The World Global

The Second and Third Drafts of My Global Pedagogic Creed

Well, I pretty much ignored this blog after the first few posts, but that is what a year in a pre-service teaching training program will do for your schedule. The good news is that it is basically over, and I have landed a position at the school I interned at this year, Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. You can read more about MCSM at its webpage, on Wikipedia or on insideschools.org.

Hopefully after the first year I will be able to develop an AP World History course or a Global Studies/Asian Studies elective for 10th-12th grade students. We'll see. In the meantime, let me finish something once started and post the subsequent drafts of the global creed I worked on in Dr. Bill Gaudelli's course this semester.

My general thoughts on what should be taught in the global course remain much the same as in the first draft (and my conception before the drafting process) but I have started moving further toward dealing with international/cross-cultural/multi-lingual/lingua franca manifestations of the deliberative processes  espoused by  a number of social justice oriented scholars in the U.S., complicated with the notion of what I call "the caring conversation" promoted by scholars like Appiah and Nussbaum. Over the next few years I hope to conduct practical exercises with my students, and students abroad, that explore the potential of these discussions.

For now, here's the second draft:

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Dear Student,


I am your new teacher. I have assumed responsibility for our learning this year, and I, with your classmates, will be a member of your community for every year into the foreseeable future. Welcome to our class.

Often, teachers ask their students to write class contracts or letters outlining their goals for the school year. In our class, however, I will write a letter to you. It is a statement of purpose and a pledge that we will share with our class, our school and our larger community. I hope you enjoy participating in this exercise with your fellow classmates and I, and I hope you are inspired one day to write a similar letter to me.

Here is my statement of purpose, my pledge to you:

I pledge in this course to help you explore, acquire, practice and refine the skills, knowledge, awareness and understanding to be a successful, confident, engaged and humane citizen in our shared world.

Among the crafts we will learn are the reading, writing, researching, computing and discussion skills that you will need to succeed in school, college and in your career. We will enhance these skills by practicing bi-dialectalism, critical thinking, teamwork and evaluative analysis—supplementary habits and practices that will secure your position as both an independent and a cooperative academic and citizen.  A first step in this process is to understand these goals—what these new words and phrases mean for us, our community and our world—an enterprise we will undertake in the upcoming days, weeks and months. Understanding and achieving these goals will instill you with confidence and skillfulness that will bring all of your ambitions for college, career and community within reach.

With confidence and skillfulness will come compassion and caring. This may seem strange, that self-success will result in more profound consideration for others, but as you learn more about yourself, you will learn more about our class, our community and our world—and you will learn that what seems far away, what seems global, is actually local, and intimately personal. By studying the narratives of humanity, and the narratives humans have written of themselves, you will find that you have much in common with your classmates and I; and with students in Berlin and Beijing, Seoul and Sydney, Dhaka and Damascus; and also with Moctezuma, Mansa Musa, Mother Theresa and Malcom X. We will find that the reason humans often feel they are so different from one another is that we take our endless similarities for granted. They are so obvious and numerous, they have become invisible. I promise to help you recognize what all humans share, no matter what distances of time and space separate us. I also promise to help you appreciate how we share our ideas, our inventions, our planet and our universe, and to invest yourself deeply in all that we share.

Once we have explored these paths, I know you will have a greater sense of responsibility for yourself, others and the Earth, so we will also learn to appreciate our roles as inhabitants and caretakers of our ecosystem, our heritage and our posterity. As you learn how close you are to everyone who inhabits the Earth, and everyone who has inhabited it, you will come to realize that you are also close to all those who will inhabit this Earth and the Earth itself. You will see that you are implicated in the future of our planet and its people, and you will want to do something for it and them. We will help each other do this, and we will learn that these actions are their own reward and that the rewards of these actions are the most valuable of all.

Finally, I promise we will fill this all with wonder. We share the lives, the stories and the dreams of humanity—and we make our own. What we make of our world is a direct extension of what we make of ourselves and as we study the fascinating stories of our human community, past, present and future, we will be weaving our own, just as wondrous and worthy of being written and read.


--Mr. Tolley

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Introduction to the Second Draft of My Global Pedagogical Creed

    I was so impressed by Marylin’s suggestion that we do something more with our Global Pedagogic Creeds, especially in terms of using them with our students, that I completely reconfigured my original draft in line with this thinking. This draft represents that change in thinking, purpose and design.

--WJT.

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Afterword to the Third Draft of My Global Pedagogical Creed          ---May, 7th 2007

    As I mentioned in class last week, my Global Pedagogic Creed has not changed since the last draft. This is not because I have stopped reflecting on the way I perceive global education, but because I am satisfied with the elements of the letter as is stands: it is intended to be a letter to my students and it should remain one page long, and direct. The one addition I would like to make will require a drastic change that I am still pondering.

    If there is one theme that has captured me during the past year at Teachers College, it is the notion of dialogic interdependence: Gaudelli, Appiah, Hess, Brookfield—people I have studied with, people whose books I have read and the people whose books they have read—all suggest that in one form or another the best way (perhaps the only way) to live in a globalized, interconnected world is by talking with one another.  This “caring conversation,” as I refer to it, undermines the meanings of ends and means and makes the means (the conversation) an end (dialogic interaction) unto itself. Although scholars like Hess and Brookfield put more emphasis on policy options and reaching consensus (reflecting their respective foci on civic decision making and adult interaction in the classroom or workplace)(Brookfield & Preskill, 2005; Hess, 2002) all these scholars seem to think that prioritizing consensus over conversation is putting the horse before the cart; we would be better served by inviting the horse into the cart for a chat on the road.

    For example, the play’s the thing wherein Bill Gaudelli suggests we’ll catch the conscience of the world. In World Class, he proposes that the optimal way to teach students about the global challenges facing them is to present them as “lived human problems”(Gaudelli, 2003, p. 133). By facing the issues of their shared world not as uncontextualized values judgments subject to knee-jerk responses and moralizing platitudes, but as issues for discussion with a human face and heart, he suggests that we can get past the notions of right and wrong, us and them, that ease othering, to create a constructive dialog among the swirl of identities and associations part of our current world. But is talking about these issues in order to create an empathetic environment enough? Is conscience catching, rather than consensus, sufficient in a world inhabited by a species as divided and divisive as our own?

    In Cosmopolitanism(2006, p. 85), Anthony Appiah more airily mirrors Gaudelli’s emphasis on dialog as the vital praxis of living in global times. As he puts it, “practices and not principles are what enable us to live together in peace.” He goes on to suggest that “Conversation doesn’t have to lead to a consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another.” Gaudelli’s assertion that dialog with people in real circumstances is more meaningful than reading about the “seemingly strange and exotic practices of Others”(2003, p. 134) makes sense in light of Appiah’s notion that conversations across boundaries of identity require a leap of the imagination. As a philosopher, Appiah can afford this leap; as educators (as I and many of the member of our seminar were) we need to provide as concrete as possible of examples and experiences, and ideas, for our students. There is obvious value in the practice of presenting our students to the greatest degree possible with the human face of the peoples, cultures and issues they study, but again, will this conversation, even if it leads to a conception of caring, lead to a conclusion of caring? Why do Gaudelli and Appiah seem satisfied to halt shy of predicting or prescribing ends to their means?

    Their hesitance leaves me unconvinced. Rather than either consensus or conversation, I would lay the emphasis on continuum. Between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as ideal types there are environments in which interdependence relies on discussion and empathy, and others in which good fences make good neighbors—and mending wall is the means to maintain measured reciprocity and respect. Our real focus needs to be on neither conversation nor consensus, but navigating this continuum, adapting to its changing environments and the perspectives of those journeying with us. This process is not only one of interaction; it is a process of reflection and identification as well.

    The one constant along this continuum is our shared humanity. This is the one addition I still need to thresh out before adding it to my creed. Somehow, I need to find a way to convince my students (or a find a means to facilitate them convincing themselves) that their human identity somehow means as much as their identity as a Dominican-American, skater, kid from Washington Heights, and “the guy who’s got Heribertos’s back”. I need to find methods for students to reflect on this sense of identity and the interactivity it sometimes assumes, and sometimes precludes. And I need to find a way to describe this in one paragraph or less. So, for now, I will keep this inquiry here, in the narrative accompanying the final draft of My Global Pedagogic Creed, until (heavy optimism here) I find a solution to the problem.

    In the meantime, this project culminates as a three-draft sequence progressing through a 5-page Deweyan declaration; a direct, one-page, statement of teaching philosophy in a letter to my students with which I was greatly satisfied; and the same letter, now lacking my satisfaction, complicated by this notion of continuum and a nagging, still unsettled dissatisfaction with the “caring conversation”. As I have complicated my understanding of these elements of global education, I have grown increasingly less satisfied with my definitions. It is good to know there is still work to do.

--WJT

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                                                              References

• Appiah, A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism : ethics in a world of strangers (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton.

• Bennet, D. (2005). The trouble with identity--QUESTIONS FOR KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH. The Boston Globe.

• Brookfield, S., & Preskill, S. (2005). Discussion as a way of teaching : tools and techniques for democratic classrooms (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

• Gaudelli, W. (2003). World class : teaching and learning in global times. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

• Hess, D. (2002). Discussing Controversial Issues Secondary In Social Studies Classrooms: Learning From Skilled Social Studies Teachers. Theory and Research in Social Education 30(1), 10-41.

My Global Pedagogic Creed--1st Draft

The following is based on assignment for one of my current courses. This is the first draft as it was submitted. I have already realized several additions and refinements I need to make, but I would like to record the developmental process here. The assignment was inspired by John Dewey's My Pedagogic Creed and the mimicking is intentional. Comments welcome.

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My Global Pedagogic Creed

Article I—What Global Education Is

Like Dewey, I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. I also believe that true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. And I further believe that those we educate are social individuals and that society is an organic union of individuals.

However, I moreover believe that the acceleration of globalization has outpaced common definitions and conceptions of race, society and individual. The mercurial development of advanced information technologies has compromised the very notion of being “individual” in all societies with access to this flow of information, these nodes of access to goods, ideas and other humans. I believe that this acceleration has not coincided with our students’ activities as much as it has collided with them. I believe it has resulted in friction, disintegration and an arrest of our students’ natures: it has gained no leverage.

I believe it is the purpose of global education to gain this leverage. To help our students identify themselves as individuals in a world society. It is the purpose of global education to invest our students in the common wealth of that society, its members—both those with access to the machineries of globalization, and those accessed by them—and its progeny.

Finally, I believe it is essential for global educators to realize they must do more than deconstruct, introduce or empathize—they must unswaddle the minds of their students.

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Article II—What The Global Course Is

Like Dewey, I believe that the school is a form of community life. However the key challenge of the global course is not only to reduce to embryonic form existing life, but to prepare our students and ourselves for the possibility that existing life is too complex, tumultuous and grand to be reduced. And to help our students navigate from their homes, to their schools, to their cities, to their countries and into this grand human tumult.

Therefore, to reduce existence to make it more intelligible is not enough.  If our students are to truly engage in the best and deepest moral training—that of entering into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought—in the world as it is, defined by its potential for digital interaction and direct engagement with members from it farthest geographic and furthest cultural corners, our students’ world-views must be expanded and complicated at the same time their skills are honed in universal application.

By so doing, we approach the potential for developing both a human awareness, and an awareness of humanity, which inform, complement and reinforce one another. The purpose of the global course is to achieve this potential to the greatest extent possible.

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Article III—The Subject Matter of Global Education

To further these ends, the global course must accomplish three goals: to assist the student in identifying herself as a member of a human community; to invest her in the welfare of this community she is part of; and to spark and maintain her interest in it and its members—and in being one of their associates.

On one level, this means global education must provide the environment in which global social activities can be learned, practiced and perfected. In classrooms that once integrated the fundamental activities of cooking and sewing we must now introduce digital correspondence, research and publishing; awareness and appreciation of different norms and standards; and the incorporation of different languages and non-lingual modes of communication to the greatest degree possible. These are the materials and processes that make social life what it is today.

On another level, we must invest global education with gravitas: the procedures of caring are not enough. The global course is a forum for deconstruction and construction, where students must be mentored through developing their own ontological understandings through historical thinking, perspective consciousness and designing their own narratives, personal and universal. These are the cognitive skill-sets that underpin the materials and processes that make social life what it is today. These are the tools of imagination that endow the human experience with tangible mass.

Most importantly, education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience. To this end, no one understanding, one history, one perspective or one narrative can be seen as the final concentration or distillation of human experience, only as a single voice in an inclusive discourse on our fractal existence.

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Article IV—The Context of Global Method

The methods, materials, perspectives and conversations of the global course must always be placed in the broadest context possible. They must incorporate the greatest number of views possible. They must involve the greatest number of actual voices reachable. I firmly believe that any global history course involving members of one in-group as defined by the members of that group is compromised. Classrooms can become places to explore different conceptions of time, space and identity among the members of the class, but as long as they are not exposed to another group they can initially define as an “other”, a global other, they have not been given the perspective to form proper images.

Therefore, the materials, processes and skills of the subject matter of global educations must be more than warm-ups and rehearsals—they must be concrete real-world interactions. This requires students and teachers to meet, communicate with, and learn from their fellow human associates and peers in other contexts. These associates can be from the high school down the street, the one in the next state, or across the country or the globe. Information technologies have made this conversation a possibility for a wide number of students around the world and distances of space and identity can be explored intimately in a sphere of educational exchange.

However, a concurrent discussion is necessary as well: Who still lies outside this sphere? Whose perspectives cannot yet be reached and appreciated, and why?

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Article V—Global Studies and Social Progress

Like Dewey, I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. This is as true on the global scale as any other.

The word “Progress” has become suspect. And while I agree with many that hailing Progress can be a fruitless and distracting exercise with the potential to be co-opted (consciously or unconsciously) by those with ulterior motives, we have many progresses that we need, and can, achieve.

I believe that these progresses ultimately serve all individual and institutional goals, benefiting all individuals independently, and at all levels of institution—right up to the encompassing conglomerate of our shared humanity.

For the reasons outlined in the articles above, I believe global studies has an essential part to play in our realizing this.

As a final aside, in another class a discussion arose in which some students expressed surprise, dismay almost, that Dewey would mention his religious beliefs in conjunction with his pedagogical creed. However, I admired and appreciated it. I also highly doubt that Dewey was talking fire and brimstone, or even loaves and fishes, in his classrooms: But this was his pedagogical creed, to which he claimed total ownership and his personal faith has a clear place in such an declaration.

In keeping with that intimacy of disclosure, I can admit that I believe my global pedagogic creed to be nothing more than an extension of the dharma, an expression of compassion and loving-kindness, and an exercising of right-livelihood. As a Buddhist, I do not see myself ushering in any kingdom of any God, but I do regularly vow to save all sentient beings, no matter how innumerable; to rid myself of all fruitless desires, no matter how limitless; to learn all teaching, no matter how vast; and to attain Buddhism, although it is unattainable.

Because, in Buddhism, we are already in the kingdom, no ushering required.