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You
are here: Connecting Deeply with your Global Classmates around the World
by Greg Tuke
I grew up in eastern Washington, in a place known as The Inland Empire, Gateway to the West. Some just called it Spokane. My high school, Shadle Park, was the second largest in the state, and we thought it was pretty diverse. We had two black students. The only foreigners I remember meeting were an immigrant German couple who ironed our clothes once a month. We worried about the Spokane River being a bad place to fish, thanks to the town's sewage disposal system, and we wondered why we had to put up with air raid sirens, which went off every Wednesday at noon. We learned about the world through the Encyclopedia Britannica, which you could get at the library. The farthest east I ever traveled was when I drove to Denver for graduate school.
Today, my kids live in a radically different world. We now live in western Washington, in a place known as The Emerald City. Some just call it Seattle. The schools they attended are filled with students from around the world. They worry about terrorist attacks, diseased food, and what this new economy will mean for them when they graduate. They now learn about the world through the web, an infinite resource of unfiltered information and contacts. They access it at home, at school, and at coffee shops. They can travel quickly and cheaply around the globe, and can be in direct communication, via the internet and cell phones, with people in even some of the poorest and most remote places of the world.
Yet, as columnist Thomas Friedman writes, "It's as though God suddenly gave us all the tools to communicate and none of the tools to understand."
Children today are in a world far more complex than the one I faced as a child. Their problems refuse to recognize the sanctity of national borders. To navigate effectively in this new world, these children need a new kind of skill set to understand, at a deep level, the cultures and perspectives of people quite unlike themselves. They need strong problem-solving skills to understand the interconnectedness of today's problems, and creative, entrepreneurial skills to adequately address them. The solutions they come up with will require cooperation and personal connections across national borders.
Today, Americans are struggling mightily with two potent forces that seem to pull in opposite directions: the desire to reach out and try to understand a world that no longer makes sense as it once did, and the equally strong desire to protect and circle the wagons to ensure our personal safety.
In the original draft of George W. Bush's post 9/11 State of the Union address, the speech writer wrote, "In the long-term, terrorism is not answered by higher walls and deeper bunkers." Imprisoned behind barricades or buried underground, we sacrifice vision. We can no longer see clearly what is happening around us. Yet the cries for more homeland security and closed borders at times overwhelm the calls for international cooperation and more open borders. And lines like this are dropped from speeches and left on the floor.
So where do we begin the work that can help us as a society weigh these questions and find the right balance? Schools are clearly the premier institution that touches virtually all children and their families in a deep and powerful way. For the past twelve years, as the founding Executive Director of Powerful Schools, I have worked with an extraordinary group of people in this region to create models for transforming our public schools into superb learning environments.
When we began on this journey, we called it creating "world-class schools." Some things we did exceptionally well. In the racially diverse classrooms in which we worked in Seattle (schools with more than 30 home-languages spoken) we created teacher training programs that made a real difference in teaching and learning, rather than being just an empty exercise that earned teaching credits. I saw how teachers were able to take full advantage of the diversity in the classroom and help students start to develop these necessary interpersonal and critical thinking skills. We succeeded in changing the culture of schools from one of classroom isolation and great learning for just a few, to one of interconnected, supportive classrooms of great learning for everyone. I saw, first-hand, the profound influence schools can have on shaping the life-long values and interests of large numbers of students.
But as I reflected and later wrote about the lessons learned from the Powerful Schools experience, I came to realize that something essential was missing. Our students were not deeply connected to the global village in which they now lived. We were not consistently showing how the problems at home were connected to the problems abroad. We were not taking advantage of the new communication opportunities to make possible the forging of these relationships that literally transform lives. We needed to create an opportunity in our schools for profound, interpersonal connections across countries to help students better understand and ultimately find real solutions to the urgent problems they now confront. We needed to put "the world" into the making of world-class schools.
So for the past year, I have researched the field of global education to understand what has been learned so far by experts in the field. I met with scores of educators and community leaders in Washington and along the West Coast, and most recently in Central America (see articles on this website.) I sought to determine who was already doing effective global education work in our school communities, and what made it effective. As a result, I discovered a rich source of expertise, programs, curriculum, and keen interest in global education both here and abroad. I found that most of the critical components of teacher training, communication technology capacity, curriculum guides, and exchange program expertise now exist.
Yet, despite the enormous resources now available to teachers and schools, three basic challenges remain that must be addressed if we are to succeed.
First, while the resources are nearly limitless, teachers lack the time to be able to seek out and find those most appropriate for them
Second, even if the resources can be found, logistical roadblocks halt implementation. Schedules and calendars between schools here and in other countries that don't sync, early cross-cultural misunderstandings that are not quickly resolved, technology glitches with no support to resolve quickly are all problems others have encountered.
Thirdly, even if the first two are overcome, there is a lack of on-going facilitation and support in the school to move the project beyond the first project with a teacher, to many projects throughout the year with an ever growing engagement of the whole school. And the support to move to multiple school partners for each school so that truly global education from around the world can occur.
To address these issues and take advantage of the enormous opportunity and resources now available, a visionary group of investors, philanthropists and other community leaders formed an organization called Global Classmates. In its first year of full implementation, our goal is to establish partnerships among 40 schools (20 in the northwest Washington State and 20 in South Africa, Guatemala and India). We offer the following, at an annual cost of $1,000 per school (US):
· Meet with school leadership to develop the overall vision by for effective, deep global education that integrates with current school goals;
· Help identify the teachers most interested in implementing global education in their classrooms, and meet with those teachers to identify first program elements that meet their needs;
· Provide matchmaking services to link schools and classrooms to other classrooms around the world with similar educational interests;
· Ensure a strong start between matched teachers and classrooms as a first project is established and tasks determined, assets identified, and strong teacher to teacher relationships established;
· Provide troubleshooting assistance on minor technology glitches and partnership problems that arise, including logistics and curriculum incompatibility concerns;
· Serve as a key resource to identify curriculum tools, classroom guests, and community resources available on the web and in the community;
· Provide in-service training to teachers to increase teacher effectiveness in global education;
· Help schools identify key learning objectives, outcomes desired, and measurement tools for evaluating progress for projects and tie this in to school goals and state learning objectives; and
· Provide facilitation support to help teachers and the school plan further projects to deepen and expand global education and transforming activities in the school.
Starting this fall, we will begin implementation. Schools interested in becoming involved should contact us at: gtuke@globalclassmates.com or call: 206-372-2015.
In our selection process, we are looking for schools where the key leadership of the school expresses a strong interest in becoming engaged and growing the involvement of global education throughout the school over time.
With this kind of global education in our schools, the next generation of children growing up in my hometown of Spokane will see the world quite differently than I did. When the next war is threatening to break out in a foreign land, they will know someone that they can immediately email and get their perspective on the issue. When they find out the Spokane River is still polluted, they can use their connections with colleagues in other partnered schools to find out how folks in other towns have cleaned up their rivers or brought it to the attention of the town. Most important of all, they will learn how to walk in someone else's shoes, especially someone very different than themselves. Because, after all, this is the foundation from which we all build true understanding and a place from which to solve the most difficult problems we face.
Greg Tuke is the current President of Global Classmates, an international organization dedicated to forming long-lasting, inter-active learning partnerships among schools in the northwest and in developing countries. He is the past founding Executive Director of Powerful Schools, a racially and economically diverse coalition of urban public schools and neighborhood organizations in Washington State dedicated to creating great schools and strong, vibrant communities. Mr. Tuke has extensive experience as a funder with both public and private foundations, serving as past Executive Director of A Territory Resource, Board President of The Pacific Peace Fund, Grants Manager for the Washington Mutual Foundation, and Advisor to Philanthropy Northwest.
Mr. Tuke has a Masters in Social Work, specializing in community organization and social policy, with over twenty-five years of experience as a community organizer and director of philanthropic organizations. He was selected in 1998 as a Denali Initiative Fellow, a national three-year training and development program in social entrepreneurship for social sector leaders. In 2003, he was chosen for a Mesa Refuge Fellowship to author and publish a book on the lessons learned in school change work, based on a decade of successful experience at Powerful Schools. He can be reached at greg.tuke@globalclassmates.com.
©September 2004 New Horizons for Learning
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