A World for the Making

In an increasingly interdependent planet, American teachers need to internationalize their teaching to
help students understand and appreciate the diversity and wonder of the world around them.

>> By Jack Schwille

There is a terrific book that I strongly recommend to elementary school teachers titled If the World Were a Village. Because it is hard to think about large populations—there are six billion of us on the planet—the book re-creates the world as a microcosm of 100 people in a village. Some of the things you realize is that only five people in that village are from the United States while 21 are from China, 17 from India, 13 from Africa, and so on. Only nine speak English, and the richest 20 people have average incomes of $9,000 per year while the poorest 20 get by on less than a dollar a day. Twenty-five people have no access to safe drinking water and 40 have no adequate sanitation.

It is a sobering realization. This is our world, our village. But what do our students know about it? According to former North Carolina Gov. James Hunt, not much. “Our students are trapped in a kind of educational isolationism, which may have suited the Industrial Age but leaves students desperately underprepared for the demands of the 21st-century global economy.” This reality has to change. We do our students a disservice by isolating them from the richness and turbulence of our rapidly changing world. The best place to start exposing students to the world, I believe, is the k–12 classroom.

James Hunt wrote about educational isolationism in the November issue of Phi Delta Kappan. Articles in that same issue chronicled the fact that the effort to internationalize k–12 schooling has become a formidable movement. It appeals to liberals and conservatives alike for different reasons. Although it is often viewed as just one more interest group, world-mindedness has the potential to influence all of schooling. Internationalization is the context that conditions everything else, including what pupils know about the world, how they think about what to do with their lives, how to allocate their time and other resources, and how as citizens they can influence what governments do about pressing issues.

That is far more than can be addressed, as some would have it, in social studies classes alone. Teacher preparation and k–16 curricula in other subjects must encompass more of the world. Science, for example, involves knowing not only about biological and physical phenomenon that exist primarily or only outside of the U.S., but also thinking about the implications of science for the world as a whole. In fact, some of the best Web sites for international education are vehicles for the internationalization of science learning (www.jason.org, www.slb.com/seed, www.globe.gov). The globe.gov site, known as globe, involves students from more than 100 countries who are partnering with scientists to collect and analyze data on such things as the atmosphere and land cover. globe is not sponsored by an international education organization—but by NASA.

In Tanzania, my son and daughter-in-law were mathematics and chemistry teachers in a remote secondary school with no telephones, much less access to the Internet. Their students were able nonetheless, to collect scientific data that were entered into the globe database. Who says the natural and physical sciences don’t lend themselves to internationalization.
American teachers have a world to create for their students, much like If the World Were a Village. The microcosm not only helps us understand the demographics of the world, but also calls upon us to think of the world as a real village where everyone has to deal with everyone else in one way or another. That is the world our young people will inherit, and that is the world that our teachers must prepare them to live in and understand. n

Jack Schwille is assistant dean for international studies in education at the College of Education.