Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher

Good thing I was in the middle of reading Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher or I might have missed the simplest of opportunities to be one... 

A couple of days ago I was thinking about a January back-to-school mini-unit for a middle school ESL class. I’d used some really great materials from the ESL/EFL teachers’ resource website TeachThis last term (totally worth the membership after I tried the free stuff!), so I searched the site for “New Years” and came up with a worksheet for making New Years’ resolutions. Minimal guidance, though. Then I remembered a NewsELA article I’d seen on making and keeping New Years’ goals. Perfect! Leveled reading practice together with a great chance to review last term’s goals, pre-holiday exam results, an American tradition, and to set some new goals. 

I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me until I was lying in bed that night that I’d completely forgotten to make a very easy global connection: in addition to a traditions from the US (like resolutions) and from Japan (where I teach), what are other traditions? I make a firm mental note, and when I got to my desk the next morning, I quickly found a BBC article “How Do People Celebrate New Years around the World?” 

I’m still shaking my head at the whole oversight, because I think of myself as a pretty globally aware educator. After all, I’m an American living and teaching in Japan. Most of my students are bilingual. Last term my high school class watched Sheryl WuDunn’s TED Talk “Our Century’s Greatest Injustice” and developed a line of inquiry from it to make their own presentation on. Next term a middle school class is reading A Long Walk to Water. And I’ve spent many years as a world lit teacher reading as widely as I can to expand from my mostly American/British lit training to find books that my international students can see themselves and their cultures in. 

We hear those catch phrases a lot—“global citizens,” and the like. Who’s against that? The pandemic of 2020 has shown us again just how interconnected we are. And yet, what exactly does a globally aware education look like? So I snatched up this book when I saw it and read it over the Christmas vacation. I’ll be coming back to it again for a slower, more interactive read, and some of the categories were more distinct and helpful than others, but I found it really helpful for some kind of traction to have some kind of set of discrete elements. These authors come up with 12 elements grouped into 3 sets: dispositions, knowledge, and skills. Here's a quick list:   

Dispositions

• Empathy and Valuing Multiple Perspectives
• Commitment to Equity

Knowledge

• Global Conditions and Current Events
• Global Interconnectedness
• Experiential Understanding of Diverse Cultures
• Intercultural Communication

Skills

• Communicating in Multiple Languages
• Creating a Classroom Environment that Values Diversity and Global Engagement
• Integrating Global Learning Experiences
• Facilitating Intercultural Conversations
• Developing Glocal Partnerships
• Assessing Students’ Global Competence Development

I gleaned a number of things from my initial cursory reading. It confirmed for me that I am moving in the right direction. It also reminded to—duh—add that global dimension to my New Year’s lesson! It prompted me to continue to articulate to my students the why of bilingual and global education—just like I continually articulate to them of the why of reading! (“The Benefits of a Bilingual Brain” 5-minute  TED-Ed) And it motivated me to finally take advantage of that Japan Times introductory subscription offer that’s been showing up everywhere in my Facebook feed—6 months for $6. After all, to connect the local and the global, I have to have more local knowledge than BBC gives me for Japan. 

Happy New Year, one and all! I know that whatever else 2021 may bring, it will be a year of challenge and growth. I’m curious to see where we all end up this time next year, and I’m content to take it one week, one day, at a time.