Martin Levins
Vivien is VP for Education of the Asia Society.
Piecharts show shift of economic power to India and China, Friedman's flat world, future supply of graduates coming from Asia, yadda yadda.
Current problems are cross border (aren't they all?)
OK - I've got it. (the global thing)
So she asks "what is a global skill set?"
Example of John Stanford school in Seattle, where improved brain development is implicated in the immersion approach to language and (say) Science or Maths.
Chicago schools, such as Walter Payton, who are teaching Chinese to Latino kids, who learn English, Spanish and Chinese at the same time. (Walter Payton is a very wealthy school, I believe, but she tells us that this process is becoming more the norm in Chicago)
She maintains that schools in the US are increasingly making travel, and/or international experience, a recruitment criterion, and integrating international content. Science, for example, can easily have an international focus, especially in the eco/sustainability arenas.
She talks a bit about measurement of global competence, using digital portfolios, for example, and she is trying to develop statements that reflect global competence that use the language of existing graduation criteria. A lot of this is US biased: in NSW, Australia for instance, Geography syllabi will specifically exclude Australian areas for study. The year 8 syllabus for Desert dwellers excludes Australian deserts.
She makes a comment re the number of passports in the US as an indicator of "globalness" (my term). Some useful info here.
Resources available at the Asia Society Website.
In answering the question: "How do we get our schools to become less euro centric?" she gives ideas of awareness raising, book clubs, local businesses coming in etc. The original questioner accepts this, but he wants to know how to retrain teachers.
She answers by saying that we have to find ways of increasing teachers interest and knowledge (which is kinda rephrasing the question he asked)
Nicer answer is that the "one right answer" may not be conducive to globalness (globalosity? globalotion?) as these sorts of questions preclude different perspectives. Good example of dealing with the US/Palestinian problem by not sticking with the two perspectives, but having a range of nations' perspectives and then asking students to swap roles.
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