Thank you, everyone, for your work on cycle one. I truly enjoyed reading all of your posts!
Before I talk to you about my own thoughts, let me introduce you to your colleagues in this class. We are fittingly diverse for a course on global education. In terms of the age of the children we work with, we have one kindergarten teacher, one second grade teacher, one third grade teacher, four fourth grade teachers, one fifth grade teacher, one eighth grade teacher, six high school teachers, and one TFA teacher educator.
For those of us who specialize in particular subject areas, we have four math teachers, two English teachers, one Spanish and ELL teacher, and five social studies teachers. Let me particularly welcome the math educators, who are bringing so much social analysis to their math classes!
In terms of location, we have colleagues from across Michigan and around the world: we have two colleagues in the Detroit metro area, with other Michigan colleagues in Marshall, Portland, Jackson, South Haven, Grand Rapids, and Cheboygan. For those out of state, we have colleagues living and working in Duluth, Denver, Atlanta, Kansas City, Boston, and Milwaukee. Finally, we have one colleague wrapping up a teaching stint in the Dominican Republic before heading to a new post in Albania.
Welcome, all! Your past, present, and future lives enrich our course.
As I might have mentioned, this is my first time teaching this course, which means it is extra fun for me to see what resources most catch your attention and what themes emerge collectively from your writing. Two things, in particular, surprised me as I worked through your posts.
First, I was struck by how differently we tended to approach the question of “globaloney.” For many of you, the fact that we tend to overestimate how personally connected we are to people around the planet was a call to “do more”: that is, there is room for growth, room to do better, room to “reach our potential” as a globally interconnected society.
Second, I was also struck by how many of you used the term “globalization.” For many of you, the term seemed to carry some normative moral value. That is, we should work to realize “globalization”—meaning, I think, we should seek to deepen our global interdependence.
The two points are related. In both cases, there was a sense that we are “underachieving.” That we could do more. (We should reflect on how a discourse of failure in this country is impacting us as teachers.) In the case of “globaloney,” by way of contrast, I had no personal sense that we were “low”—the numbers just were what they were.
In short, your attitude awakened me to my own ambivalence around some areas of global connection.
This may sound odd coming from a professor teaching a course on global education, so let me explain.
To my mind, globalization is more a phenomenon than an ideal. It is a fact of the world we live in—greater interconnection through the emergence of world-wide economic and technological systems. As part of this process, place is rendered less important and time is lived as continually “speeding up.” Obviously, while globalization presents interesting opportunities for enriched living, it also threatens important values that I hold: in particular, the importance of the “here” and “now.”
Globalization, and social media in particular, always seem to be pushing us away from our own embodied lives in the present. It has the potential to make us continually dissatisfied with what we have.
That seems like a recipe for unhappiness.
Personal interactions across national borders are amazing opportunities. Still, we have to ask, do one hundred international friends on Facebook replace three local friends we can sit have a cup of coffee with? If we are travelling or living internationally, do FaceTime conversations back home prevent us from digging deep into our present locale? If we have been forced to emigrate, leaving friends and family behind in our home country, are remittances back home to be celebrated as a victory for global mobility or as a temporary stop gap until we can achieve a more globally secure and just society?
In short, are cross-border personal interactions something that we should even desire as a regular part of our daily lives? And if so, what number is the ideal?
An increasing danger of globalization is that we come to care less as we know more. “Compassion fatigue” is probably something we have all experienced at one time or another.
And as many of you have recognized, the true challenge of twenty-first century global education doesn’t seem to be so much learning to read, write, and do basic math, but empathy. From what you wrote, this certainly involves students who are insensitive to the struggles of people in other countries, but even more so involves children who are insensitive to the struggles of their own peers—the person sitting right next to them in your classrooms.
Interdependence is an old idea. It is manifested beautifully in nature (if not sub-atomic reality). But human interdependence only means something if we recognize its implications: that our own lives can only flourish when all lives flourish. That injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Empathy and compassion give a moral form to the fact of human interdependence. Let us hope that we, as global educators, can continue to find ways to wake children up to the fact of their interdependence.
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