Global Fellows Brazil (Brasil) Trip- Perspectives

Philanthropy and global education are important endeavors that have the potential to positively change the world.  The Pearson Foundation, the National Education Association Foundation and EF have co-founded a program called the Global Learning Fellowship.  The mission of the Global Learning Fellowship is to provide educators with the knowledge, expertise and disposition needed to teach in a culturally diverse world.  Through participation in the fellowship, educators become global leaders acquiring the skills necessary to integrate global instruction into their classrooms and districts.  The objective of this program is to create global competency through a summer exchange program. Educators who participate in the program have traveled to China and Brazil, learning about the cultural and societal impacts that affect both countries’ educational systems. 

Global competence means that a citizen has the knowledge, skills and dispositions to act creatively and effectively on solving issues of global significance, such as reducing poverty, disease, wars and climate change. In order to be globally competent and economically competitive, citizens need to be innovative entrepreneurs.  The ability to be adaptive, respond to change and to creatively problem solve are key traits of a 21^st century learner.  These traits are also critical in creating innovative entrepreneurs and global competitiveness.   The Global Learning Fellowship provides educators with an opportunity to expand their horizons, immersing them in a cultural experience that transforms their world view. Additionally, through the participation in continuous professional learning groups, educators work collaboratively to develop integrated, global lessons that stress critical thinking skills and creativity.  It is through this collaboration that educators can advance their pedagogical practices, and, thus, contribute to the closing of the achievement gap.

Much research demonstrates that educators that focus on route memorization of facts and teach primarily for success on state tests have unmotivated, low performing students.  Conversely, educators that focus on critical thinking skills and creative problem solving tend to have students who are more motivated to learn and are higher achieving.  Educators who teach to levels that are higher on Bloom’s taxonomy create students who are more adaptable and can transfer knowledge from one situation to another.  The Global Learning Fellowship trains educators to create transformative lessons that espouse the highest of Bloom’s taxonomies—evaluation and synthesis. Students who are taught in a transformative manner are able to analyze information and support it with evidence in a creative and original way.  Conversely, students who are not taught in a transformative manner, may only be able to regurgitate information, and, not wholly understand its meaning.  Additionally, educators know that in order for students to evaluate and synthesize information, they need to have some relationship to the content. 

Students are not motivated by content; they are motivated by the characteristics that a particular assignment calls on them to accomplish. The Global Learning Fellowship provides a context for educators to create meaning and application for their students.  For example, a Global Fellow educator can study how climate change has affected the economy and culture of Brazil, and, then create several lessons that relate those learnings to the American economy and culture.  Consequently, the educator has created a transformative lesson in which students are evaluating and synthesizing, looking for global relationships. The educator is helping students become motivated to learn and understand the world in which they live, thereby, promoting global competency.

The power of the Global Fellowship is that it helps ensure that educators are inspired to bring back what they have learned to their students and district.  The program values global equity by promoting dialog between people of different cultural backgrounds.  Educators from all fifty states travel together to a foreign country.  They develop a powerful relationship as they explore and reflect upon their own prejudices and preconceptions.  They forge bonds with educators across the globe, developing critical friends that energize and motivate their students to want to learn.

It has been said that the business of schools is to create engaging learning experiences that promote workforce ready students.  The Global Fellowship program is an organization that makes the world a better place to live.  This organization achieves this through its generous support of educators around the world.  The sponsors of the program have created a website with outstanding resources that support educators in their pursuit of global competency. By providing experiences as those described, the program not only transforms the lives of educators, but also the lives of the educator’s students.  These students may never get the chance to travel outside of their small communities; however, the Global Fellowship program connects these students to other cultures by promoting global competency in their teachers.

I personally had the privileged opportunity to travel to Brazil--Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero to tour schools and learn as much as I could about the Brazilian culture.  I have come back a changed person.  I have learned that the world is much more inter-connected.  The biggest take-home was that we all desire to build meaningful relationships-- to know that an appreciation of the power of education can create opportunities and transform the world into a better place for all! Below is a slideshow glimpse of this powerful experience that the NEA Foundation and Pearson provide...Thank you to my new Global Friends!

For more information, visit: http://www.neafoundation.org/pages/nea-pearson-foundation-global-learning-fellowship/

See more blogs from Brasil- http://www.neafoundation.org/blog/