In this two part reflection we would like you to respond to the following:
1) What might an "ideal" global school look like? Draw on readings from the course (particularly this week’s content) to make these connections. You may also include additional relevant examples from your own schooling to support your argument.
2) As you prepare to develop and deliver a lesson on a topic related to global education, consider how the framework you have developed in this course allows you to think about the implications of globalization for education.
Read. Reimers, F.M., Chopra, V., Chung, C.K., Higdon, J., & O’Donnell, E.B. (2016). Empowering global citizens: A World Course*. (pp. xix-179; introduction – 5th grade)
k9-12 would be fine for me. Because to some extend, students during this age have already had half elements that adults have. It is a process between teenage to adult. I would like to be a nice teacher in their life, because I know it is very important to have some one guide you no matter on academics or mental problems. Personally, I prefer to teach Chinese/Esl/history. Whatever I would teach, it would be more than textbooks. And technology is necessary in my class, because I want to show real things such as video, picture, or evidence etc to students. Visual impact makes students remember more and it seems more convinced than just tell them. Broadening their views and make them think about the world in the past, in the present or in the future. I would be happy if they develop interests to explore other culture or something else positive from my class.
I would respect every one in my class and take some time to study their culture. I don’t want any one feel left or ignored. I would encourage my students to share their experience and support them by all means. I would be willing to apologize if I make some mistakes or offend certain culture since not every one knows other culture. I would always be the first to share my interesting/embarrassing stories to my students, which cause by culture difference. I want them realize it is ok to misunderstand somethings but we need to figure out the truths. Getting know every student in my class is very important because it is the base of teaching global classes.
Locating the Global: Schooling in an Interconnected World
Glynda A. Hull and Emily A. Hellmich
University of California, Berkeley
Structured Abstract
Background: Educators in the United States and internationally have become increasingly interested in incorporating international perspectives into curricula, programs, and policy (Hayden, 2011; Parker, 2011). Rooted in a long history of international education (Dolby & Rahman, 2008), these efforts have been described variously as “multicultural,” “democratic,” and “international.” In this article and our work, we use the term global education for this phenomenon in order to signal, along with others (e.g., Hansen, 2011a; Soriano, 2015), an important shift in conceptualizing how to prepare students for a globalized world.
Objective: This article is an initial exploration of current global education efforts in the United States and internationally. The study asks, “how do schools instantiate the global?” and considers how particular schools incorporated global concerns into their mission, curriculum, pedagogy, and structure.
Research Design: The research design consisted of a qualitative case study of thirteen schools located in the US and Asia.
Data Collection and Analysis: Data consisted of online document collection, semi-structured interviews with administrators, teachers, and/or students, and observations (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Data analysis consisted of iterative rounds of open-ended as well as thematic coding.
Findings: Findings revealed seven strategies used by schools to integrate a global orientation. Two detailed case studies showcased the complexities inherent in implementing these strategies.
Conclusions: This article underscores the challenges that schools in the US and internationally face in instantiating a global education, particularly the meaningful integration of technology, second/foreign languages, and service learning as well as making a global education available across socioeconomic groups. It calls for additional research on how to foster global orientations that position all young people to become cosmopolitan members of local, national, and world-wide communities.
Executive Summary
Efforts to incorporate international perspectives into educational curricula, programs, and policy have increased in recent years in the United States and around the world. While these efforts have roots in a robust and long history of international education, we have chosen to label this movement global education to indicate a qualitative break with past manifestations and to call attention to the need, echoed by others, to reimagine schooling today in the context of an increasingly globalized and interconnected world.
This study set out to explore how schools indicate—through their missions, curricular and pedagogical offerings, structure, and organization—that they address and value global problems and points of view as well as local and national ones. To do so, we investigated how thirteen national and international schools instantiated a global education, using qualitative case studies consisting of document collection, interviews, and observations.
We framed this investigation in terms of cosmopolitanism, which, we argue, stands as compelling framework for rethinking schooling. Efforts to internationalize education have been motivated by competing goals: some frankly focused instrumentally on the need to attain national economic advantage, and others more altruistically attuned to intercultural understanding across borders and cultures. While we acknowledge the continued importance of national, instrumental approaches, we see a cosmopolitan focus on intercultural understanding as essential for rethinking schooling in a rapidly changing, interconnected, and yet ideologically divided world.
We identified seven primary strategies that schools used to instantiate a global orientation: 1) global courses; 2) a global curriculum; 3) global extra-curriculars; 4) a multilingual language policy; 5) a diverse student body; 6) digital technology; and 7) physical networks. Schools leveraged these strategies in different ways and to different extents. For example, one school network in the United States focused primarily on one strategy—a curriculum in which global orientations, skills, and competence-building were threaded into all classes at all grade levels—while another divided their efforts among several strategies: a multilingual language policy, a global course at each grade level, and globally-oriented extracurriculars.
These strategies were further illustrated by two detailed case studies. The first school, Connections Academy USA, realized a global education primarily through its international and culturally-diverse student body. Although it too faced challenges in terms of negotiating that diversity as well as the relevance of its small-scale model in today’s world, the school ultimately illustrated a path to the global rooted firmly within a cosmopolitan frame: the school sought to promote cross-national and cross-cultural understanding through the cultivation of a diverse living and learning environment.
The second case study school, Global Studies High, sought the global through a socially- and ethnoracially-diverse student body as well as through its intensive project-based curricular design. As this curricular design presented challenges to teachers and students alike, an internal focus on cosmopolitan integration was juxtaposed and complicated by an external focus on global job markets; this produced notable tension in how and for what future it prepared its students.
The schools we investigated should be commended for their pioneering efforts, even as they faced significant challenges to the instantiation of these strategies and a global orientation, such as in the meaningful integration of second/foreign languages and service learning into curricular and pedagogical offerings. With a few exceptions, global education efforts were concentrated in elite schools, raising concerns that globally-oriented skills and knowledge sets, essential in today’s interconnected world, will exacerbate the divide among socioeconomic groups. Despite its potential in supporting an equitable, cosmopolitan global education, digital technology in global schools remained limited, leaving the possibility that such tools, in the hands of skilled educators, could promote such an ethic in future work. Finally, global education continues to be framed in both instrumental, nationalistic as well as altruistic, cosmopolitan terms. The two focal schools embodied these two orientations, preparing their students for the larger, global world in very different ways: as cosmopolitan leaders at Connections Academy-USA versus as competitive career-driven entrepreneurs at Global Studies High.
Globalization has created a world marked by the rapid flow of information, ideas, and people as well as a world marked by fear and suspicion toward others. While we acknowledge the importance of instrumental orientations to global education today, we argue that a cosmopolitan orientation to education that respects difference, that encourages dialogue, and that is embedded both locally and globally is essential for our collective future. Thus, we call for robust, sustained, cross-disciplinary research on how to cultivate, nourish, and foster global orientations in our schools that position all young people to become cosmopolitan members of local, national, and world-wide communities.
Introduction
The education of children has traditionally been a national enterprise, designed primarily to socialize and prepare individuals for participation in local communities and in autonomous nation-states (Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). However, the world is now radically interconnected and challenged by social, economic, and environmental problems that spill across political and geographic divides (Blommaert, 2010; Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). Economic competitiveness, long a motivation for shoring up and rethinking skills required for work, has only intensified as a rationale for schooling both in the US and across the world (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015; U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Such economic, social, and cultural pressures suggest the necessity of rethinking schooling to ensure that children are adequately prepared for a rapidly globalizing world and for their agentive place in it (Soriano, 2015; Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004).
Fostering “international mindedness” (Hill, 2012) has long been a goal of specialized international schools (Hayden, 2011; Hill, 2012). However, the importance of such habits of mind and accompanying curricular orientations for all students has intensified of late. Indeed, increasing numbers of schools (Hayden, 2011; Ortloff, Shah, Lou, & Hamilton, 2012; Parker, 2011; Parker & Camicia, 2009) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011) have begun to include international perspectives in their curricula. There are many signals, then, that the institution of schooling, once nationally or inwardly focused, is looking outward in order to inculcate global perspectives and dispositions.
In this paper, we explore how schools are envisioning and instantiating a global orientation. That is, we are interested in how schools indicate, through their missions, curricular and pedagogical offerings, structure, and organization, that they address and value global problems and points of view as well as local and national ones. While a variety of terms have been used in association with such efforts, such as “multicultural,” “international,” “democratic,” “human rights” education (Dolby & Rahman, 2008), we have chosen global to indicate a qualitative break with past manifestations and to call attention to a new frontier of educational practice. It is our contention, as well as that of others (e.g., Hansen, 2011a; Soriano, 2015), that an important shift is afoot as schools begin to come to terms with how to prepare students for different conceptions of citizenship, work, and social relationships that derive from globalization. This shift seems all the more important given current global crises around immigration, the environment, economic markets, and sectarianism (Erlanger, 2016; Sengupta, 2016). We explore that shift first by looking historically at early attempts at international education, a predecessor of the current global movement. Next, we offer a conceptual framework that juxtaposes a more instrumental and nationally-rooted understanding of global education with a more altruistic or cosmopolitan-oriented view. This is followed by a set of case studies of U.S. and international K-12 schools that illustrate diverse current paths to global perspectives and practices. We conclude with implications for the future of global education in the U.S. school context.
Background
Literature Review
Current efforts to incorporate global perspectives and practices in schooling are rooted in the long history of international education. Below we discuss two streams of international education, international schools and the internationalization of K-12 education, in order to suggest the antecedents of a global education today (Dolby & Rahman, 2008).
International schools. International schools were originally created in response to an emerging class of mobile diplomats and businessmen following WWI (Dolby & Rahman, 2008; Hill, 2012), such as the International School of Geneva and the Yokohama International School (Bunnell, 2008a; Hayden, 2011). Since the 1920s, schools bearing the label “international” have increased, although their exact number is unknown due to the lack of a regulating body and definitional ambiguity (Hayden, 2011). Scholars have categorized international schools in several ways (e.g., Lallo & Resnik, 2008; Sylvester, 1998), including a distinction based on missions or philosophies: 1) international schools that provide a national curriculum different than that offered in the host country; and 2) international schools that promote intercultural understanding and awareness to a diverse group of students (Sylvester, 1998).
With intensified globalization, especially over the past 15 years, international schools have come to the fore, attracting more students and popularizing certain practices associated with them (Hayden, 2011; Lallo & Resnik, 2008). The increased cultural capital ascribed to international education and schools is suggested by an expanding demographic: while international schools were established for the global elite, they are now sought after by middle class parents as a way to signal social status and to promote upward social mobility (Bunnell, 2008a; Hayden, 2011). Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the for-profit school network called Global Education Management Systems (GEMS), which has expanded rapidly throughout Asia. The majority of GEMS students come, not from elite ex-patriot populations, but from local families who nonetheless pay steep tuition (Hayden, 2011). International schools, then, now include a range of different types of schools that cater to a range of different kinds of students and families.
Internationalization of K-12 education. Dolby and Rahman (2008) identify four foci within the internationalization of K-12 education: peace, global/multicultural, human rights, and the environment (p. 699). We focus here on the second component, global and multicultural education. Known by many names (e.g., world studies, citizenship studies, and global citizenship studies), global/multicultural education at the K-12 level came about after WWII and was intended to heighten “students’ awareness of their position within a global reality and how they can contribute to the creation of a peaceful world” (Dolby & Rahman, 2008, p. 701).
In the United States and internationally, the movement toward including global/multicultural education in K-12 schools took serious root during the late 1960s and 1970s. This period was marked by social, political, and economic events, such as the Vietnam War and the launch of Sputnik, which heightened a fear of interconnection with the larger world (Abdullahi, 2010; Dolby & Rahman, 2008; Tye, 2009). During this period, some of the efforts to incorporate global/multicultural education in the United States and in Europe aligned with the idealistic goals described above of creating a peaceful world through education (Abdullahi, 2010; Dolby & Rahman, 2008, p. 701). For example, “An Attainable Global Perspective,” published by U.S. scholar Robert Hanvey influentially argued for an increased understanding of global perspectives in light of the nation’s interdependence with the rest of the world (Hanvey, 1976).
Many efforts to internationalize K-12 education came under fire or were curtailed in the 1980s and 1990s with the election of conservative governments. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, for example, the goal of cultivating a peaceful world through a globalized K-12 education competed with more ethnocentric, nationalistic arguments for a global education (Dolby & Rahman, 2008). During the Reagan administration (1981-1989), the publication “A Nation at Risk” explicitly compared the U.S. education system to other national systems and declared the failure of U.S. schools to prepare an internationally-competitive workforce (Ortloff et al., 2012). In other words, global education in support of national competitiveness was foregrounded while global education in support of world peace was sidelined.
The past 15 years have seen renewed efforts to internationalize K-12 education. For example, we can see this increased interest in the continued growth of the International Baccalaureate (Bunnell, 2008b). In the United States, this growth has occurred both in elite private schools and also in under-resourced and public schools (Conner, 2008; Bunnell, 2012). In addition, renewed efforts to internationalize K-12 education can be found in the establishment and growth of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as World Savvy (2016) and TakingITGlobal (2016), which specialize in providing global curricula and programs for youth around the world (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011; Parker, 2011). The work of such organizations increasingly grows out of and depends on connectivity through the Internet, itself a major shaper of globalization. Finally, interest at the federal level has been sparked: the U.S. Department report (2012) “Succeeding Globally through International Education and Engagement” outlines why global competencies are strategically important to the U.S. and how they can be achieved. Similarly, the Ontario Ministry of Education’s report (2015), “Ontario’s Strategy for K-12 International Education,” lays out how secondary education in the Canadian province can “embrace diversity and achieve excellence through learning about and from other cultures and education systems” (p. 1).
The boundaries between the internationalization of K-12 education and international schools are of course not hard and fast. A new charter school in the United States that sets out to educate students to understand and respect difference could be considered both an international school (Sylvester, 1998) as well as the result of internationalization efforts (Dolby & Rahman, 2008). The important take-away here is that contemporary efforts to include international perspectives in school missions, curricula, and structures are growing and intensifying, and that these efforts appear to be propelled by the radical interconnection of our world that is the result of globalization. Thus, in order to signal the significant shift that has occurred in the importance, prevalence, and nature of internationally-oriented practices and policies in K-12 education, we use the term global to describe these contemporary efforts. There is now a growing awareness, shared not only among educators in schools designated as international but among educators across the board, to prepare students for different conceptions of citizenship, work, and social relationships that derive from globalization.
Theoretical Frame
We situate our work within recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism, as it has been reinvented to theorize a postcolonial, interconnected, and mediatized world (cf. Couldry, 2006). Explored variously as a “political philosophy, a moral theory, and a cultural disposition” (Rizvi, 2009, p. 253), cosmopolitanism provides a vantage point for conceptualizing and addressing the challenges and possibilities of understanding diverse Others across globalized, transnational spaces. As we discussed above, efforts to internationalize education have been motivated by competing goals: some frankly focused instrumentally on the need to attain national economic advantage, and others more altruistically attuned to intercultural understanding across borders and cultures. While we acknowledge the continued importance of national, instrumental approaches, we see a focus on intercultural understanding as essential for rethinking schooling in a rapidly changing, interconnected, and yet ideologically divided world. Cosmopolitanism provides a broad framework for doing so.
The signature trope of cosmopolitanism is dialogue: it is through dialogue, according to Appiah (2007), that tolerance and respect for “legitimate difference” can develop (p. xv). Cosmopolitanism asks us to enact identities as global citizens, whose responsibilities include yet extend beyond the local to include larger arenas of concern; it also asks us to construct new spaces for the practice of dialogue, where our human obligations can transcend traditional ties of kith and kind. Our global world is awash in great shifts, challenges, and opportunities brought about by political and economic strife and realignment; environmental concerns and crises; unprecedented migration; and new communication technologies and patterns of interaction. Cosmopolitanism holds out hope that these seemingly unbridgeable differences need not divide us.
Cosmopolitanism represents one roadmap for conceptualizing education that is global in orientation (Hansen, 2010, 2011b). It points us, for example, to the importance of language and the cultivation of abilities to communicate across difference. In previous work, we explored the promise of cosmopolitanism for communication practices (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014); for example, we investigated how effective global communication requires a flexible capacity to make meaning across an increasingly complex range of textual forms and modes, as well as an ethical capacity to imagine one’s literate responsibilities as an author and reader in a global world (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014; Silverstone, 2007). In the current paper, we extend our focus to include the global dimensions of mission statements, curricula, technological infrastructure, and space/time organization of schools today.
Methodology
Over the course of three years we examined the current worldwide global education movement and its ramifications for the U.S. school context through a qualitative case study methodology. Specifically, we investigated thirteen national and international1 schools that claim a global component (for example, a world language program) or orientation (for example, a mission statement that indicates allegiance to global as well as local concerns). We conducted telephone interviews with the founders and principals of four schools and made day or half-day visits to nine schools. We identified these schools through Internet searches and recommendations from leaders in international and independent school networks. Table 1 summarizes the names,2 general location,3 type, and level of participation for all thirteen schools. A brief narrative description of each school can be found in Appendix A.
Table 1
Summary of Participating Schools
| Name | Date of Visit | Location | School Type | Type of Participation |
| Bilingual Academy | 2012 | Asia | Private | Visit |
| Connections Academy- Asia | 2012 | Asia | Private | Visit |
| Connections Academy-Southeast | 2012 | Asia | Private | Visit |
| Connections Academy-USA | 2013 | USA | Private | Visit |
| Crown Academy | 2012 | Asia | Private | Visit |
| Equality Charter School | 2013 | USA | Public | Phone Interview |
| Global Edge High | 2014 | USA | Public | Visit |
| Global Studies High | 2013 | USA | Private | Visit |
| International Studies Institute | 2012 | Asia | Private | Visit |
| Lakeview Academy | 2012 | USA | Private | Phone Interview |
| Local Academy | 2012 | Asia | Public | Visit |
| Peace School | 2012 | USA | Private | Phone Interview |
| World Network, Inc. | 2012 | World-wide | Private | Phone Interview |
Data Collection
During the interviews and site visits, we explored each school’s global perspective through its mission; its start-up experience, marketing, and financial plan; staffing and professional development; student population, including its efforts to enroll a diverse student body; and technology infrastructure. School visits included in-person interviews with key administrators and teachers; when possible, students were also interviewed in focus groups. School visits included school tours and/or classroom observations. Both observations and interviews were semi-structured in nature (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Interviews with students, teachers, and administrators were transcribed for analysis. We wrote summaries of Skype and telephone interviews and field notes of schools visits (Miles & Huberman, 1994). These data were supplemented by information available online from school websites, as well as printed documents provided by the schools.
Data Analysis
We analyzed these qualitative data via multiple rounds of open-ended and thematic coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 2009; Saldaña, 2009). The latter included concepts from cosmopolitanism such as inculcating abilities to see from others’ points of view; opportunities for dialogue across various kinds of difference; hospitable readings of difference and responses to those perceived as other (Derrida, 2001); a sense of citizenship that extended beyond national borders; and preparations for careers sensitized to finding solutions to global issues. (See Appendix B for a sampling of these as well as open-ended codes.)
Case Studies
After reviewing the broad characteristics of the worldwide global education movement that we derived from the above data, we focus on in-depth case studies of two schools in the United States and their paths to the global. At the first school, Connection Academy-USA, we interviewed five administrators and teachers as well as four students as part of a focus group during the visit; we also observed two classes: an English as a Second Language class and a Geography class. At the second school, Global Studies High, we interviewed five administrators and teachers in person as well as five students as a part of a focus group; we also interviewed the CFO over the phone following the visit. In addition, we observed two classes: a Spanish-Humanities class as well as a Humanities-Economics class. Jottings taken during the classroom observations at both schools were turned into field notes; interviews were also fully transcribed (Miles & Huberman, 1994). All field notes and interviews were subsequently analyzed, along with information from the two schools websites, using open-ended and thematic coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 2009; Saldaña, 2009).
Results
We present our results in three parts: first, we characterize the worldwide global schools movement, highlighting the intensity of the movement as well as seven strategies that schools used to incorporate a global orientation or perspective. Next, we describe the challenges that schools faced to instantiating a global orientation in a substantial and meaningful way. Lastly, we present two case studies that detail the ways in which two schools in the United States instantiated the global for their students and that reveal the complex, tension-filled, yet promising nature of this movement.
Where is the Global? Characterizing the Global Schools Movement
Our study confirmed a vigorous global education movement with initiatives in the US and across the world. Administrators at domestic and international schools described long waiting lists for their schools, for example, as well as pressure to expand or establish new sites from parents and local governments. Indeed, for-profit companies were opening new schools domestically and abroad at a very fast pace, sometimes several new schools per year. One such network, World Network Inc., planned to open six new schools in Fall 2014 in three countries across Asia and the United States. Similarly, a domestic public charter network of schools that promotes global competences established itself at five new schools in 2011.
We identified seven different ways in which schools sought to instantiate the global:
1) Global courses. Some schools, such as Global Edge High, offered a particular course or set of courses that was explicitly addressed issues of global significance as well as different worldviews. At Global Edge High, these courses included world demography as well as world religions and were offered in some form at every grade level.
2) Global curriculum. Other schools, like the Equality Charter School, sought to thread global orientations, skills, and competence-building into all classes at all grade levels. This created an overarching globally-oriented curriculum that framed the educational experience of students at these schools.
3) Global extra-curriculars. Many of the schools we researched included a service learning or community service component into their curriculum. This often centered on economically-distant and disadvantaged groups. In principle, this activity targeted the global through connecting students with different communities and cultures both locally and internationally or in Appiah’s words, fostering “obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” (2005, p. xv).
4) Multilingual language policy. Learning second and/or foreign languages was a common component of many schools. Across the schools surveyed, language learning was situated as both a way to prepare students for a global marketplace (e.g., Global Edge High) as well as a way to engender cosmopolitan habits of mind (e.g., Bilingual Academy) needed to navigate complex cultures and challenges.
5) Diverse student body. Some schools sought to achieve the global through a representatively diverse student body that brought different points of view and cultures into the classroom. This often took the form of national and ethnic diversity, without an accompanying socio-economic diversity. That said, some schools achieved a degree of socio-economic and cultural diversity through admissions policies and scholarships (e.g., Connections Academy).
6) Technology. Another path to the global centered around looking to leverage cutting-edge technologies to widen educational contexts and increase social ties. This included technology-enhanced pedagogy within classrooms, such as equipping all students with iPads or MacBooks, as well as efforts to link students around the world telecollaboratively through in-class projects.
7) Physical networks. A final path to the global was the construction of physical networks of schools. At some schools (e.g., World Network, Inc.), simply the presence of a broader network was seen as a part of instantiating the global, creating a global community of learners under one umbrella. At others, this was combined with providing students the opportunity to juxtapose cultures, languages, and social worlds through exchanges. Global Edge High, for example, intended their students to “study abroad” at different sites within their network before graduation.
These seven strategies were used by schools in a variety of ways: some schools focused their efforts on one particular strategy while others combined two or more strategies to instantiate a global education. (Appendix C lays out the major strategies used for a subset of the thirteen schools studied.) Schools also instantiated their global visions with varying depths, dealing with variable degrees of success with several barriers, discussed below, that made it challenging to instantiate a cosmopolitan, global vision.
With the exception of some public schools that include a broad socioeconomic demographic, the current worldwide global schools movement serves primarily elite populations, the children of wealthy internationally-situated families, or a handful of less privileged youth who have received scarce scholarship slots. The price tag for Global Edge High, for example, was more than $45,000 per year at the secondary level. While admissions decisions were made without consideration of financial need and while school materials claimed a desire to establish socio-economic diversity representative of the local area, only 10% of the student body received financial aid. As such, Global Edge High, like many of the schools we visited, was challenged to extend the global beyond elite demographics and to truly cultivate a cosmopolitan orientation in relation to diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Although the expectation might be that elite global schools would be cutting-edge technologically, our inquiry indicated otherwise: the schools we visited were typically behind the times technologically, not yet having conceptualized how information technologies can play a role in fostering global identities, or not having implemented such a vision. For example, we visited three schools that reside under the same umbrella organization of Connections Academy. Despite this connection, no technological network had been set up. Further, plans at these schools to advance technology included traditional, perhaps less innovative uses, such as enhancing the transfer and organization of instructional materials.
Like technological innovation, bilingualism and multilingualism were often promoted as a core feature of most global schools and a way to advance cross-cultural understanding; however, it was rare to find examples of schools in which students were taught systematically and meaningfully in two or more languages across the school and curriculum, calling into question the extent to which the cosmopolitan orientations engendered by language learning could be accomplished (Byram, 1997, 2008; Starkey, 2007). For example, many of these schools contained more comprehensive language immersion programs, in which content was delivered in multiple languages, at the pre-primary and primary level; however, this immersion tended to be substantially reduced in favor of English for the high school years. Schools in the United States often offered language courses in Mandarin or Spanish, but they remained restricted to one or two class periods at the secondary level. Similarly, schools outside the United States most often used English as the medium of instruction at the secondary level; home and other second or foreign languages were relegated to specialized courses that focused on grammar and literature. Finally, at many of the international schools we visited, secondary students without English proficiency were at a distinct disadvantage, often left to learn the language without support from the school. A notable exception to meeting all of these challenges was Bilingual Academy: beyond offering the greatest percentage of language immersion at all grade levels, the school had deeply contemplated what it meant to teach in multiple languages, considering, for example, how pedagogy differed in an English math class and a Chinese one.
The limited instantiation of a global education continued with the practice of community service or service learning. While community service, including extensive trips to help disadvantaged communities locally and internationally, was a feature of most schools, the impact of these experiences seemed limited to the exercise of attitudes of noblesse oblige. For example, many of the schools we visited used the IB curriculum, which includes a mandatory service-learning component. However, several school heads and teachers worried about the touristic aspect of many of the trips and projects undertaken to fulfill this requirement were not substantial: they did not require sustained interaction with local populations and did not instill notions of community engagement.
In a nutshell, our inquiry into the worldwide global school movement confirmed a thriving movement, yes, but also revealed substantial challenges to the instantiation of the global, even at elite schools rich with resources. This leads us to conclude that as a whole these schools by and large did not represent contexts in which “we more fully acknowledge and engage with the Other in her sameness and difference” (Corpus Ong, 2009, p. 463).
Case Studies
We turn now to two case studies to illustrate in more detail the complexity, challenges, and opportunities that schools encounter as they attempt to instantiate a global education. These two schools, Connections Academy-USA and Global Studies High, took intersecting yet distinct paths: while Connections Academy-USA realized a global education primarily through its international and culturally-diverse student body, Global Studies High found a path that combined a locally-diverse student body with a globally-oriented curriculum.
Connections Academy-USA. Located in the United States, Connections Academy-USA was a small residential two-year school for rising 11th and 12th graders. The school selected and assembled students from different national, cultural, and/or social backgrounds and engaged them in the rigorous two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. Connections Academy-USA was part of a network of other Connections Academies that shared a similar model and mission. On the surface, a global education at Connections Academy-USA could have been cultivated through this network of schools or through the IB; however, it became clear in visiting the school that the global at Connections Academy-USA was primarily located in the students themselves who represented over 80 different nationalities and countless different cultures.
“Diversity of us.” Both students and administrators pointed to this student body as what made the school distinctive and what made them global. For example, Kela, a first-year student from Belize, cited the primary difference between Connections Academy-USA and other high schools as the people:
[Connections Academy-USA] brings people together so it’s like, people from here, there, and everywhere like, like places like you weren’t even taught of that (1.5) that just make this, Connections, together and like, one big community.4This sentiment was echoed by Shenshen, a second-year student who hailed from Mainland China:
But what really makes it special is, us, like, what we think and what we do here, how we interact with each other. (1.0) Yeah (1.0). So like t— like the diversity of us and also the diversity of our ideas make us special.
For students, then, the distinctive global centerpiece of the school was, in fact, themselves: a nationally and culturally diverse student body strategically brought together at the school.
Administrators confirmed the centrality of the student body in instantiating the global. For example, Head of School, Trevor, noted the presence of diversity within the global world but highlighted the significance of bringing together this diversity:
So, you know (1.0) getting to know somebody because they came from Cambodia, or getting to know somebody because they came from Tanzania or whatever. You know, you can get that from all over the world now, with blended families and the mobility of people. So what drops down to a deeper level for me is when you bring all the diversity together.
In other words, Connections Academy sought to bring students together from diverse backgrounds in order to promote a substantive level of cross-cultural understanding.
It is important to note that the diversity of backgrounds gathered together at Connections Academy-USA differed from the diversity brought together in schools that draw on diverse local populations. As scholars and educators have noted, the mobility of people characteristic of globalization has increased the linguistic, national, and cultural diversity of classrooms around the world (Blommaert, 2010); that said, this diversity is subject to local contexts, defined and shifted in relation to the majoritarian national culture. What made Connections Academy-USA different was an emphasis on respect for and retention of national identity: for example, there was no majority national identity among students, and the school’s location isolated it somewhat from homogenizing influences of U.S. culture. Furthermore, the school’s culture itself emphasized the students’ national identities. For example, students came to naturally position themselves as representatives of their national background, introducing themselves as “Shenshen from China” or “Reza from Sudan.” Thus, national and cultural differences seemed to be valued and retained; as we will see, this paved the way for important cosmopolitan impacts on students.
“Comfort with all different kinds of people.” Indeed, the Connections Academy-USA experience set the stage for students to engage deeply with difference and to open their minds to alternative worldviews. As Shenshen mentioned above, their national and cultural diversity also necessarily created a “diversity of ideas.” For Kela, this interaction stemmed largely from classes where dramatically different perspectives on everything from literature to environmental policy were shared on a daily basis:
You learn from that culture and you’re like “oh wow well my culture wouldn’t accept it.” And then some things that I would find taboo is like normal in (1.0) in another country and like so being in that class makes us think differently and how to judge people differently. Like we’re not supposed to judge people. Like now we have different perspectives like “oh a person from maybe Sudan would say this, as a person from China would say something else.” So like we get that perspective.
Importantly, these multiple perspectives had taken root and had begun to manifest in her schoolwork: the different view she was learning in her classes were brought to bear on her assignments, “forming a globe on a paper.”
For fellow first-year Maya, originally from New Zealand, the impact stemmed from more socially-oriented interactions outside of class:
We have [common] rooms and I don’t know it could be four o’clock at night and your, all your ideas are being challenged by these different people from these different cultures and because of the culture of the school, even though you can completely disagree with someone’s idea, you can still be like s- be friends with them and that’s such a special thing.
For both Kela and Maya, then, Connections Academy-USA created spaces where respect and friendships were cultivated despite and across difference through interactions with their peers inside and outside the classroom; in opening their eyes to different cultures, worldviews, and perspectives, Kela and Maya embodied the “principle of comfort with all different kinds of people” which stood at the heart of Connections Academy-USA (Interview, Head of School) and illustrated the cosmopolitan impacts of the school’s instantiation of the global.
The residential bubble. It is important to note that this deep level of cosmopolitan understanding expressed by Maya and Kela was rooted in the design of the school itself, namely its residential campus. As Maya explained, “If we weren’t living here, I don’t think this place would be such a special place.” Dean of Students Sally offered an explanation of the importance of a residential campus for instantiating the global through the student body:
[Boarding school] well I think what it causes our students to deal with on a daily basis is-are those conflicts. So you may be a white conservative from the South and you have this um a very different liberal roommate from somewhere else. You have to learn how to deal with that. And if it was not a boarding school, you could go home, and just still be yourself at home and not have to ever deal with that conflict.What Sally underscores here is that the residential component of Connections Academy-USA was integral to taking the cosmopolitan habits of mind that stemmed from discovering different world views to a deep level: putting the student body into sustained contact set the stage for serious and sustained engagement with difference.
This residential component of the school combined with its remote location contributed to the notion of Connections Academy-USA as an isolated “bubble” separated from the larger world. For students, this isolation seemed key to their experience. The Dean of Students noted, for example, that parents didn’t always understand the radio silence from their children while at the school. She explained that while part of that stemmed from the students’ heavy workloads, “it’s also that they don’t want to have the outside world come and influence them here.”
This desire to avoid outside influences also became clear through the students’ mixed feelings about being “too connected” via technology. For example, Maya acknowledged the benefits of access to multiple news sources and multiple languages online but also saw computers as a “hindrance out of class.” Reza and Shenshen picked up on this, further explaining the tensions around technology:
Maya: Yeah and [technology is] really a hindrance when you’re supposed to be like I think that’s one of the (0.5) the things that I could lead to stopping global discussion like out of classes that people are on
technology the whole time like (2.5)
Researcher: Twitter-
Reza: Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, it goes on and on and on and on.
Maya: Yeah.
Shenshen: Because we’re supposed to go to people’s room and talk, instead of talking on Facebook.
Reza: But you actually end up speaking more to people on Facebook than you do in real life. Yeah, it’s interesting
What the students highlight here is a strong desire to take advantage of the school’s diverse student body and isolated location to cultivate deep relationships as well as cosmopolitan understandings; they also highlight the perceived threat by outside influences to this sacred time and space, particularly ubiquitous in social media. This further supports the centrality of the residential as well as isolated experience at Connections Academy-USA in cultivating a cosmopolitan understanding.
Challenges and tensions. This deeply cosmopolitan agenda was not without its challenges. All the students seemed to agree that there was an individual challenge to engaging in difference in this way, which Kela distilled thusly:
If you want to be here, you have to accept that challenge from within, so like you have to say “oh I’m up to make that challenge” or “I’m up to face that. ‘Cause like okay if you’re not happy with yourself or like in your own community back home, if you can’t stand someone, how could you stand or appreciate people on a global perspective?
In other words, this engagement with difference required students to have a well-developed sense of self and to accept the challenges associated with this engagement. This is no small feat for adults let alone still maturing adolescents.
Not surprisingly, then, the residential component of Connections Academy-USA also resulted in challenges in addition to fostering cosmopolitan benefits. Given that students shared rooms with one or two other students from different years and different geographic regions, conflicts were inevitable. Some conflicts stemmed from the banal issues that arise when people share living space, such as cleanliness and sleep schedules. Others related to the different cultural and national backgrounds of the students; for example, a student from a politically and morally liberal country living with a student from a politically and morally conservative country.
Bringing together students from a range of backgrounds also brought together different socioeconomic statuses, which represented another challenge. Students at the school were either on full scholarship, partial scholarship, or were full-fee payers; this created an awareness of socio-economic gaps between some students. As Dean of Students Sally pointed out, these gaps remained salient despite the fact that all students were fed and housed:
I think that when you constantly see your roommate who orders something from Amazon and gets a new pair of shoes everyday and you can’t do anything. You’ve come with your one suitcase of clothing and you’re not gonna change that—that’s very wearing on some of the students.
The Dean of Students highlights here that, in practice, an understanding of and respect for different socio-economic backgrounds did not always factor into the larger cosmopolitan understanding targeted by the school. This points to the challenge of fully executing a cosmopolitan agenda, at Connections Academy-USA and at any school.
A final challenge faced by Connections Academy-USA stemmed from the changing world itself and the financial feasibility of this approach to the global. In total, each student’s education cost between $40,000 and $44,000. While some students paid full tuition fees, many of the students were on partial or full scholarship. The school had historically looked to cover the rest of their budget through philanthropy. However, the philanthropy scene had shifted in recent years, according to the Head of School, Trevor:
[Philanthropists] are changing their approach to it, you know? You know what I mean? Well, I mean “I love the smiling African boys on the cover of your magazine, but what’s the scale of that?” You know, I think in the old days it was like, “Wow, I’d really like just to support that kid. I’m gonna give you my 20,000 bucks and that’s making me feel good about my philanthropy.” I think it’s really changed a lot. If you look at young people with money, “Like okay, that’s nice. But that’s not enough.” They wanna know like “how are all these schools gonna work together to create this global movement,” you know?In response to funders’ desires to see a larger scale in the global education movement, the Connections Academy organization had made plans to open new campuses over the next few years; this was a deliberate attempt to change with the times in order to attract more philanthropic attention.
Despite challenges and tensions, Connections Academy-USA represents a path to the global that is rooted firmly within a cosmopolitan frame: the school sought to promote cross-national and cross-cultural understanding through the cultivation of a diverse living and learning environment. We will discuss the implications of this model for the global education movement more generally in the last section.
Global Studies High. Located in the United States, Global Studies High engaged local students in a globally-relevant, project-based learning curriculum led by teacher teams within small but interconnected schools. In juxtaposition to Connections Academy-USA, a school that took one primary path to the global, Global Studies High sampled and combined two primary strategies in instantiating the global: its student body and curricular design.
Locally-diverse student body. Similarly to Connections Academy-USA, Global Studies High sought to instantiate the global through their student body. In contrast to Connections Academy’s largely national diversity, Global Studies High targeted diversity that reflected the local cultural and socio-economic diversity. This equated to about 40% Latino-American students, 35% White Students, 12% African-American students, and 13% Asian and Pacific Islanders as well as 35% first-generation college students.
The most salient piece of this diversity for students and administrators was socio-economic. Indeed, what was termed “social integration” was one of the guiding principles of the school. As Dean of Students Natalie noted, all decisions in the school had to be in line with the following questions: “is it in support of social class integration? Is it about bringing our young people together in a space that honors all of them and supports them with what they need?” In other words, the school sought to create a school space that brought together students from different socioeconomic and ethnic/racial backgrounds that intentionally respected and supported students in this integration.
The school’s desire for respectful inclusion of students from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds was not lost on the students. For example, Senior Hanna immediately cited the student body in listing what was distinctive about Global Studies High:
I think the design of it allows for—and I think this doesn’t become apparent until you become older and you’ve been in the system a while—that you have socioeconomic diversity because of the lottery based system that differs from a traditional public school in that you don’t have the same kind of kid either in a positive or negative way all at the same place.
Similarly, the Chief Administrative Officer, Henry, shared a story of a student:
[She had] only worked with kids who looked like her [at her previous school], and she had ideas about kids who didn’t look like her, but she didn’t know because she actually never met them before coming to Global Studies High. And all of a sudden she has to sit with kids who don’t look like her, and she realized that the kids who don’t look like her are different than what she thought, and also everyone else is having the kind of experience that she’s having, and so now, she just likes all kinds of people.Students, then, were keyed into the unique composition of their school’s student body and socialized to attributing value to it.
Project-based learning. Interestingly, Hanna went on to describe the intersection of this diverse student body with a second path to the global, the school’s curriculum:
By doing that the way public schools do, you lose that sense of diversity. That’s such an abstract word, but by having people from both ends of that spectrum that you’re working with in very, very close relations with—you know, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with the same group of 25 kids, because we stay with our classes for the most part, at least for an entire semester—I think that allows for a lot of crossing of ideas, a lot of crossing of understanding, seeing where different people are from and seeing how different people have grown up and a crossing of cultures even within the same county that is unique.
Hanna cited here the importance of the school’s curriculum in helping students from different backgrounds engage with difference—exchanging ideas and cultivating understanding across differences.
Moreover, the curricular context that Hanna described—working eight hours a day, five days a week with your classmates—was a special one. In contrast with the curriculum and organizational structure of most schools, Global Studies High centered their curriculum around project-based learning (PBL) or learning through immersion in projects that are authentic and relevant. Jerry, a media and arts teacher at the school since its launch, described this approach simply as learning through “doing and making.” Indeed, the school itself was covered floor to ceiling with the projects that had guided student learning over the years. One project that we saw in action combined a humanities class and a Spanish language class toward the creation of a food truck meant to promote cultural understanding through the fusion cuisine served; the project involved ethnographic research essays on existing food trucks in Spanish and English as well as research reports on the cultural significance of different ethnic cuisines represented in the area (Mexican and Korean).
The 20 students who participated in this particular project and other projects at Global Studies High spent hours working together with a common goal of seeing their student-generated project come to successful fruition. As Dean Nathalie noted, this time spent together was both critical and challenging:
We have students coming from homelessness and students coming from billionaire families, and they work together on projects. There is a lot that comes up in that interaction and that’s the social class integration piece is that I think that when we do this, we are preparing them to be leaders of the world. That doesn’t just happen though. We have to be very conscious of the spaces we put them in, the way we choose the groupings, the places they sit, the spaces we create for them, physical and thought spaces.
This explanation points to two things. First, it was the intersection of diverse students with a project-based curriculum that promoted substantial engagement with difference and a cosmopolitan understanding among students; the curriculum was the mechanism through which cultural barriers and boundaries were broken. Second, the school paid attention to school structures and spaces in order to target engagement and understanding through the project-based curriculum. In sum, it was the combination of a diverse student body and a project-based curriculum that produced cosmopolitan habits of mind, although not automatically and not without challenges.
The project-based curriculum used at Global Studies High can also be understood as a way to instantiate the global outside of its connection to the student body: PBL at Global Studies High was centered around doing and making what was relevant to the global world. According to Founding Head Len, the “whole idea [behind Global Studies High] is that [the students] realize that building and making things is is — and thinking things — is really the future, you know? That’s basically it.” Len expounded on what skills this future required later on in the interview:
Because what we want them to have here are, you know—because we use different words with them over time like “commit,” “curiosity,” “being resolved to pursue something,” “finding it endlessly interesting,” “being able to do advanced reading in a group,” “working collectively,” “being able to schedule,” “something that’s complex, multifaceted that takes a long time to accomplish with others or by yourself.” Those kinds of skills.
In other words, the curriculum was future-oriented, looking to impart to students skills that will help them succeed in a global world.
This orientation toward the future was salient to the students as well. For
example, Jamie, a Junior at Global Studies High, noted that:
Well most of the lessons you learn, and the projects that you do, the teachers will relate it to something outside. It’s usually what all their lessons are based around so that way, you’re not learning things where you’re like, I don’t know when I’m going to use this. So you actually know when you’re going to use it and it gives you an idea of what you want to do.
This outward orientation was also picked up on by Senior Laura, who commented that Global Studies High “is really involved with kind of looking at how the world is progressing and kind of tailoring the curriculum to that.” From Laura’s perspective, this took the form of an emphasis on public speaking and STEM-related careers, such as robotics, and integrating that into the curriculum. Students also mentioned multiple opportunities to explore different career paths and to forge professional connections in these fields through guest speakers and guest teachers from industry, field trips, and internships.
Tensions and challenges. For students and administrators, then, the project-based learning curriculum brought in relevant connections to the outside, globalizing world and worked to prepare students for success in this world by equipping them with the necessary skills and connections. Importantly, this success was largely defined in terms of economic success: the ability to secure employment in the face of a rapidly changing, globalizing job market. Students and staff both emphasized the link between the curriculum and careers or, as Laura summarized, that fact that Global Studies High identified “careers that are becoming popular, the ones that are becoming really successful, and kind of tailoring the curriculum to fit that.”
With global relevance of the curriculum defined largely in terms of jobs rather than in terms of understanding or helping global Others, this future-looking curriculum aligned more with the entrepreneurial and economic discourses that have surrounded global education. This stands in juxtaposition with the more idealistic and cosmopolitan agendas expressed by students and staff when discussing the student body. We are left, then, with a notable tension at the heart of Global Studies High between an internal focus on cosmopolitan integration and an external focus on global job markets.
Global Studies High faced other tensions as well in instantiating the global. One challenge to implementing the curriculum itself stemmed from the very nature of the curriculum: its non-traditional nature did not fit all students, teachers or parents. Jamie explained, for example, the shirking nature of his graduating class:
We have a much bigger freshman class than we do senior class, because there are a lot of kids that this just isn’t for them, and they’re not doing as well as they should be, or as well as they feel they should be. Because at the end of the day, they don’t try because it seems like this foreign idea of learning and it’s just not for them, so they end up leaving.
This “foreignness” of the curriculum did not always sit well with parents, either. Jerry, the media and art teacher, laughed that:
Parents are like, “My kid had too much fun at school today. What’s going on? Why aren’t they—I took Chemistry and I was miserable, how come my son is having such a good time?” And so they pull their kid out.
Teachers as well faced challenges in implementing a truly project-based learning environment. Jerry went on to explain that:
Even still here at Global Studies High, we’ll get new teachers and they’ll cognitively understand we’re doing project-based learning but in their hearts, they just can’t believe it. They’re like, “No, but I have to lecture to them. I have to do this or I won’t be a good teacher.” And you’re like no, make something, do something.
In other words, instantiating a truly project-based curriculum remained a challenge to implement even when the will was there.
In addition, this curriculum and the school itself demanded a lot from teachers. Laura described the availability of her teachers:
And a lot of the teachers are kind of available all the time. Where in like traditional schools they’ll go home right as it hits or they’ll be there right as school starts. But our teachers are here early in the morning, and they’re there until at least 5 PM every school day. Even some weekends they’re here. A lot them will give you their phone numbers so you can text them if you have some kind of problem with an assignment. They’re always available to help which is really great.
Another student brought up the example of a teacher who had recently stepped in to support her:
[Teachers] go above and beyond to make your education the best one possible. So I’ve been working on a project and I’ve been really stressed out, and I haven’t had enough time and the project was actually from last semester. But yesterday, we were building a garden at a preschool. My teacher actually took me out, we drove over to the preschool, and we worked on it after school and it helped me a lot with finishing the project. It was less stressful. They go above and beyond even if it’s something like that.These student testimonies illustrate the importance of relationships between students and teachers to the PBL curriculum and to the school model as a whole. That said, this intensive time was not sustainable for all teachers. For example, Jerry was the only teacher from the initial team still teaching at the school 10 years later. Hanna summarized this, saying “[Teaching here is for everyone?] Oh absolutely not. It requires so much effort out of the teachers.” Teachers then faced the enormous challenge of sustaining this model and this curriculum for students without burning out.
Global Studies High illustrates a hybrid path to the global through a socio-economically diverse student body and a globally-oriented curriculum. This path looked to promote both cosmopolitan habits of mind within the school and 21st century savoir-faire for life after school. We turn now to a discussion of this path and its tensions and opportunities as they relate to global education in the United States more broadly.
Implications and Conclusion
Our findings confirm a flourishing worldwide global schools movement that was nevertheless marked by challenges in the substantial and meaningful instantiation of a global orientation. We identified seven strategies that schools around the world used to integrate a global orientation and detailed the complex path toward the global taken by two schools.
These findings point to several implications for the U.S. education context. First, we want to acknowledge the considerable challenge of instantiating the global as well as the great importance of meeting this challenge. Schools around the world and across the board are still working to figure out what it means to provide a global education and how to do it: all of the schools we visited faced significant challenges in meaningfully instantiating the global. Even in schools with seemingly unlimited resources, substantial obstacles remained: integrating second/foreign languages, service learning, and technology, for example, or welcoming students from all socioeconomic walks of life. In some ways, it should not be surprising that a cosmopolitan orientation toward others that recognizes the legitimacy of alterity (Dooley, Tait, & Sar, 2016; Levinas, 1969) and insists upon dialogue is difficult to achieve, especially at our particular historical moment. At the same time that digital media have connected us, the same technologies have brought into bas-relief our stark differences and the even starker inequities that characterize our world, both within nation states and across them. Indeed, how to speak and hear across these differences, we would argue, is one of the most important educational, ethical, and political issues of our time. We call for robust, sustained, cross-disciplinary research on how to cultivate, nourish, and foster global orientations in our schools that position young people to become citizens of the world as well as responsible members of local and national communities. How, for example, can students be concretely supported to encounter difference—a different way of speaking, sounding, interacting, thinking—with curiosity rather than fear?
In our study, the schools paving the way toward the global, or claiming such an orientation, were primarily private schools that catered to elite populations. The concern that globally-oriented skills and knowledge sets are most available to certain segments of the population, that a move toward a global orientation will simply raise or shift the bar and create another gap or divide between the privileged and the not, is a danger that is not lost upon us. To be sure, one of our cases featured a public charter school in the US that served a socio-economically diverse student body. And there are moves afoot, most notably by organizations such as the Asia Society, to spread the gospel of the global to public schools. Nonetheless, we are concerned that a global education be viewed, not as a privilege of the few, but a basic right of all. We urge educators to reclaim cosmopolitanism, not as elite privilege, but as a fundamental orientation and values set essential in a globalized world where all people need to be able to interact with and understand divergent, diverse others (Blommaert, 2010; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Kirkwood, 2001; Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). How to reconcile national standards, vocational orientations on the one hand, and global, cosmopolitan orientations on hand, should, in our view, top educational policy agendas. This may involve inquiry into the few models for providing a global education to students from under-resourced communities or the rising middle class, such as the Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network (Asia Society, 2016). In addition, work in this area could identify new models for providing global education that have yet to surface.
Third, while digital media have propelled the forces of globalization and made possible an instantaneous flow of ideas, images, and information across geographic, cultural, political boundaries, the role and use of digital technology in global schools and toward a global orientation remains limited and problematic. We do not mean to imply that the radical connectivity of the Internet is always helpful and certainly not that such connectivity promotes a cosmopolitan ethic by itself. But we are interested in how such tools, in the hands of skilled educators, could promote such an ethic. At Connections Academy-USA, technology was ultimately positioned as a threat, criticized by the students as a hindrance to their in-person relationships. While commendable in its intentions, this stance seems at odds with a global reality marked by digital connectivity and leaves opportunities to further a cosmopolitan outlook via digital social presence unfulfilled. At Global Studies High, conversely, technology was central to pedagogical offerings; however, it was leveraged toward preparing students for a job market increasingly dominated by technical skills and know-how, again stopping short of deploying technology to connect with distant or different others. These findings underscore the need to explore digital media and tools in research and practice as a pathway to greater cosmopolitan connection, moving beyond common perceptions of technology as a threat or as a tool just for the global job market.
Finally, our findings confirm a tension between instrumental and altruistic orientations to global education that has long characterized its existence in the United States and abroad: global education has been and continues to be framed both as 1) a way to remain economically and militarily competitive as well as 2) a way to promote cross-cultural understanding. The two focal schools embodied these two orientations, preparing their students for the larger, global world in very different ways: as cosmopolitan leaders at Connections Academy-USA versus as competitive career-driven entrepreneurs at Global Studies High. We certainly acknowledge the continued relevance of instrumental orientations to global education, and indeed, the importance of career orientations at a time of economic instability and slow wage growth. However, we believe that cosmopolitan orientations cannot be forgotten or left unfulfilled, lest we position youth too narrowly and jingoistically for work lives with a singular focus on a national economy. Even as educational institutions across the board emphasize preparation for employment (Grubb & Lazerson, 2007), it is more important than ever to interleave such preparation with the development of a cosmopolitan ethic given the inescapable connectivity of our world. Globalization has created a world in which information and ideas; people and politics; as well as conflicts and crises cross borders with still disconcerting ease. It has also created a world in which fear and suspicion toward others run rampant, constructing new walls to fortify old borders and barriers. With Appiah, Hansen, and others, we submit that a cosmopolitan orientation to education that respects difference, that encourages dialogue, and that is embedded both locally and globally is essential for our collective future.
Although each of the schools that we visited would agree that their path to the global is not yet complete, they have all made important moves away from exclusively instrumental curricula. We take our hats off to them for their commendable efforts to imagine and offer their students an education suited for the 21st century. Inspired by these schools, we encourage the educational research community to turn focused inquiry and attention to educative contexts both in the US and around the world that are locally embedded yet globally aware in order to help us understand what models best promote cosmopolitan leanings for students, preparing them not to fear what lies beyond familiar borders, but to respect, understand, and engage with it.
Notes
- Schools visited internationally were located in Asia. This choice was rooted in the rise in popularity in global schools and education in Asia (Hayden, 2011; Sharma, 2016).
- All names are pseudonyms.
- To preserve the anonymity of the schools visited, we indicate the general region in which they are located, rather than a specific city.
- Transcription conventions: pauses are marked in seconds enclosed in parentheses. For example a pause of two seconds would be marked as: (2.0). Restarts are marked with an em dash (—).
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Appendix A
Narrative Summary of Participating Schools
Bilingual Academy, located in Asia, housed 1,500 students, pre-primary to 12th grade. The school offered some scholarships, but most students paid the full US$20,000-26,000 tuition fees. Students were a mix of ex-patriots and middle/upper middle class local families. The school required Mandarin-English immersion at all grade levels.
Connections Academy-Asia was a small college preparatory program for 300 17-19 year-olds from many different nationalities. The school was part of a larger network of Connection Academies around the world. Tuition cost around US$40,000 per year; most students were offered full scholarships. Within an IB curriculum, English was the medium of instruction with options available for second/foreign language learners as well as native language maintenance. Service learning was cited as central to the school model.
Connections Academy-Southeast Asia served close to 6,000 students, grades K-12, from almost 100 nationalities. The school was part of a larger network of Connection Academies around the world. Tuition ranged from US$35,000-40,000 per year. There was a mix of full scholarships, partial scholarships, and full fee payers. The school implemented the IB at higher grade levels. English was the medium of instruction with options available for second/foreign language learners as well as native language maintenance. Technology was incorporated using a 1:1 policy at all levels, and service learning in an international context was a core component of the school model.
Connections Academy-USA was located in the US and served 200 17-19 year-old students. Like Connections Academy-Southeast Asia and Connections Academy-Asia, it was located in a larger network of Connection Academies around the world. Students came from over 80 nationalities. Tuition was US$40,000 per year. There was a mix of full scholarships, partial scholarships, and full fee payers. The school offered the IB diploma program; English was the medium of instruction with options available for second/foreign language learners as well as native language maintenance. Service learning in local communities was core to the school model.
Crown Academy, located in Asia, had 1,500 students grades K-12. They offered a British curriculum. Tuition was US$15,000-25,000 per year. Some scholarships were available for secondary school. Students were a mix of ex-patriots and middle/upper middle class local families. English was the medium of instruction with foreign language courses available.
Equality Charter was a network of a half dozen K-5 schools around the US. Over 2,000 students were served, network wide. The charter charged no tuition and focused on the local manifestations of globalization. It centered its curricular model on support and embracing racial and socioeconomic diversity. They offered some foreign language classes to older students.
Global Edge High, located in the US, served 1,500 students grades K-12. Students were largely from affluent families. Tuition cost US$45,000 per year. Included at every grade level was a globally-themed course. Language immersion was implemented in lower grades with a traditional foreign language course model at the secondary level. All students at the school received high-end technological hardware (tablets or laptops) that was used in classes. The school also had plans to connect future campuses via telecollaboration.
Global Studies High, located in the US, served 600 students. As a charter school, families were not charged tuition. The student body was selected to reflect the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the surrounding community. English was the medium of instruction and foreign language options were available to students. Curriculum was project-based with frequent use of contemporary digital technologies to make learning relevant to 21st century job market.
International Studies Institute, located in Asia, served 3,000 students, primary-12th grade. Tuition ranged from US$23,000-26,000 with little financial aid available. The students were largely ex-patriots, very few of whom held local passports. The medium of instruction was English with a focus on Mandarin studies at all levels. Service learning through international charities was central to school’s mission and self-packaging.
Lakeview, located in the US, served 400 high school students. Tuition cost US$40,000 per year with some financial aid available. The school demographic was mostly affluent and white. The school offered traditional foreign language classes and implemented a 1:1 laptop policy for all students.
Local Academy in Asia served 2,000 students grades 1-12. Unlike many of the other schools visited in the region, this school served primarily local students. English was the medium of instruction. Tuition cost US$6500-1000, and admission was need-blind with substantial financial aid available to students.
Peace School, located in the US, served about 500 students, grades K-8. Tuition cost US$30,000 per year. Half of students were students of color and a quarter received financial aid, although the scholarship amount per student was not clear. English was the medium of instruction with foreign language options.
World Network Inc was a network of close to 70 schools in more than a dozen countries. Tuitions and scholarships ranged by school. Similarly, a range of curricula (e.g., IB, British, American) were offered, based on school. The network claimed that global perspectives were integrated into all courses and curricular components. It also sought to connect classrooms across the network via technology.
Appendix B
A Sample of Codes Used in Data Analysis
Thematic Codes
Altruistic or Cosmopolitan Orientations to Global Education
Perspective taking
Hospitable relation to difference
Global citizenship
Service to others
Instrumental or Nationalist Orientations to Global Education
Job market
Competition
Military safety
Open-Ended Codes
Technology
Language policy
Diversity vs. homogenous student population
Financial model
Student life
Curriculum
Teacher preparation
Appendix C
How Six Schools Used Different Strategies to Instantiate a Global Education
|
School Name
Location
|
Connections Academy
Network
World-wide |
Bilingual Academy
Asia |
Global Edge High
USA |
World Network Inc.
World-wide |
Global Studies High
USA |
International Studies Institute
Asia |
| Strategy 1: Global Courses | Global courses offered at all grade levels | |||||
| Strategy 2: Global Curriculum | Claimed to integrate global perspectives into all curricular components | Project-based curriculum focused on skills necessary in global world | ||||
| Strategy 3: Global Extra-Curriculars | Connected students with different cultures through local service learning | Focus on mission was service to global and national others through fundraising and service trips | ||||
| Strategy 4: Multilingual Language Policy | Committed to bilingual, bicultural education in Mandarin and English | Partial immersion in Spanish or Chinese in primary years | Mandarin offered at all age levels; required Mandarin study until 6th grade | |||
| Strategy 5: Diverse Student Body | Over 80 nationalities represented and some socio-economic diversity | Student population set to mirror socio-economic and cultural diversity of local area | ||||
| Strategy 6: Technology | All students receive high-end hardware; plans to connect different campus via online classes | Provided high-end hardware as well as cutting-edge software to connect students | Used technology to make learning relevant to skills needed in global era | Gave all students a computer and used technology to collaborate with international classrooms | ||
| Strategy 7: Physical Networks | Network of 13 schools around the world yet largely unlinked | Plans to establish multiple interconnected schools around the world | Network of 65+ schools in more than a dozen countries |
