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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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Interdisciplinary Learning: A Cognitive-Epistemological Foundation

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Interdisciplinary Learning: A Cognitive-Epistemological Foundation

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Preparing individuals to lead informed and fulfilling lives in dynamic knowledge societies requires that we nurture synthesizing minds. We must nurture individuals’ capacity to to knit together knowledge from vast and disparate sources into coherent wholes in order to address pressing issues of cultural and natural survival (Gardner 2006). Synthesis is a fundamental human capacity. It manifests early in life, when children engage in symbolic play, create artistic compositions, or learn the rules of a new game. To a certain extent, we learn to synthesize rather effortlessly by participating in societies where analogies, rich visual representations, and simple systems are ubiquitous. Interdisciplinary synthesis, however, presents heightened cognitive demands and requires deliberate instruction. It implies the integration of knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines in search for better understanding. Understanding how individuals learn to integrate different forms of expertise to create a work of art, explain a multifaceted phenomenon, fashion a new technology or propose a sustainable environmental solution is essential if we are to cultivate this capacity among collegiate and pre-collegiate youth. What cognitive processes are central to interdisciplinary integration? What kind of “knowing” is embodied in a historical monument, an explanation overfishing or a sustainable development policy? On what basis can we discern the relative success of such form of integrative cognition? Ultimately, how can we design instruction to nurture potent forms of interdisciplinary integration?

Find and download the full article under Resource Links to the right.

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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.

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Video

Children as Citizens Video

A resource from Children Are Citizens & Making Learning Visible

Children as Citizens Video

A resource from Children Are Citizens & Making Learning Visible

2-minute video of Mardell and Krechevsky discussing documentation and young children as citizens.

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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Global & Cultural Understanding

Resources

Interdisciplinary Learning: A Cognitive-Epistemological Foundation

Leading with the World in Mind

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

Children as Citizens Video

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

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Project Zero Classroom 2015

Future of Learning 2015

Project Zero Perspectives: Zeroing in on Learning

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