Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms
Philippines
Global Education Guide
Embedded Files
Mabuhay! Welcome!
Mabuhay! Welcome!
We can text and call for pennies. There are flights to almost everywhere daily. Globalization has connected the world more than ever. But threats like misinformation and disinformation, AI-generated manipulation, growing populations, climate change, and identity politics are all pulling us in opposite directions. How can we be so linked, yet so divided?
And that's where global ed comes in to save the day. THIS is how we start putting things back together. Not through a special assembly or a food festival in April, but by building the habit in young people of stopping for a moment to see through someone else's eyes before deciding what they think.
Hello from The Big Apple
Hello from The Big Apple
New York City is certainly a good place to make that argument, as our own mini-globe! Our students go to school in a system where more than 180 languages are spoken, and they often live a few blocks from people whose lives look nothing like theirs. When my sixth graders leave me, there's no telling where they'll land. It might be a high school in a different borough, almost certainly with classmates from backgrounds unlike their own and teachers who see the world differently than they do. Whether or not any of them chooses a career with "global" in the title, they need a global education just to thrive in this city.
At my school, M.S. 245, the mission statement has, for a long time, included that we should prepare a diverse population of learners to be leaders in their community, to make interdisciplinary connections, and to take an active role in the world at large. Then this past year, New York State adopted its Portrait of a Graduate, naming "global citizen" as one of six things every student will need to demonstrate to earn a high school diploma. Our team has spent a number of professional development sessions working out what that means for our courses. If you're reading this from another state, you may have your own version of this moment coming. If you're in New York, it's already here.
The hardest part of my Fulbright year was not changing my teaching. Adapting lessons turned out to be the fun part. The hard part was the reading and the writing, week after week, on top of a full teaching schedule. So I did that reading and pulled out the pieces super worth your evening: organizations, resources to start with, tools I'd recommend, and classroom artifacts I built, ready to be copied and adapted to your students' needs.
Global competence is not creating an entirely new subject; it's an extension of what you already teach. I'm a sixth-grade science teacher with an advisory and robotics elective, in a public middle school, with a bell schedule and a co-teaching model and all the usual constraints. Everything in this Guide was made under those conditions, which is my way of saying that I hope it will fit yours too.
How to Use This Guide
How to Use This Guide
Jump around! Learn gives you the language and the background. Teach has the tools, the artifacts, and the local resources. Travel is where I take you to the Philippines with me. Start wherever your curiosity is.
Take whatever helps! Copy, update, use anything with your students tomorrow. If you share it, throw in a link back to this site to help other teachers get on board.
Start with a unit you already have. Don't build from scratch; open the unit you're teaching in three weeks and look for a place where the world could get in.
Tell me what happens! If you try something from this site, I want to hear about it! Drop a note at skos@schools.nyc.gov or leave a comment on the Substack or Insta!
Doing This Together
Doing This Together
Trade artifacts, not philosophy. Bring an actual task you're assigning next week and swap it with someone. That conversation goes further than a semester of talking about frameworks.
Put on your learner's hat first. The best professional development I've attended asks teachers to experience a protocol as students before switching to the teacher's hat to debrief it. You get to practice the skill before performing it!
Find a partner class. If you have a cohort or a fellowship, you have partners. If you don't, the platforms on the Digital Tools page exist for exactly this, and several will match you with a classroom for free. You can also email me! I've been the teacher on both ends of that arrangement and am happy to be it again.
Don't Ask Where I'm From, Ask Where I'm Local
Don't Ask Where I'm From, Ask Where I'm Local
There's a TED Talk I keep coming back to, in which the writer Taiye Selasi asks us to stop asking people where they're from and start asking where they're local, a question you answer by looking at your daily rituals, your closest relationships, and the restrictions that decide where you're allowed to be in the first place. The moment that sticks with me is when she catches herself doing the exact thing she's arguing against, mentally filing a friend born and raised in Accra as being from Lebanon because that's where the family came from three generations back.
That habit has consequences. More than a third of New Yorkers were born in another country, and our students move constantly, between apartments, boroughs, schools -- sometimes even countries -- and back again. Most of them are already local in more than one place, and nobody has ever asked them about it. Asking a kid where they're from hands them a label and waits for them to fit inside it. Asking where they're local assumes there's more going on than you can see from where you're standing. This is the whole skill we're trying to build.
Borders decide who gets to cross them, and nothing else about the person on the other side. Watch the talk, then ask your students where they're local. What they tell you is where the work starts.
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