Homecoming

Thank you for your work on cycle three! I truly enjoyed seeing all of the wonderful learning experiences that you designed for your students!

As we close the course, I want to take the opportunity to remind you about three key points—ones I hope will stay with you into the future.

First, education is best rooted in the desire to increase the human ability to flourish. By this, I mean that education should be nourishing! It should be exciting! It should encompass all of the hopes and regrets we carry deep within us as human beings. We should want to undertake it, and this undertaking should seem as natural as eating a good meal or breathing in the fresh morning air.

If any of these things are missing, we might question the educative value of an experience.

When it comes specifically to global education, we have heard imperatives about the need to complete globally for jobs, to improve international test scores, or to make US students less ethnocentric. These are all fine outcomes, but they are rooted in a sense of lack or fear.

Global education cannot be fear-based. If it is, we risk perpetuating the closed minds we seek to open.

This leads on to my second point. In connecting to ever more parts of the world, we are expanding our own sense of what it means to be human. But this notion of "expanding" can be misleading. For it is really more of a "deepening."

One of our colleagues in this course quoted these famous lines from the American poet, T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

These beautiful lines remind us that all education involves a home-coming. To learn about other cultures and other places means little if it alienates us from our own traditions and neighbors. Ultimately, the point of intercultural contact is to deepen our appreciation for own worth at the same time as we grow in wonder for the diverse forms the common human experience can take.

Finally, all of this leads us to the reminder, best put by global educators Graham Pike and David Selby, that the journey outwards must always be accompanied by the journey inwards. If we meet others and think, "oh, isn’t that strange . . . or interesting . . . or odd," we are left untransformed. The point is to find and live our calling through authentic encounters with others.

Global, ultimately, means “whole.” Global education is holistic education.

In connecting the outer journey with the inner journey, we come to respect self and other in a life lived to intelligent examination of habits that can best support the entire human community as well as life on the entire planet.

Thanks for a great course!