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Global & Cultural Understanding

Every generation confronts the challenge of discerning what capacities and dispositions are the most important to nurture among its young people at a given moment in time. Today, profound economic, digital, demographic, and environmental forces are shaping people’s lives on the planet, thereby making the promotion of cultural and global understanding a priority. Our contemporary context requires us to examine how (1) young people can develop the capacity to understand themselves as well as people living in contexts that are different to their own; (2) teachers and learning environments can foster learners’ dispositions to make sense of the global issues of our times and take action toward societal wellbeing and sustainability; and (3) such capacities are both supported and hindered in today’s digital landscapes.

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Article

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

How do children get to know their city and the city get to know its children? How often are children asked their opinions about their city? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) established that in addition to children’s human rights to protection from harm and provision of an adequate standard of living, children also possess civil rights to participate in the cultural and civic activities of their communities. We, the authors of this article, maintain that children are indeed citizens from birth with the right to participate in the civic life of their cities. Cities belong to the adults and children who live there—even young children, who are capable of generating compelling insights about their communities.

The recognition of children as citizens is an essential pillar of the Reggio schools. Sustaining the strong bond between children’s and adults’ destinies has characterized 50 years of dialogue and cultural and political collaboration between the city of Reggio and its municipal preschools and infant-toddler centers. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, believed that schools are a critical context for fostering the relationship between children and the city. Once Malaguzzi said:

Our children go outside of the school as often as they can. They go to discover what is there or not in the city and to reflect and maybe conquer, with the help of the adults, what could be there . . . [They go] to strengthen relationships with cultural and sports institutions, to run in the fields, to meet the farmers . . . [They go] to discover people’s most beautiful trades, where and how their fathers and mothers work, to make friends with the elderly in their nursing home— images that are missing from their eyes and minds but that are essential to launch themselves into life, into the future. They invite to school the farmer and the factory worker, to hear their stories, their problems, the conditions of the work, and to understand the meaning of life, to feel they are part of a wider community. (see also Cagliari et al., 2016)

How might we help children imagine their futures as active members of their communities? Schools are an ideal setting for fostering a dialogue between children and the city. Like the ancient Greek agora, classrooms can serve as laboratories for life in a democratic community—places where knowledge and culture are both created and transmitted. When children encounter other perspectives—when they discuss, argue, and compare ideas—they are building understanding and making public that which had been private. Cities also provide a construct that three-, four-, and fiveyear- olds can understand—places they can experience and to which they can respond.

This article is written for those who wish to foster a relationship between children and their cities. We start with two examples of children’s contributions to their communities, one from Reggio Emilia—a city with a long and rich history of connecting children to their community, and one from Washington, DC—a city that has more recently built child-community connections. We close by identifying three lessons learned about engaging children in their communities.

From Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange, v. 23, n. 4, published by NAREA (North American Reggio Emilia Alliance)

Download the PDF (under Resource Links) to continue reading this article.

Download the PDF

Article

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

An initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Out of Eden

Learn is an online learning community that connects school-age students from

around the world to engage together in “learning journeys” of cross-cultural inquiry

and exchange. These learning journeys invite young people to do several things: to

slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; to

exchange stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; and to reflect

on how their individual lives connect to bigger human stories. Out of Eden Learn

accompanies Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul

Salopek’s epic Out of Eden Walk: his multi-year journey on foot around the world

along the migratory pathways of our ancient human ancestors and experiment in

“slow journalism.”

This white paper is intended to explain the underlying philosophy and model of Out of

Eden Learn.

Use the link under Resource Links to download the entire white paper.

Download White Paper

Article

What Makes Teams Tick?

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

What Makes Teams Tick?

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Many of the most pressing issues of our time—climate change, economic inequality, human rights—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet facilitating collaboration among individuals from disparate fields can often be challenging. A recent study on what contributes to successful interdisciplinary work has found that the “emotional aspect” of such collaborations is at least as important as their intellectual aspect.

The study, by professor of sociology Michele Lamont, lecturer on education Veronica Boix Mansilla, and Kyoko Sato, now a lecturer at Stanford, closely examined nine interdisciplinary networks funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Santa Fe Institute. These networks all brought together scholars from at least three disciplines; their research topics ranged from brain development to urbanization. Drawing on documents, observation, surveys, and interviews, the authors concluded that the markers of successful interdisciplinary collaborations include not just an intellectual, but also emotional and interactional elements, and they proposed a “shared cognitive-emotional-interactional platform” for evaluating such projects.

Read the full article on the Harvard Magazine website.

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Article

Finding Our Way Into Each Other's Worlds: Musings On Cultural Perspective Taking

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Finding Our Way Into Each Other's Worlds: Musings On Cultural Perspective Taking

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Perspective taking, the capacity to understand how others view their world is at a premium in a world of increasing diversity and complexity. It was also the topic of a class on global learning that Liz Dawes Duraisingh and I taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education before the end of the year. In this class, a group of students and I experimented with trying to take on the perspectives of different individuals described in Paul’s dispatch Tomatoes – a moving description of his encounter with Syrian refugees eking out a living on the fringes of the desert in Jordan. We tried to imagine these individuals’ worlds shaped by majestic deserts and stubborn wars. Our efforts proved both challenging and generative as they raised essential puzzles of cultural perspective taking.

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