This article is written from the perspective of an English language teacher who has had opportunities to teach in classrooms in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America, and who believes strongly in the value of exchanging ideas in accordance with Article 13 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child:
The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice. (UNCRC, 1989, p. 6)
The core point in both this article and Article 13 above, is that young people also have rights as young world citizens, which means for language teachers that as well as learning about the current adult-run world, we should also enable young people to act collaboratively to influence or change that world.
I propose to consider some vital areas which require clarification, leading from asking what language to use for global learning exchanges, to asking what we mean by world or global education, and ending with what is the educational implication of a term like citizenship? Each of these stages of enquiry I shall aim to illustrate with specific examples from actual language teaching/learning situations.
Language for Global Exchange
My personal experiences of learning exchanges have involved communications through a variety of languages, linked as far as possible to drawings as a universal language for young people to communicate with each other. Clearly, the higher the visual content the less the need for translating and understanding verbal expressions between cultures. The visual emphasis is also a good motivator for promoting exchanges among younger children. For example, 10-year-olds in primary schools in Scotland and Panama were invited to participate in a "Caring and Sharing" project, based on their ideas about childcare, caring for the environment, and trade and aid topics (Brown & Harrison, 1998). By setting up key prompts or questions with a minimum of words and giving maximum space in an open frame for visual responses to the prompts, a high level of exchange and learning took place.
Teachers in one rural school in Panama saw this approach as offering a "window on the world" for their pupils who have little visual aid or electronic access to other media for knowing how children live in places beyond their immediate locality. The drawings suggested that we could analyze very different cultures of childhood from the responses, with the drawing of a solitary child in Scotland with a personal computer seeming to represent a more private and technological upbringing than the communitarian image of farming and walking to school in the drawing from Panama.
Global Education
The aim of this kind of exchange is for teachers to act as links which enable young people to learn from each other, following parallel themes in classrooms separated by distance and language.
If young learners present their own experiences and exchange these with other young learners somewhere else in the world, is that global education? Does learning about the world mean the whole world, or linking specific parts? If you leave a school in Europe having done a project on Africa, have you learnt enough about the world? Of course, another way of approaching the same problem is to emphasize the diverse strands available to us as global teachers. If we favour the environmental, we may look more to link and compare localities; if the economic, we may tend to have more of a focus on macro processes; if the cultural, we may take in more regional diversities and multicultural dimensions. The language teacher has more freedom to work across the traditional academic frontiers of subject-based knowledge and create links of expression. There is much scope here for creative work at the interfaces between culturally diverse linguistic communities within a country and their direct links with ancestral and heritage countries in the world beyond.
Map work can be done with a minimum of language expression, although much can be discussed in class while engaged in making maps, and these discussions can lead on to further investigation of images and perceptions of the world and where they come from. Between the world of each child's culture and experience (their known world) and the outer world of maps and statistics and analyses of global trends lies the gap in which language teachers can operate to broaden understanding.
Educational Implications
The key point is to link sharing expression and global levels of learning with an agreed understanding of what we mean by education for citizenship. If this is seen to include learning about the world and sharing in the world while well-linked to learning forms of action for the world, then the active citizen can learn to operate on a global scale. The teacher of first or other languages has an important role in developing young people's capacities and confidence to take an active part as citizens on a world stage. If global citizenship education is taken as preparing for life as adult citizens of the world, then the focus is likely to be on forms of adult influence, such as voting. If, however, we can also see the importance of educating young people for their present roles as young global citizens, then an exciting extra dimension can be added.
Education for Citizenship
Three examples from language classrooms illustrate varieties of education for citizenship with a global range. For a secondary school link between Scotland and Malawi, the challenge to design health campaign posters led to highlighting very different concerns: the concern with the cleanliness of school eating conditions in Africa and the young people's perceptions of the dangers of smoking in Europe. Again, my examples are primarily starting from a visual challenge, which can come from and lead on to oral work. The comparison is between speakers of English as a first language in Northeast Scotland and as a foreign language in Southern Malawi. The sharing in citizenship dimension comes through exchanging ideas about what each group sees as an important health concern for them and how they portray a school/civic campaign to act against it.
In another example, an English language class in a Malaysian secondary school used a newspaper-style interview and presentation on the subject of foreign workers. The finished work suggests how the language classroom can be used to develop communication and research skills for issues of local and national citizens' rights and identities, encouraging understanding of active citizenship which may be easier to grasp than the notion of being an active global citizen (Harrison, 1989).
The third example used the 1998 European Youth Parliament Project on Drugs and Development, which began setting up local parliaments of young people in nine European countries to learn about and debate global issues related to the trade and trafficking of drugs, and submit proposals for change. The crucial role of language teachers was to help equip young Europeans to share ideas, through e-mail exchanges and at a full parliamentary session, face-to-face. The project also aimed to involve young people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, so the ability and quality of discussion and exchange of ideas through areas of common language are vitally important elements.
An analogy could be made here to processes of curriculum change. At present I work for a non-government organization which would like to see more global citizenship education within UK structures. The Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC) was created in 1939, from the League of Nations Union education committee in the United Kingdom, in the belief that:
Under modern conditions all mankind are increasingly members of one another. What is done in one place affects the course of events far off in all directions... The citizen of the world, in our use of the term, not only recognizes this inescapable condition of modern life, but consents to it with his (sic) will and is prepared so to order his own conduct to assist in making this perpetual interaction a blessing and not a curse to mankind. (Smith, 1941, in Heater, 1984, p. ??)
CEWC has worked at this educational challenge for nearly sixty years, developing localized programmes of events and national publications for members, which include a regular magazine-style publication for global citizenship issues, Broadsheet, which contains a Digest version of great use to both teachers and learners of English as a second or other language, as well as an Activities leaflet which contains ideas for discussion and interactive learning on the topic. These strands of initiative build up to a plan for curriculum influence within UK educational structures.
In order to influence curriculum planners and government departments, we need to have an experience base of how such education can be developed in real school situations. In a similar way, for young people to act as citizens in some form of collaborative action (which is how citizens can influence governments), they need the capacity to build proposals and programmes together with other young people. A school in one locality could achieve this through whole-class or whole-school collaboration on a project around an issue which has a specific political output in terms of expressing opinions and seeking to influence adult official policies.
A number of such schools could achieve more through linking their projects and building a programme for common action. If such schools in different localities achieve sharing links, then a global programme for action may be built up to impact at the same time on local and national policies, as well as seeking to inform and influence adult people and organizations involved in wider world change, for example, within the United Nations' networks.
In summary, I see language teachers' roles in global citizenship education as vital for encouraging and increasing young people's abilities to understand and communicate their views as citizens of the communities they belong to, in order to achieve a sharing of perceptions and plans for coordinated action for the world of the future. Capacity for hearing what other young people are saying and for communicating one's own points of view are central to this process of citizenship as shared action. Language teaching and citizenship education are joined in the same frame of vision.
References
Brown, M., & Harrison, D. (1998). Children's voices in times and places: Experiences from primary classrooms. In N. Clough and C. Holden (Eds.), Children as citizens: Education for participation in democracies old and new (pp. 258-270). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Harrison, D. (1989). Understanding must be increased by allowing people to meet: a report from an English language classroom in Malaysia. World Studies Journal,7 (2), 8-10.
Heater, D. (1984). Peace through education: The contribution of the council for education in world citizenship. London: The Falmer Press.
UNCRC. (The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child). (1989). Article 13.