Global Education: Collaboration and Innovation

• In Event: U.S.-China Innovative Partnership in Elementary Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
a.Describe the conceptual foundation, purpose, and background of the school/university/enterprise international comprehensive partnership.
b.Describe the stages, tasks, teams, resources, scaffoldings, and the structures of the project-based learning international conference for elementary education.
c.Analyze and reflect on the five-month learning experiences and outcomes of this project-based learning conference from its participants: teachers, students, parents, leaders, schools, universities, and directly involved enterprise partners.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
The conceptual foundation of this comprehensive international partnerships includes: 1) recognizing and agreeing that the current existing circumstances of global/international education is “Chicken talk with Ducks”; 2) children in other countries/regions/cultures need to be treated as neighbors’ kids, not competitors for national security or any other similar reasons. This builds up the moral and ethical foundation for the international partnerships; and 3) there is a common body of knowledge about educational practice existing cross languages, cultures, and countries which has been created by educators from different countries and regions and should be shared by educators world-wide.

Methods, techniques or modes of inquiry
The acceptances and effects of the three conceptual foundations of the school-university-enterprise international partnership are examined by internal and external evaluations from two dimension partnerships: 1) engaged students, teachers, principals, and parents and 2) involved schools, universities, and business partners from surveys and focus group interviews during the five-month project-based learning conference and one and eight months after the conference event to identify short and longer term impacts.

Data sources, evidence, objects, materials
Partnership involvement and impact data (from internal and external evaluation reports). Records of the five-month project based learning conference, including photographs and video

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view. The three conceptual foundations of this comprehensive international partnership has been shown to work to set up a solid moral, ethical, cognitive and knowledge base for global education partnerships creating opportunities for global educational collaboration and innovation.

Scholarly significance of the study or work
1).This is the first time that the project based learning/inquiry educational model has been used for a conference, especially an international conference directly involving about a thousand students, teachers, parents, education leaders. They came from four elementary schools from US, 23 schools from mainland China, and five schools from Hong Kong, plus scholars from universities in US and China and members from enterprises.
2). The Neighbors’ Kids concept lays out the moral and ethical foundation for global education partnership.
3) The impressive teaching and learning practices of the 8 US teachers with 400 Chinese kids in the 8 American classrooms in China while the conference participants observed live and discussed real-time, which benefited from technology.
4) The recognition of the common knowledge body of education practice existing cross languages, cultures, and countries/regions and the fact that kids are the same, no matter where. The differences are because of teachers.

Author

• Guoli Liang, Global Educational Community