Teaching the Global Dimension

Key Principles and Effective Practice

David Hicks, Cathie Holden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134137794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching the Global Dimension specifically responds to concerns such as inequality, justice, environment and conflict in chapters written by leading educationalists in the field. It explores both the theory and practice of 'global education' today and provides:

• a framework for understanding global issues
• a model identifying the key elements of good practice
• insight into young people's concerns for the world and the future
• tried and tested strategies for handling controversial global issues more confidently in the classroom
• key concepts for planning appropriate learning experiences
• a range of case studies which demonstrate the different ways in which a global dimension can be developed.

Inspiring, thought-provoking and highly practical, this book shows how teachers at any stage in their career can effectively and successfully bring a global dimension to the taught curriculum.

Part I
The global dimension

Chapter 1
Responding to the world

David Hicks

How can and should education respond to world events in the early twenty-first century? This chapter begins by noting the long-standing interest which teachers and others have had in helping young people become more world-minded. It then considers some of the educational responses to global issues that have emerged over recent decades and, through a series of thumbnail sketches, indicates both their variety and their relevance to schools today.

Introduction

What is it that teachers need to know if they are to help young people make sense of the world in the early twenty-first century? Long-standing global issues – those to do with poverty, environment, conflict and social justice – constantly take on new forms, whether in relation to the complexities of globalisation, the ‘war against terrorism’ or global climate change. Some of the global trends reported in recent Worldwatch Institute reports (2005, 2006) include: a) a decrease in the number of wars worldwide; b) severe weather events on the rise; c) wind power as the fastest growing energy source; d) the gap between the poorest and richest countries continuing to grow; e) world population growth slowing down. Clearly some global trends are positive whilst others are a cause for concern. In trying to assess the current state of the world some commentators have argued that we may be on the edge of a major transition.

The western economic model – the fossil-fuel based, automobile centred, throw away economy – that so dramatically raised living standards for part of humanity during [the last] century is in trouble … The shift towards an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a transition as the Industrial Revolution that led to the current dilemma was.

(Worldwatch Institute 1999: 4)

Global issues, trends and events are so called because they are ones that have a major impact across the planet. It would be wrong, however, to see them as issues that only occur ‘elsewhere’ and thus perhaps not of relevance to young people in our own communities today. Every global issue has a local impact, though its form may vary from place to place – local and global have become two sides of the same coin.

These are not, of course, matters which educators are unaware of. Indeed a concern that education should help young people become more world-minded dates back to the work of progressive teachers in the early twentieth century. As this chapter will show, there is thus a long tradition of teaching about global issues, trends and events and a growing consensus has emerged that such matters have a major part to play in educational debates.

Eight out of ten 11–16-year-olds, for example, feel that it is important to learn about global issues at school so that they can make more informed choices about their lives (MORI 1998). Official support for this in England, Scotland and Wales is given respectively in Developing a Global Dimension in the School Curriculum (DfES 2005), The Global Dimension in the Curriculum (Scottish Executive 2001) and Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship (ACCAC 2002). The Department for International Development (2006a) provides a website for teachers which identifies a wide range of resources that help young people develop a global perspective. Subject bodies, such as the Geographical Association, have similarly responded with detailed advice for teachers on the global dimension in geography (Lambert et al. 2004).

The argument that lies behind initiatives such as these is that we cannot fully understand life today in our own communities unless we set this in the wider global context. What happens elsewhere in the world constantly impacts on our daily lives whether this is international finance, food, fashion, crime, the weather or popular music. Education thus has a central role to play in helping create citizens who can think and act globally as well as locally. This is no easy task for at heart this is about how we help young people understand their interconnections with others and how we help them make sense of the human condition. On the one hand humans are capable of great compassion, altruism and vision and on the other great cruelty, selfishness and destruction. On the day after September 11, 2001 I had to talk on the global dimension to over a hundred new PGCE students. I struggled all morning with what I might say in the light of the events in New York. In the end all I could say was:

As you will be only too well aware the world is both a good place and a bad place. This will also be true of your own communities and the schools you are about to teach in. One of the key tasks for you as a teacher is to find a way of being present to that tension, both in your own life and those of your pupils.

Given the history of the twentieth century it is not surprising that in the 1990s many people looked forward to the new century with some ambivalence (Real World Coalition 1996). The future was seen as a place for concern rather than as a source of hope. Hope, however, has to be central to the human condition. This means that any classroom investigation of an issue must look not only at the nature of the problem but also at the range of possible solutions. Not to do so would be an educational crime for the result is to disempower pupils (surely not one of our learning outcomes) rather than empowering them to take part in responsible action for change. ‘One of the tasks of the progressive educator …’, says Paulo Freire, ‘is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles might be’ (1994: 9).

Educational responses

Teachers who wish to encourage greater understanding of local-global issues amongst their students have a long educational tradition to draw on. From the 1960s onwards a growing number of new educational movements emerged internationally. This was because an increasing number of educators began to question whether education did actually help young people understand the contemporary world. Each movement had as its focus an issue that was not only national but also global. I collectively refer to these fields as ‘issue-based educations’.

Some observed that the curriculum took a national rather than a global perspective on the world. They therefore felt it was vital for young people to understand the notion of global interdependence. Others observed that people were increasingly concerned about environmental matters and felt that the environment should be highlighted more in schools. Others looked at issues to do with global inequality and argued that issues of development needed to be more deeply understood. Others looked at the local and global community and observed that pupils needed a deeper understanding of issues to do with peace and conflict. Others looked at British society and saw widespread racism as the major concern. They felt that the curriculum needed not only to reflect the cultural diversity found in society but that it should also challenge issues of racism. Others looked at education and observed that it did not prepare children for a future that would be very different from today. They argued that schools should help pupils develop a more future orientated perspective on the world. More recently educators and others have drawn attention to the need for schools to address issues of citizenship and also of sustainable development.

Issue-based educations

Because these issue-based educations each had their own particular focus they each developed different areas of expertise. Internationally these fields are known as global education, environmental education, development education, peace education, antiracist education, futures education, and education for sustainable development. Whilst some of these labels may not be widely used by teachers they are nevertheless useful shorthand for alerting the educational community to particular global concerns. Gradually a range of organisations, networks, newsletters, publications and classroom resources have emerged, all of which offer specific expertise in teaching and learning about global issues. In many cases educators were also able to draw on the insights of scholars working in corresponding academic fields.

During the 1980s there was much debate about whether and how these issuebased educations might relate to each other. Lister (1987) argued that these ‘new movements in education’ shared various features in common and thus represented a major historical shift in education that warranted particular attention.

[Their] twin stresses on human-centred education and global perspectives constitute a radical shift away from the dominant tradition of schooling (which is knowledge centred and ethnocentric). Thus, the new vanguard educators seek to give to education a new process and a new perspective on the world.

(Lister 1987: 54)

In contemplating the differences between these issue-based educations and their contribution to the wider educational scene Richardson (1990) argued that they could each be seen as parts of a greater whole and highlighted the danger of each field trying to achieve its goals without reference to the others. Some educators like to see these initiatives as all being part of a wider ‘movement’ (Marshall 2005b) whilst other proponents put more stress on the distinctive features of each.

Since these initiatives are central to the concerns of this book seven exemplars, drawn from the experience of the UK, will be outlined here. As noted above, some like to see them as distinctly different fields of enquiry, whilst others see them as closely related. In the context of this book it is useful to see them as each highlighting a particular concept or perspective that is integral to the global dimension in the curriculum.

Global education

In the UK early interest in global matters was found amongst the progressive teachers who set up the World Education Fellowship and its journal The New Era in the 1920s and those educators who set up the Council for Education in World Citizenship in the late 1930s (Heater 1980). Such initiatives contributed to what was known in the post-war years as ‘education for international understanding’. In the 1960s James Henderson and colleagues at the University of London Institute of Education coined the term ‘world studies’ as shorthand for recognition of this need for a global dimension in the curriculum. Henderson was also involved in an important curriculum initiative called the World Studies Project.

It was this influential project, under the directorship of Robin Richardson (1976), that identified the core ideas informing global education in the UK. At the same time American educators were also beginning to develop a series of important conceptual frameworks. Anderson (1968) was one of the first to argue that a systems view was needed in order to understand the nature of global interdependence and that this needed to be reflected in the curriculum. Other ground-breaking work on learning objectives and classroom materials came from the Mid-America Program for Global Perspectives in Education at Indiana University (Becker 1975). Tye’s (1999) international research shows such initiatives to be part of a worldwide movement.

Other important initiatives in the 1980s were the World Studies 8–13 Project based at the University College of St Martin’s in Lancaster and the Centre for Global Education then at the University of York. Both are described in more detail in Chapter 2. The World Studies Trust continued this tradition through its work with teacher educators on local–global issues. Such issues can usefully be seen as falling into four broad categories: wealth and poverty, peace and conflict, rights and responsibilities, and environmental concerns (see Chapter 2). A key document for educators is Developing a Global Dimension in the School Curriculum (DfES 2005), whilst amongst the many excellent resources available for teachers are In the Global Classroom by Pike and Selby (1999/2000) and Global Citizenship: The Handbook for Primary Teaching (Young and Commins 2002).

Development education

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of NGOs concerned with issues of global poverty, such as Oxfam and Christian Aid, felt they needed to develop an education programme in addition to their main fund-raising function. This was partly as a result of opinion surveys at that time which showed there was a general lack of public awareness about issues of development. The purpose of such programmes was not to fund-raise but rather to look at the ways in which issues of development could be taught about in schools. A number of ex-teachers brought their classroom expertise to such initiatives and developed both courses and materials for teachers.

Initially the focus of development education was on the causes of poverty in less developed countries but this soon broadened to look at different definitions of development and the notion that ‘underdevelopment’ was an on-going process rather than a state some countries found themselves in. The cause of such problems was seen to lie in the process of unequal development that began as a result of European imperialism and colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Issues of trade and aid were also examined and the ways in which these could perpetuate such inequalities. Global notions of the rich North and the poor South added to this analysis, together with an understanding that cultural imperialism often marginalised the voices of those living in the global South.

A comprehensive definition of development education is provided by the Development Education Association (DEA website). The DEA defines development education as lifelong learning that:

• explores the links between people living in the ‘developed’ countries of the North and those of the ‘developing’ South, enabling people to understand the links between their own lives and those of people throughout the world
• increases understanding of the economic, social, political and environmental forces which shape our lives
• develops the skills, attitudes and values which enable people to work together to take action to bring about change and take control of their own lives
• works towards achieving a more just and sustainable world in which power and resources are more equitably shared.

The DEA is one of the main coordinating bodies for development education in the UK. It is linked to a national network of Development Education Centres (DECs) which in different ways support teachers and other educators who wish to explore the nature of current global issues. Some centres, such as TIDE (2006a) in Birmingham and Manchester DEP (2006a), work closely with schools and LEAs in providing continuing professional development and a wide range of excellent teaching materials. The Development Education Journal provides a valuable forum for international debate. Some NGOs, such as Oxfam (2006a), have chosen to operate under the heading of ‘global citizenship’, in some ways possibly a clearer label than development education. An exciting range of classroom materials is available from organisations such as Oxfam (2006b) and also from Teachers in Development Education (2006a).

Education for sustainable development

One of the crucial precursors to education for sustainable development (ESD) (QCA 2006a) was environmental education which emerged in the late 1960s. Since then the emphasis in environmental education has shifted, from conservation of the countryside in the 1960s–1970s (plants, trees, hedgerows, wildlife), to national and global problems in the 1970s–1980s (pollution, resource depletion, global warming), to issues of sustainability in the 1990s and today. International developments in environmental education were very much influenced by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organisation) and UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) at milestone international conferences in the 1970s and 1980s when definitions of its nature and scope were agreed on (Palmer 1998).

Three different but interrelated forms of environmental education have frequently been noted (Palmer 1998). Education about the environment focuses on the need for factual information but may say less about the changes needed in social and political systems to resolve environmental problems. In education through the environment, students’ experiences of various environments are used as a medium for education. This adds reality and such experiential learning can engender feelings of environmental concern. Education for the environment engages students in exploration and resolution of real issues and highlights the importance of human agency in creating a better world.

The Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002 crucially drew together the twin global concerns of development and environment....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Teaching the Global Dimension
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The global dimension
• Part II: Key concepts
• Part III: The global classroom
• Bibliography