Dialogue > Article > Going Global Panel Discussion

On Oct. 30, 2008, a Going Global conference was held at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario, sponsored by the school and the Canadian Educational Standards Institute (CESI). Educators, students and parents, joined by others tuning in via a webcast, questioned a panel of experts about creating a global future in our schools. Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), gave the keynote address and Jonathan Leigh, headmaster of Ridley College led the panel of experts, which included:

Guy McLean, headmaster at Appleby College in Oakville, Ontario;

Mark Evans, associate dean, teacher education and senior lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario;

Kim Gordon, head of The Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, Ontario;

Anne-Marie Kee, executive director of the Canadian Educational Standards Institute;

Paul Miller, director of Global Initiatives for National Association of Independent Schools; and

Robert Snowden, head of St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia.

When we talk about globalization and globalism in education, what are we really talking about?

Bassett: We want to make sure our students, our countries, our economies are competitive in the world market so that goes back to what skills will be useful. I recommend a book, Cosmopolitanism, by Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appih. The notion is that we are all in the world; increasingly we have interactions that are global and we have some obligation to learn about the others. And when we approach our counterparts in other countries and regions in the world, we have to do so with a stance of curiosity, not judgment, not necessarily seeing an enemy or competitor. We’re thinking about this notion of a global citizenship that sees the opportunity for communication in a way we haven’t had it happen before.

I’d like to know how innovative schools and faculty broke through the political status quo?

Evans: Whenever we face change, there’s always a certain level of reluctance. We find ourselves working in a variety of contexts and schools and locations that sometimes support innovation and sometimes restrict innovation. Innovation is happening in pockets in schools, there’s no sort of coherent front that I’ve witnessed. Historically we know what happens in schools that are not moving forward and this can be a huge roadblock. But there are some excellent things happening. I think those people that are experiencing (positive change) have courage, develop collaborative support, move forward and also find support in faculty and administration and amongst their students.

Gordon: One of the things we’re doing with CESI, as we put down the standards and begin to look at what a great school should aspire to if it wants to be a global school, is to ask questions. We’re documenting questions that we think will be really great for a school to talk about as a learning community. It’s not that we have the answer. We can’t even define what a global school is exactly. How do we begin to find the time in our schools to have these great conversations?

Miller: No change agent ever goes unpunished. You’ve got to be very deliberative as a change agent, anticipating the resistance to changes and planning accordingly.

What is the difference between a school with a high percentage of international students and a school that furnishes an international education? Do principles and practices of an international education complement an International Baccalaureate Programme?

Snowden: All the schools have the same challenges, but a school that has a lot of international students is already a long way along the road. The presence of students from other countries brings those voices into all kinds of venues, discussions in the classroom, the lunch table, the common room. We, like Ridley, have a significant boarding population with students from many different countries but to make that (positive interaction) conscious and deliberate is your challenge. You’re creating the conditions that allow conversations to take place. Even though there are a few skinned knees along the way, the rewards are tremendous.

McLean: The IB programme does complement the kind of thing that we’re talking about in terms of global citizens, especially if the school has made a commitment to the totality of the program. The pieces are designed to fit together and create many of the opportunities in the co-curriculum and the academic curriculum for the development of these global citizens. But it’s not an answer entirely in and of itself in terms of a single source solution to globalism. . . it sets the table and creates an opportunity.

Kee: Having students in a school from a bunch of different countries is not enough. . . What’s important is that we come together and be very intentional in our mission statements as schools; really focusing on becoming 21st century learners and 21st century learning communities. I think the danger is in saying this curriculum or this service trip makes us an international school.

What are the attributes of global citizenship that need to be developed in our junior and middle schools? And how do we work at achieving these?

Gordon: Enhancing the curiosity of youngsters is really what it’s all about. The idea of structuring the curriculum around values and curiosity and inquiry; what does that look like and sound like from a student perspective and working upwards from that.

Miller: I would add language to be a critical component. What happens with the mind when children learn (a second language) at an early age? The mind process of knowing about the interchangeability of things, that there can be different ways of describing the same object, there are all kinds of things that happen in the brain that there could be benefits down the road.

Is there fear to the business side of what you’re saying? What’s the reward for the person who may turn out better kids, more educated kids, more worldly kids, but doesn’t necessarily have the opportunity to achieve what they want because the rules of what they are being measured by are not what we want them to be?

Snowden: Letting people know that you are a school that has a deliberately global perspective is attractive to most families—enough certainly to fill all of our schools to bursting. And the students and families who want something else, well, they go somewhere else. And I think the students’ academic performance only benefits.

Miller: We are educating students for life, not just for college. But I know that college is also of great importance, especially to parents. Colleges are moving forward with their own global approaches and they seem to value the work we’re doing. Some of the top colleges are moving away from just the metrics of testing; they’re giving up on their Scholastic Aptitude Test and starting to look at other ways of evaluating students. And students who have different experiences and perspectives because they’ve been exposed to global education, are of more interest to them now.

McLean: I think it would be a mistake to assume that because a school is globally minded that somehow the curriculum would lack traditional rigour. If your goal is to send a bunch of kids out on service projects and have them have a wonderful experience and say they’ve been to some exotic country, and they come back with the very simple gloss, “Oh, it was a life-changing experience,” and you let them get away with that, there’s no rigour and little educational value to the experience. But if they receive cultural training before they leave, if they’re de-briefed regularly, if they journal keep. . . I think that you’re achieving the same sort of test-driven rigour, just in a different way.

What sort of things do you think schools can do inwardly to promote globalism?

Gordon: You can really look at your own school first, what’s the hidden curriculum. Who are the people in our building? We are largely a day school with 80 boarders from 26 countries. When we really began to examine this wonderful small international community, (we asked) “Are we learning from this absolutely wonderful source of learning within our own school?” We weren’t. We kept trying to ask “How do we get the day and the boarding kids much more integrated?” What we were really asking is how could we get those boarding kids more integrated. So you need to do that self-examination first.