Eric Hartman

1. What do our young people know about the world?
2. What are they encouraged to know?
3. How do they learn it?
4. What might be missing?

As a multi-institutional network concerned with best practices in global learning and cooperative development, globalsl has a special interest in these questions. I should note that the questions emerged from an insightful undergraduate’s comments at Kansas State University’s first Leading Change Institute (Thanks, Garrett Wilkinson). After learning of specific concerns in international volunteering relating to child protection and global health, Garrett suggested, “The messages I received about – anything international, and anything involving service – in high school were uniformly positive.” He prompted us to consider:

Shouldn’t individuals working with post-secondary young adults be cooperating more systematically with the educators who play such an instrumental role in informing young people’s perceptions of how they should interact with the world?

Great question. And believe me, answering the four questions above is not easy. If, as this series moves forward, you have additional links, resources, or insights to add, please do so in the comment box, or connect with us on Twitter or Facebook.

1. What do our young people know about the world?

The data is difficult to nail down, but a safe response to #1 is, “not much”. To be fair, this isn’t a youthful problem as much as it is an American problem. Professor Sanford Ungar points out that, “Only a third of Americans are thought to hold passports — compared to about 50 percent in Australia, more than 60 percent in Canada and some 80 percent in the United Kingdom.” And indicators of global interest among youth do not offer reason for optimism, “According to a recent report from the Modern Language Association, college students in the United States are actually studying languages 6.7 percent less now than they did five years ago.”

Young Americans did particularly poorly on objective geographic knowledge questions back in 2006. When a survey asked people aged 18 – 24 to locate Iraq – the country where the US was at war – on a map, nearly two-thirds failed to do so. Also worth noting here is what some observers suggest is waning interest in government and history generally, coupled with apparently decreasing support for democracy. I emphasize these measures of historical, geographical, and political understanding because these things matter for trade, development, sustainability, war and peace.

2. What are they encouraged to know?

Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero Principal Investigator, Veronica Boix Mansilla, has cooperated with the Asia Society’s  Anthony Jackson  to suggest globally competent K-12 students, “are able to perform the following four competencies:

• Investigate the world beyond their immediate environment, framing significant problems and conducting well-crafted and age-appropriate research.
• Recognize perspectives, others’ and their own, articulating and explaining such perspectives thoughtfully and respectfully.
• Communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences, bridging geographic, linguistic, ideological, and cultural barriers.
• Take action to improve conditions, viewing themselves as players in the world and participating reflectively.”

3. How do they learn it? 

Indeed another million dollar question, and one on which many individual teachers, districts, agencies, and organizations are working. We’ll be sharing what we’ve learned over the coming weeks, as we share 50 different resources for educators and students, all designed to support global learning in formal and informal K-12 educational settings.

4. What might be missing? 

Whether from the perspective of Appiah’s  cosmopolitanism or my own work with Richard Kiely on critical global citizenship, human dignity matters. If we’re going to make moral progress in the world, we must consider questions through the lens of the inherent dignity of the human person. This commitment – central to human rights and faith-based frameworks of justice – disciplines any worthwhile global analysis. The Boix Mansilla and Jackson competencies framed above are strong, but in my view they do not go far enough in support of the moral commitments of global citizenship outlined so well by Martha Nussbaum many years ago.

If all human life matters equally, as Thomas Pogge writes, we must look squarely at the extraordinary inequity in the world and ask “the crucial question of why nearly all the relevant agents fail even though (supposedly) they can succeed.” This question should lead to disciplined structural and historical analysis. Why have conditions in particular places manifested as they have, what keeps them that way (from a structural, policy perspective), and how could those conditions change in a manner more supportive of the inherent dignity and capabilities of all persons?

As you’ll see in the weeks to come, several of the resources we have assembled actually do get at the questions of common human dignity and structural analysis. However, many popular approaches do not expressly include these vital components. As more and more educational institutions approach global learning and global citizenship, my hope is that we will see increasing clarity on commitment to common human dignity, the value of human rights, and the importance of structural analysis.

We will be sharing resources accumulated under the following titles. Check back soon, follow us on Twitter, sign-up for email (right side of the page), or like us on Facebook to stay in the conversation!

• Part 1: Online courses for educators
• Part 2: Onsite training and immersion trips for educators
• Part 3: Live webinars, networking, and organizational memberships
• Part 4: Curriculum guides, lesson plans, and teaching materials
• Part 5: Virtual online exchanges

Series author Annie Wendel was recently accepted as a fellowship graduate student at Merrimack University to pursue an M.Ed. in Community Engagement. Due to a long-standing passion for global citizenship and social justice, coupled with critical questioning and hard-nosed analysis, Annie has long been a friend of globalsl.org, repeatedly interning for the network and moving our work forward. She is currently completing programming with the Wyman Teen Outreach Program in middle and high schools in the Greater New Haven area in Connecticut, implementing a positive youth development curriculum and organizing community service-learning opportunities for students. She has also learned and served elsewhere in the States, Nepal, South Africa, and the Solomon Islands. After graduate school, she hopes to continue to pursue global education through experiential models and service-learning programs.

Eric Hartman wrote today’s post and cooperated with Annie during much of this process. He is an Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University, and has previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Providence College and Arizona State University. He holds a PhD in International Development and Public Administration from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA). Dr. Hartman has published extensively on global civic engagement, campus-community partnerships, and Fair Trade Learning, leading to his receipt of the Early Career Research Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. He was recognized with the 4 under 40 Impact Award from GSPIA, due to his leadership as Executive Director of the nongovernmental organization Amizade Global Service-Learning. Dr. Hartman is co-founder and editor of globalsl.org, a virtual hub that advances research-based best practices supporting global learning and cooperative development.