How to go global in schools and learning environments for children and youth today
Today, I learnt a lot about the terms globalization and internationalization and the different ways of how schools can go global.
For me, the most important fact of bringing globalization into the classroom is to be a teacher who is well prepared and open-minded and also an “expert” on the field of globalization and cross culture. In my opinion it is essential for teachers that they have professional development/further training (lifelong learning), in-service teacher training or maybe take part in an international committee. As a teacher, I never want to stop learning something new about how to spread intercultural competence among my students. I’m also convinced that in our jobs, we have to have certain awareness toward other cultures and creativity to pass on cultural and moral values to children. I believe that one of my prior task is it to be and to teach acceptance and tolerance toward other cultures. You don’t have to agree with other cultures’ traditions and views, but you should be able to respect, accept and tolerate them.
My second aspect regarding the headline is to teach pupils how to be open-minded because I strongly believe that this is the basis of intercultural competence.
How to aim it? First of all, I want to teach my pupils to ask WHY? all the time. It gives them a necessary tool to try to get to the bottom of a culture. Furthermore, it is important to teach them about their own culture and about other cultures, so that pupils are able to compare cultures. A method of doing that is the little game which we did in class with Marcus (spider web of culture shock works with prejudice, too). If children practice how to question other cultures and how to be curious about them they will easily gain understanding toward cultural diversity.
Another way of developing intercultural competence is to global programs, e.g. eTwinning, the Image of ther others and Comenius. The best way is to use audiovisual methods and materials to communicate (video clips, music, skype). The younger the students are the easier it gets to teach intercultural competence.
In the last semester at my home institution in Potsdam/Germany, I attended a course called “project management for language teaching”. In the course of the lessons I got in touch with the Comenius program but I also learnt a lot about other programs which are mainly used in primary schools. Especially remarking was a very simple project about extensive reading. Therefore the teacher has to find a class from another country and has to get in touch with the teacher there. Aims of the project are to exchange information about the pupils among each other and the two nationalities as well as about their favorite books and their reading habits. Furthermore, the classes exchanged books from their own countries. After reading them, the classes discussed about the content and the intention of the books. The readings provided plenty of information about the culture of the countries, so that the children learnt a lot about the other culture. In that way, the children became more open-minded and were curious about the cultural diversity. It also had a very positive effect on the language improvement of the children because all of them had to communicate in English. Some of the children stayed in touch after the end of the project and developed their intercultural competence regarding acceptance, tolerance and understanding another culture.
Projects like extensive reading develop awareness among the children toward the diversity of cultures and are the first step to aim a respectful contact with people from a different culture. From my point of view it is necessary to integrate such programs into the curriculum of schools.
