In the global 21st century, content knowledge of world events and institutions simply are no longer sufficient for truly global education. Increasingly, information is not what is lacking, but instead there is a dearth of authentic global experiences and opportunities for students to get beyond their comfort zones and break free from their preconceived notions about the world. To do this, we now look to inculcate our students with global competencies to prepare them for their global futures. But what do these competencies look like and how do we design our curriculum to successfully nurture these in our students? In this session, I will share my experiences garnered while working through the Global Competency Certification program developed and administered by the Teacher’s College at Columbia University, the Asia Society, and World Savvy. We will then discuss how I have used these lessons to redesign the Global Scholars Program at USM.
The 50-minute session will be structured in three parts. First, we will discuss how I have taken the GCC coursework and fieldwork experiences and adapted them to building the University School’s Global Scholars program. We will then critique the GCC’s Global Competence Matrix and examine materials from the GCC curriculum. Lastly, we will explore implementation, using the student-centered project design of USM’s collaboration with Ugandan communities in the “Great Lakes to Great Lakes Water Project” as an example. The goal of this session will be to discuss and to articulate the core concepts, skills, values, attitudes and behaviors that we should foster as we seek to educate our students to be globally competent.
