Chet+Saunders

Interview with Dr. R. (and no, not Dr. Richardson)

1. What are some influences that caused you to incorporate a global perspective in your teach? //Dr. R: I love to travel and I love to learn. There is so much we can learn from other cultures and we have to embrace that.// 2. What education did you receive regarding globalization? //Dr. R: My Ph.D. helped me learn a lot, it’s actually in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in cultural studies. A lot of my graduate courses dealt with international and feminist perspectives and then of course there are always my travel abroad experiences//. 3. How are you sharing your global teaching style with other educators in your field? //Dr. R: I am a strong believer in academic freedom; each professor or teacher has a right to do what he/she sees fit in his/her classroom...within limits, of course. I can only relate my personal experiences to other faculty and hope they see the benefits of global integration.// 4. What benefits have your students seen from your global connections? //Dr. R: A lot of students are shocked by the education systems in other countries. For example, in my SEC 200 class this past semester, my students interviewed a foreign exchange student and those who interviewed students from Japan were especially surprised to learn than many parents send children to school after school.// 5. What are your future plans for continuing or expanding your global curriculum? //Dr. R: I’ve written a grant where students in my EDU 200 class will have some dialogue with teacher candidates in South Africa. I’m still waiting to see if the University has the ability for me to allocate the funds for this project though. There isn’t as much technology in South Africa, so it will be difficult at first to get our teacher candidates to synchronously communicate with them; however, the asynchronous communication shouldn’t be a problem at all. I chose to do this grant with my EDU 200 rather than SEC 200 students because I wanted to reach a broader student population. I will, of course, continue my current methods of global integration while I wait for my grant to come through.// 6. How do your more traditional coworkers feel about brining global perspectives into the classroom? //Dr. R: I believe most agree it’s a good thing; however, we do tend to disagree on the best methods for doing so. Some believe you can only get a global perspective from studying abroad, but I also believe in the "at home" global experience...there are students and people from all over the world living in the U.S. You can easily get a global perspective by simply talking with your neighbor.// 7. Have all of your experiences with global education been positive ones? //Dr. R: NO! The biggest struggle I face with global education has to do with taking students abroad. There is never enough time to learn everything you want your students to learn about another culture or their educational system. For example, on my recent South Africa trip, I wanted to constantly keep moving; however, things move at a much slower pace in South Africa so we didn’t have the chance to see nearly as much as I would have liked, but when you’re in another country you have to follow their culture. But that is my only really negative experience, I’ve never had a student say that he/she hated learning about other cultures or educational systems.// 8. Which professional journals do you recommend to stay on top of global education? //Dr. R: There is the AERJ, American Education Research Journal, which even though it doesn’t specialize in global education sometimes has some really great articles in it. I would also strongly recommend Comparative Education.// 9. In your opinion, what should be the next move for NC public schools concerning global education? //Dr. R: They made the move, it just has to take the time to trickle down to teachers. Schools need professional development funds to teach teachers the methods for integrating global education into their curriculum.// 10. If President Obama named your Secretary of Education, how would you address global education? //Dr. R: Broadly! You can’t force people to do global public service or education. I do think global public service projects should be part of all teacher education programs, though. Our education system starts with teachers first, after all.// 11. If you were a twelfth grade teacher in a school system that included global education in its curriculum, what would the requirements for the final (senior) project look like in order to demonstrate proficiency? //Dr. R: I would definitely give options. For examples, if we put all of our efforts towards one project we could perhaps make a bigger difference, but this leaves out helping a bunch of smaller projects in a little way..and to be honest, I don’t know which is better, one big difference or several smaller differences? Assuming the senior class was two-hundred students, or larger, I would have them pick three possible options and they organize what would be best.// //In order to assess their proficiency, I think I would help the students construct their own "rubric of evaluation." So they as students would evaluate themselves, I as their teacher would evaluate themselves, and the participating organization would help evaluate them as well.// 12.It seems as though bringing global perspectives into the classroom would be easier in some subjects than other. For example, a social studies class would be easier than a math class. Is this the case and if so, how do you incorporate global perspectives into a class such as math? //Dr. R: No, we’ve just allowed ourselves to get stuck in this framework. I remember one time I subbing for a math class actually and they had watched A Beautiful Mind about John Nash. I wanted to bring in some additional material so I did a simple internet search for "a beautiful mind" and got a paper on this brilliant Indian (from India) math genius, yet we never talk about him. We’ve allowed ourselves to think of some subjects as purely content, like science and math for example. Chet, you know that science in other countries isn’t necessarily practiced the same way it is here...what about all of the famous global scientists? It’s easy to incorporate a global perspective into any subject, as long as you approach it with an open mind.// 13. What are your final thoughts on global education? //Dr. R: The phrase "global education" still bothers me a little...what exactly is it?// 14. How do you think we should fix it, or define it? //Dr. R: I don’t know, it’s a problem with language and those are always the slowest problems to fix. Global education has multiple facets, it’s about you as an individual, your understanding of other cultures and education, and, perhaps most importantly, what you do with that information as an individual.//