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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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Children Are Citizens Book 2017

A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

A resource from Children Are Citizens

People from all around the world know about Washington, DC. They talk about it, write about it, draw it, and make movies and TV shows about it. But almost always, we hear only the opinions and ideas of adults.

For this book we invited some of our youngest citizens—preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders from DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Sacred Heart School, Seaton Elementary School (DCPS), E.W. Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Sunshine Early Learning Center, and J.O. Wilson Elementary School (DCPS)—to tell us what they think of our city. We asked them to share their ideas in order to help other children (and adults) learn about what is important about DC. We asked their teachers to help students research the city and discuss their ideas with classmates and children from the other schools. Each teacher guided the children in different ways. The result is Washington, DC: "What People Like Most is in This Book!,” a title suggested by the children that conveys their connection to their city. In this book you will find a set of descriptions, theories, and stories—shared in pictures, words, and photographs—that are thoughtful, informative, and sometimes surprising. As Sergio Spaggiari, a veteran educator from Reggio Emilia, Italy, notes, "It seems that for cities to be understood and appreciated, they should be talked about in stories." You can learn a lot about our city from the stories in this book.

Jim Reese

Director, The Professional Development Collaborative at

Washington International School

On behalf of the Children Are Citizens coordinating team: Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Nathalie Ryan, Joanne Seelig, Stacy Steyaert, and Tim Wright

Use the resource links on the right to view the full book.

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

Book

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking. ISBN-13: 978-1138240407

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Article

Leading with the World in Mind

A resource from

Leading with the World in Mind

A resource from

In today’s interconnected world, leaders face new challenges and opportunities, and must possess different skills and competencies than were previously expected, such as comfort dealing with ambiguity and complexity, and the ability to work across cultural and linguistic differences. Globalization and advances in technology enable capital, goods, information, and people to easily move across borders. Simultaneously, global demographic changes and rapid urbanization in developing countries are causing a shift toward emerging markets. This increasing interconnectedness, and the opportunities for global cooperation and competition they present, accelerate the pace of innovation and require new business models and leadership styles. The ability to understand and navigate these changing global dynamics and the business, linguistic, and cultural landscape of developing markets is becoming increasingly important to success in international business.

Leading with the World in Mind

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

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Global & Cultural Understanding

Resources

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation

Leading with the World in Mind

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

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Projects

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Project Zero Classroom 2015

Future of Learning 2015

Project Zero Perspectives: Zeroing in on Learning

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