Training Educators for GCED: It's a transformational personal learning experience

• In Event: Ensuring Equitable and Quality Education and Assessment (II)

Proposal

If a world depends on educators and their knowledge and capacity to instruct, and if educators hope to facilitate effective GCED in classrooms, there is a great need to understand the nature of their experiences as they learn to be globally competent. Exploring global citizenship discourse and current implications where teachers’ cultural capabilities and civic roles are central is a must (Halbert, 2018). As Global Citizenship Education (GCED) is implemented within education institutions outside the United States, prioritizing educator training around personal learning and educator global competency remains understudied (Estelles & Fischman, 2021, Merryfield, 2009).
This paper describes the deeper and connected personal learning educators experience as they become globally competent and prepared to teach GCED (Kopish, 2016). For the United States, where GCED remains a nascent movement jostled between social divisions and other equity concerns such as anti-racism, teachers create GCED lessons without significant institutional support. This paper focuses on results from a study focused on educators committed to becoming globally competent through completing a one-year training program offered by World Savvy in 2015 and 2016.
For some educators, becoming globally competent is fraught and challenging to experience. Discomfort, emotional destabilizing moments, and un-learning past assumptions and notions about self, world and others (Pashby, 2016) are reported. This transformational and self-directed learning is vital to understand as teachers prepare to deliver lessons focused on global issues of today and as their students critically interrogate the causes, develop multiple perspectives, and develop as global citizens. The paper describes features of this transformational learning educators found most valuable: a supportive and healing atmosphere and an understanding from the facilitator that discomfort, grief, and guilt are a natural part of the learning. Deep reflection and space to grapple with new understandings that challenge assumptions are also needed components of becoming globally competent, as reported in this paper. “True global citizenship requires and attitudinal shift,” (Sklarewitz, Fields, Seider & Didier, 2015 p. 190).
This paper presents study results that describes four domains of personal learning for educators, beginning with The Comfortable Known and progressing through the following three stages of A Growing Challenge in the Learning, Committing to the Learning Process, and Acknowledging New Learning for Action. Study findings in this paper also underline the importance of collaborative work amongst educators as part of their global competency learning, where sense-making and personal testimonies about the learning and its impact are given time and attention for self-reflection and support of peers and facilitators. This follows the suggestion by Rogers and Tough (1996) that global competency learning features a synergistic blend of emotional, existential, and cognitive aspects.
How globally competent teachers exert personal power to decide and develop classroom lessons that address issues and challenges the world faces today is defined in this paper by examining what teachers report are important features of their learning and how their own global competency transforms who they are, what they teach and how they engage their students. This sequential exploratory transdisciplinary mixed methods study featured in this paper collected quantitative and qualitative data through a questionnaire, followed by interviews where initial summative data and interview responses are interpreted by responders. Gathering consensus, multiple perspectives and insight were the goals of using this approach (Glesne, 2016). The paper focuses a globally competent educator reports changes in themselves and in their classroom decision-making around the instruction core, a term that is defined by Robert Elmore as the space where teacher affects instructional improvement by considering themselves, content and student interaction (Elmore, 2008). Educators in the study reported significant changes in their own knowledge and skills to teach as a result of focused global competency learning. Changes related to student involvement and the type of work that was assigned also changed significantly as a result.
This paper also considers the thoughts and reported actions of think leaders in the U.S. GCED movement in addition to educators, capturing unique insight from three sets of leaders: teacher education, those in the non-profit and consulting world, and higher education professors. While these leaders help to expand GCED, it remains in the hands of individual teachers to impact their classrooms with new understandings about humanity and the planet. Implementation of GCED may bet move forward incrementally, this paper asserts, classroom by classroom and a teacher at a time. Therefore, recommendations for teacher trainings are presented in this paper to signal the need for continued focus and development of the GCED movement in the U.S. and to contribute to worldwide efforts to bring GCED and new learning into 21st Century classrooms.
“As we transform education, teachers – and teaching – must also transform themselves, going from passive to active; from vertical and unidirectional to collaborative; from teaching answers to promoting learning based on questions and curiosity; from merely transmitting content to developing the capacity, the joy and the discipline for problem solving. Teachers should become leaders and guides of their students.” (United Nations High Level Political Forum, 2022).

Author

• Janette Neumann, CGU