LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      FOSTERING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP BY MEETING IN THE MIDDLE

      There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making.

      —Paulo Freire

      I like to use the phrase meeting in the middle when talking about building equitable, reciprocal global partnerships. What does it look like to meet in the middle? The middle is not a destination, particularly when it comes to classroom-to-classroom partnerships that occur predominantly or entirely online. Teachers or students from two or more countries might travel physically to meet during a partnership, creating a more personal, face-to-face opportunity as a component of a long-term online experience. But meeting in the middle doesn’t rely on physical travel; it’s about students and the educators who guide them seeing others as the people they are, without judging or trying to change them. It’s about meeting others where they are, figuratively speaking, and of crafting rich experiences that benefit all involved. It’s about seeing other humans in all their wholeness, for their strengths, weaknesses, and goals, not just their circumstances. It’s about seeing the essential humanity in others by acknowledging that every person has his or her own complex set of gifts, needs, and hopes. It’s about celebrating all we have in common and learning from what we see differently. It’s about learning from and with one another as real partners, not being observers who simply learn about each other. It’s about trust, building relationships over time, and helping students see the world and their lives through someone else’s eyes. And it’s about equipping students to become the kinds of “patiently impatient” change makers Freire (1998) describes (p. 38).

      Global education has experienced a boom since the mid-1990s, when it quickly became popular in schools worldwide. Connected educators around the globe are using new technologies to engage with communities and individuals, but many of those connections are not as equitable as they could be, by which I mean that they are founded on a deeply ingrained deficit mindset most teachers don’t realize they have, which usually includes inaccurate assumptions about intelligence and capacity. Those inaccuracies don’t do justice to what every child in every context has to offer the conversation. In fact, many connections are based on exploitative foundations by well-intentioned teachers who use global education simply to observe or solve for, rather than immersing students in what they can learn from others. In my experience, this approach can unintentionally dehumanize partners. For example, I’ve seen many young people come away from global learning experiences with the impression that they’ve “saved” a community, instead of seeing that community as perfectly capable of saving itself. Giving students the opportunity to engage directly with the world can be life changing, often providing a sense of purpose that motivates and grounds young people well into adulthood. But if that sense of purpose is based on the belief that one country or cultural group can save or fix others, these experiences may be causing more harm than good. We need a global educational revolution that puts equity at its core—one in which partners on all sides know they have something to learn and to teach, and one in which all partners have a voice and collaborate on equal footing.

       Giving students the opportunity to engage directly with the world can be life changing, often providing a sense of purpose that motivates and grounds young people well into adulthood.

Why I’m Here

      As an elementary student at the School in Rose Valley in Pennsylvania (an early progressive model developed by Grace Rotzel) and a graduate of the Jefferson County Open School in Colorado (the United States’ second public alternative school focusing on experiential education, founded by thought leader Arnie Langberg), I was lucky to be in globally connected, student-driven educational systems that fostered my passion and purpose. At these schools, thinking differently was a merit, and being willing to oppose authority for the sake of what Vladimir Nabokov (1980) calls “a too early moonbeam of some too early truth” was practically a graduation requirement (p. 372).

      My educational experiences in the 1970s and 1980s included a great deal of outdoor and expeditionary learning, meaning that I learned by doing beyond the classroom walls. I experienced global learning and partnerships long before there were technologies to simplify those connections. My first global learning expeditions were two work trips with Open School to Sonora, Mexico, in ninth and tenth grades, during which my peers and I helped rebuild rural schools in small mountain communities through a partnership between the United States and Mexico. We provided the labor force, and the Sonoran government identified the school most in need of repair and provided paid foremen and materials.

      I was on desk duty both years, which meant stripping, repairing, and then repainting all the students’ wooden desks. I remember working in the shade in a beautiful courtyard and seeing my first scorpion. I remember sitting in the local church during breaks, feeling a connection between Catholicism and Judaism that I’d never recognized before, a sort of universal spirituality I still connect with today. I remember that the local women cooked a huge traditional meal midweek for our celebration, and we played in the river with children and adults from the community. I remember my friend

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