Think Like a Teacher

What does it look like to teach and learn globally? I have been thinking about this as I follow tweets from those in Shanghai for a ed conference this week, as TeachersFirst has joined as a partner in the free, online Global Education Conference in November, and even as I talk with friends who are planning or returning from travel to various overseas destinations. I am no world traveler, though I have been to the UK, Switzerland, and — foreign country within the U.S.– Alaska. But I don’t think the teaching globally thing requires world travel experience.

What teaching globally does require — at a minimum — is posing another layer of questions on top of everything that has become routine in our classrooms.  As we discuss the weather in elementary science and talk about changing seasons, how many of us  stop to ask about the opposite hemisphere where the seasons are reversed from ours? How do you suppose the approach of spring feels to those down under as we all talk about pumpkins and raking leaves? What would Halloween feel like in spring? Wait…do they even celebrate Halloween with costumes and gluttonous bags of candy? This might be the global layer of questions in first grade.

In middle school, we teachers are so aware of students’ perceptions of  “cool” and “lame” that we may forget to add the layer of questioning that neutralizes both cool and lame into global. It was cool that suffragettes fought for the right to vote (You mean they didn’t always have it? Lame and stupid.) Where do women live today without the right to vote? That question is not in the tested content, but it is in the global layer of questions for middle school.

In high school, who should pose the global layer of questions? If students heard them in elementary and middle school, could they take over?

Physics class has problems related to motion: calculate ways to make this object land precisely at this point. Launch the water balloon to hit the teacher-caricature squarely and demonstrate using formulas why your catapult had the right design to work. Ask something about this project to give it global dimension. Would this water balloon behave the same way in Tibet? What impact might altitude have? If you were trying to design a physics problem for kids in Iceland, what might you have to change? Would they think it was cool to try to splat the teacher? Does teen sense of humor vary between different cultures?

Now Hamlet. Does it matter that he is a Dane? Do you suppose Danes would have written a tragedy about an English prince? How did Shakespeare know about this prince, anyway? Did he make it up? Did Brits know about stuff on the continent then? What would people know now if they followed Lady Macbeth on Twitter– while she was washing her hands??  How would Shakespeare have used Tweets in his plays? 

Now History. Everybody knows about the Declaration of Independence, right? How much of China’s history do we know? Why do we expect them to know what the 4th of July is? Don’t they manufacture many of the things we use to celebrate it? Are Chinese kids upset that they can’t get at the same stuff on the Internet we can? Isn’t that freedom of speech? Wait–do they have it? Do they WANT it? When I don’t like something my parents say, I tell them. Do they? They say the Chinese want to be like us. Do they? Why would they? What part of us would they hate to be?

What if we asked each high school student to pose a global question in every subject every day, somehow connected to what happened in class that day but also to other places and people? What if they aggregated them where others could see – and generate their own? Is that what one layer of global learning might look like? What a marvelously purposeful digression.