smaller working groups—task forces, production teams, project groups, or deal teams—that are designed to provide tailor-made services to particular clients. They are designers of products and bear responsibility for the deliverables.
- Teamwork is the common mode of operation. People are expected to work beyond any narrow special knowledge.
- “Working relations are not bound by procedures.” People have to work with others, demonstrate flexibility in dealing with personal differences and maintain positive relationships. People are more likely to face decisions regarding ethics, emotions, values and principles.
- Presentations, negotiation, brainstorming, persuasion, debates, and arbitration all entail complex communication skills.
- “Individuals face constant adjustments in teammates, partners, and social groups at work. There’s a greater need for socializing and networking.”
- Although tasks are increasingly specialized, people are not. ????
- “Individuals must be continually engaged in on-the-job and lifelong learning.”
- “There are higher expectations for self-management, self-confidence, and self-reflection.”
- There will be more space for freelancing and entrepreneurship.
Challenges to education
- Historically, schools performed a screening function. That’s not the case now. Now people lose their jobs in the 40s and 50s because their credentials no longer match the changed workplace.
- “Education should enable people to sustain their work engagement throughout their lives.”
- Specialize later.
“When a leading investment bank hires first-year analysts, it looks for a person with a ‘winning personality’ rather ha experience in banking. The bank then provides the appropriate training.” (that’s sort of what we do, but we don’t always provide the appropriate training.)
“Various forms of human communication have become the most critical workplace activity.” Much depends on individuals to achieve harmony, integrity and dignity; self-management/confidence/respect/reflection.
Schools need to emphasize character and personality.
“Learning takes place only in schools and only during structured activities, all students learn the same way…”Operating this way fails to provide students with the capacity they need to survive.
Problem-based learning: develop own questions, explore own paths, arrive at solutions independently or in groups. (senior honors thesis!)
Use learning experiences to enhance learning beyond traditional subjects. (special programs!)
Create learning communities: flexible grouping based on necessities. (we have that in math and language.)
Student profiles and authentic assessment with an emphasis on integration and collaboration.
Lifelong Passport (What’s a “Lifelong Passport?)
Develop a “passion for nature, a commitment to society (through membership in groups), perseverance, leadership ability, an appreciation of the arts, interpersonal skills, fluency in a second or third language, familiarity with other cultures, a sense of justice, belief in equal rights, and tolerance of diversity and plurality.” (the trumpets are playing now! ‘tolerance’ of diversity is off target. Diversity is essential to evolution and growth; it needs to be much more than tolerated.)
Ch. 9 . The Postindustrial Workplace and Challenges to Education. Kai-ming Cheng, Professor of Education-University of Hong Kong.
“Educational systems around the world must adapt traditional teaching strategies to teach cognitive, emotional, digital, and social skills that go beyond the local context.”
- “Teach young people problem-solving and communication methods…outside the individual’s cultural context.”
Immigration and Migration are occurring in 200+ countries.
Europe has the most immigrants
- Europe hasn’t resolved teaching intercultural skills vs. immigrant assimilation
Immigrants struggle more in school. (Duh)
Example curricula
- Role playing, value cultural diversity, foreign language earlier
“Teaching digital skills must be high on the agendas of global educational curricula.”
Globalization threatens the original residents and immigrants and their children. Need to help youth “identity build.”
- Eg. Give two languages equal status
First generation immigrants: “must learn a vast amount of information that may often conflict with assumptions and ways of interacting deeply rooted in self-understanding.”
Ch. 10. The Integration of Immigrant Youth. Maurice Crul, Senior Research at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam.
“I will advocate that the capital (knowledge and experience) of successful immigrant-origin students be put to use more effectively.”
“Second-chance education offers a viable alternative to a pattern of late selection.”
“Research on childrend of immigrants who have achieved educational success shows that for many of them, the road to that success is often bumpy.”
Intermediary:
- Often parent or community liaisons, and school ass’ts who come from migrant backgrounds.
- Communicate with newly arrived immigrant parents, who often face difficulty in supporting their children.
- Student mentoring provides emotional and psychological support, role modeling. They have been effective.
- Mentoring attracts more girls…
Ch. 11. The Education of Immigrant Students in a Globalized World. Marie McAndrew, Chair of Ethnic Relations at the University of Montreal.
Aim: the role of common schooling vs. ethnocultural institutions with newcomers; majority vs. minority languages in the curriculum; should public schools adapt their norms and regulations to religious and cultural diversity.
“the intensification of supranational loyalties is a reality, both for religious militant groups and form more discreet immigrant groups that … benefit… from globalized communications.”
“Schools with a high concentration of immigrant students have often been found to outperform others in academic results, especially when their socioeconomic composition is take into account.”
Preserve medium density schools which combine a sizable presence of the host society’s students with a critical mass of immigrant students. (what = “sizable” and “critical mass”?)
“if basic concepts and skills are not strengthened in the mother tongue, full mastery of other languages will be impeded.” (Should we have mother tongue course for international students?)
Immigrants must master the host language w/o losing the sense of self-worth or accumulating academic deficits. Schools need to be open to linguistic diversity.
5 suggestions
- Incorporate elements of immigrant cultures in school activities
- Implement activities tailored to needs of immigrants to help equalize opportunity
- Integrate immigrant-oriented content or perspective into the curriculum. Acknowledge differences and conflicts over interpretation.
- Adapt norms and regulations governing school life for all. Identify what’s at the heart of the individual school.
- Transform various elements of the curriculum to respond to the “organized” community. (Somebody needs to translate that one for me. Transform? organized = ?)
“Children are extraordinarily flexible: they can live in two different worlds as long as they are not forced to choose one over the other or made to feel that some cultural or religious characteristic are linked to socially devalued individuals (esp. parents).”
Ch. 12. First-Language and –Culture Learning in Light of Globalization. Eugene Roosens.
First language and culture education should be an essential element in present education.
Diversity allows one to conveniently minimize the polarity between “us” and “them.”
It’s good to recruit from specific clubs and networks. That’s how people emigrate.
Today’s youth are learning from, interacting with, an world that is connected to different values, cultures, language groups, levels of economic development, and educational systems. To meet this challenge, youth need to develop intercultural skills.
Ch. 13. Rethinking Honor in Regard to Human Rights. Unni Wikan, University of Oslo.
“Education in an era of globalization must ever struggle to find new ways to teach and enlighten young people about individual freedom as a social commitment.”
To develop as competent and responsible citizens, must above all, respect the integrity and dignity of of the individual human being. “Individual freedom as a social commitment…”
Misconceived humanism places culture above the individual.
Problem: an honor code that underscores the right of the collective to loyalty from the individual. Violence is endorsed to maintain control. A person attacks to maintain the honor of the family, tribe, etc. (Honor Killings)
“In an era of identity politics in which global transnational connections and modern communications steer decisions at the local level more effectively than ever, people must be helped to resist group pressure and the demands of the collectivity.”
Replace the notion of honor that legitimizes violence with an ethos that makes honor equivalent to the defense of human rights.
