Grappling With "Global": From Challenge to Opportunity, And Not Just for Educators

So already, how is global interconnectedness a burden, and how is it an opportunity? What are its outcomes, desirable and undesirable? How do they reflect our needs and predilections as human beings and as citizens who want* to "pay attention to" the world? And how can we make global interconnectedness more opportunity than burden?

Pedestrians in front of the Singapore Art Museum

I'm not talking about the idea of global interconnectedness, the abstraction of it, but rather the human experience of it. When my recent travels to Singapore and Penang, Malaysia simultaneously began my education** about Southeast Asia and impressed upon me how the introduction to a place through travel, conversation, and reading is still just that--an introduction--I began to think of the challenges of understanding any new place as it understands itself. Can it happen? Can it happen in the absence of contact between people, flesh-and-blood people? How long does it take, and is there some level of less-than-full understanding that is adequate?*** 

Off the Island of Langkawi, Malaysia

Questions like these last three--and there are so many "new places" they could be asked about--can easily lead us to make the partial the enemy of the complete, the good the enemy of the perfect. But I do think there's a way to manage the vastness and complexity of the global and its component parts. The answer is to dive in somewhere, to dive as deep as we can, to recognize how our personal and national perspectives are shaping the way we're seeing the waters around us, and to keep reminding ourselves not to mistake our partial understandings for complete ones.

But wait: I've moved pretty quickly from global interconnectedness to global understanding, or understandings. And there are probably important way stations between these two. Global encounter is one possible way station; and authentic connection, the by-product of a global encounter marked by real engagement, is another. Can global interconnectedness lead to encounter and then beyond encounter to authentic connection without a great deal of human effort? 

And maybe there's another question to be asked before I go galloping off on any false assumptions about people's desires to connect: for most people, are global encounter and transnational interpersonal connections goals--even minor goals--of global interconnectedness?

I suspect not. Interconnectedness is a fact, a reality, the result of technologies that link people, permit their ideas, their voices, their images, their goods, their bodies to travel to other people and places. Encounter that leads to connection, on the other hand, requires effort, mutuality, contact, some kind of openness to another person, another idea, another way of being in the world. Furthermore, a constellation of articles in Ideas section of the February 1 Boston Sunday Globe**** suggests that people, as individuals and as nations, are becoming less connected, and less desirous of connection. The section's feature article, primarily political in nature, lays out the harmful consequences of deglobalization and less international connection as suggested by history, and recommends ways leaders can combat the trend; other shorter articles share research data about the functioning of our minds and brains when they encounter new people and new places.

In "The Great Deglobalizing,"***** Joshua Kurlantzick asserts that "Since the late 2000s, despite the superficial connectivity of Facebook and Twitter, the world has entered a period of . . . deglobalization." Given his analysis of "cycles of globalization and deglobalization" in the last hundred years, he bids national leaders to act in the following ways, quoted directly from his article:

• " . . . American and European leaders could help demonstrate the benefits of continued interest in the world."
• "Leaders could also demonstrate a commitment to global communications, and to the power of intercultural exchange."
• "World leaders also could push back against the most extreme, and often racist, anti-migration organizations."

Kurlantzick advocates globalization for the sake of world peace and stability. Despite his arguments and advice, and despite my own thoughts about how to approach the vastness and complexity of the global, I sympathize with people's feelings of being overwhelmed by it. I've been watching it snow for three days now, and today's snow is piled on top of yesterday's snow, which is piled on the snow from last week, which is piled on the snow from the week before. So where does one begin to shovel out, sort it into piles, move it? Do I try to understand Boko Haram first? the significance of the nationalities of those ISIL has recently beheaded or burned to death? the Cuba-America relationship past and present? the Ukraine-Russia relationship? Or do I immerse myself post-Charlie Hebdo in a consideration of different western cultures' sensibilities around the exercise of free speech? How do I decide? 

The one recent globally reported event I felt a real connection to was the AirAsia disaster in late December. Having looked at so many maps of maritime Southeast Asia in the last few months, I understood roughly where the plane had crashed. And having flown AirAsia myself three times in November, nervously because it was monsoon season, I knew how likely it was that many, and probably even most, of the passengers on that flight were Muslim. So I could relate not only to the grief and anger of victims' families, but to their need to have their relatives' bodies returned to them for proper burial as dictated by their faith.

But as an item in Kevin Lewis' Uncommon Knowledge: Surprising insights from the social sciences****** column states, "People have more trouble feeling the pain of strangers than that of people they know. . . . According to a new study, one reason is stress hormones, which are generated in the company of strangers and which inhibit empathy." So there's something downright biological in our instinctive lack of empathy, our desire not to connect to the suffering of others. But do we want to be defined first and foremost by our instincts?

Another item in the same Uncommon Knowledge column suggests that there can be too much of a good thing when it comes to new experiences, even those touted as meaningful and worthwhile. As the item in Lewis' column explains, a glut of tourist experiences--which often involve an encounter with another time and/or culture, if not another stranger--fosters a shut-down that translates to paying less attention:

Hollis Hall, Harvard Yard

To test how feeling like jaded travelers affected people’s interest in new sights, researchers surveyed American tourists before they entered Boston’s Old North Church. The tourists were given a checklist of common American destinations or a checklist of exotic foreign destinations and asked to indicate where they had traveled. Tourists who completed the checklist of common American destinations—that is, who were made to feel that they were well-traveled—spent about 30 percent less time in the church.*******

I'd love to understand a bit more about how feelings of being "well-traveled" might have conferred permission to pay less attention. At some point, do people decide that they know enough and no longer need to pay attention? Is their analysis more quantitative than qualitative?

But some decisions about how much attention to pay may not be based on reason. Even if we have the means to see the best of the global, hear the best of it, taste the best of it--chances are our appetites become dulled by a surfeit of stimuli, even "high quality" stimuli. It makes sense that a steady stream of peak tourist experiences or a steady diet of international atrocities fed to us by nightly news reports--especially when they cast us in the role of speedy consumer of facts and ideas as the tour moves on or the next news story begins--would make us want to stop paying attention, to avoid any more experiences that require our intellectual and emotional energy. Understandably, we're sometimes more than ready to change the channel, or to sit on a bench while everyone else moves on to the next fascinating artifact.

This sense of the world's being too complex and too large for us to engage with the whole of it conscientiously and thoughtfully, be it through literature, history, journalism, or travel, makes me think of Arjuna's experience in Chapter 11 of The Bhaghavad Gita. When Arjuna asks Krishna for the power to see Krishna's "cosmic form" (11:4) if Krishna deems him able to "behold" it (11:4), Krishna provides him with "divine eyes by which you can behold My mystic opulence" (11:8).******** 

The cosmic, world-containing form of Krishna is so magnificent and terrifying that while Arjuna grows in understanding, respect, and love, he also grows in fear.********* So he asks the god to return himself to the four-armed form with which Arjuna is comfortable and familiar:

After seeing this universal form, which I have never seen before, I am gladdened, but at the same time my mind is disturbed with fear. Therefore please bestow Your grace upon me and reveal again Your form as the Personality of Godhead, O Lord of lords, O abode of the universe. (11:45)
O universal Lord, I wish to see You in Your four-armed form, with helmeted head and with club, wheel, conch and lotus flower in Your hands. I long to see You in that form. (11:46)

Krishna does as Arjuna asks, and in so doing reminds me that we mere humans need four-armed approaches to exploring a globalized, interconnected world. I've been fortunate to encounter some of these, thanks to the global competence-related initiatives of both Project Zero and the NEA (National Education Association) Foundation. While I believe that all of these initiatives have the potential to foster authentic connections among actual people from different places, I also think they have much to contribute to an overall culture of understanding and cooperation in the absence of developing those connections.

With each passing year, I grow in my appreciation of the EF (Education First) Educational Tours online course about China that I took three years ago. That course, with its well-defined topics and opportunities for choice, prepared me not only for making the most of the NEA Foundation/Pearson Global Learning Fellows' June 2012 trip to China, but for making sense of what I read and see about China in the news today. Travel matters: it's enhanced by preparation for it, and it enhances our engagement with news about the places we've visited once we're back home. The NEA Foundation offers courses and materials through its Global Fellowship Program. 

Project Zero (at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) continues its commitment to fostering global competence, which demands making the world intellectually manageable for and penetrable by as well as enticing to students and teachers. Just last week, at a Harvard-based seminar offered in conjunction with The Global Lens Project, guest presenter Michael Kozuck shared an interdisciplinary unit that explored globalization's impact from the perspective of just three countries--China, India, and Mexico.********** Both Kozuck and the project's principal investigator, Veronica Boix-Mansilla, used the world "slice" to characterize the size and scope of the pieces of the global pie that the students had explored. Learning to inquire into a slice of the interconnected world yields knowledge of that slice, skills for inquiring into other slices, and perspectives from which to make sense of other slices. 

And while the web site of Project Zero's Out of Eden Learn Project features Paul Salopek's accounts of and reflections on his travels through many countries, it also includes lots of materials for teachers eager to engage their students in learning about the world. It's worth watching the video of Liz Dawes Duraisingh talking about the project on the site's About page.*********** The project encourages students to slow down, look carefully, and embrace age-old as well as current means for making sense of the world by connecting their personal worlds to others' worlds. There's no reason that we as adult lifelong learners shouldn't do the same.

There's no question about it: to develop and maintain a global perspective can be endless, heavy lifting; the world is vast and variegated, and the individual countries and regions that compose it are internally complex and always changing. And yes, it makes sense that, after a week of particularly grim reports of strife, violence, and injustice in other parts of the world, we're inclined hunker down in our own peaceful if snow-blanketed homes and communities and forget the world beyond them.

But that lifting doesn't always have to be so dread-filled and onerous. There are ways, places, resources. With some moderation, some regard for our own needs as human beings, and some deliberate approaches, we might make this global interconnectedness manageable and inviting, particularly as educators. And if we end up producing a generation of citizens who have the knowledge, intellectual and interpersonal skills, and inclination to participate successfully in a global world, perhaps their methodologies and mindsets will spread to the generations preceding theirs, making it more possible for our interconnected planet to work better for us all. 

P.S. I'm thinking a great deal about Singapore, Penang, and maritime Southeast Asia more generally, past and present. Stay tuned for some more "global" blog posts.

* I say this knowing the motivations for paying such attention can vary. For some, the primary motivation could be a commitment to being well-educated and well-informed; for others,the primary motivation could be more deeply connected to advocacy and action. ** I say "began" even though my seventh-grade social studies class studied modern Asia and the Vietnam War led me to look at maps, photos, and news stories over the years.
*** I realize I could be asking this same set of questions about the encounter of two groups of Americans whose worlds seldom or never overlap. 
**** Screen Shot of http://epaper.bostonglobe.com/epaper/viewer.aspx ("Ideas" section front page of February 1, 2015 Boston Globe)
***** Kurlantzick, Joshua. "The Great Deglobalizing." Feb 2015. Council on Foreign Relations. Feb 2015. 
*(6) Lewis, Kevin. "Empathy for Strangers? Too Stressful." The Boston Globe (Boston, MA). N.p., 1 Feb. 2015. Web. 9 Feb. 2015. <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-37628800.html?refid=easy_hf>.  Martin, L. et al., “Reducing Social Stress Elicits Emotional Contagion of Pain in Mouse and Human Strangers,” Current Biology (forthcoming).
*(7) Lewis, Kevin. "Another Fabulous Destination? Yawn." The Boston Globe (Boston, MA). N.p., 1 Feb. 2015. Web. 9 Feb. 2015. <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-37628800.html?refid=easy_hf>. Quoidbach, J. et al., “The Price of Abundance: How a Wealth of Experiences Impoverishes Savoring,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (forthcoming).
*(8) "Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 11: The Universal Form." Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 11: The Universal Form. His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, 1972. Web. 09 Feb. 2015. <http://www.asitis.com/11/>.
*(9) By Ramanarayanadatta astri (http://archive.org/details/mahabharata01ramauoft) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 
*(10) You can read about this unit beginning on page 30 of Boix-Mansilla, Veronica, and Anthony Jackson. Asia Society, 2011. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. <http://asiasociety.org/files/book-globalcompetence.pdf>.
*(11) Dawes Duraisingh, Liz, Carrie James, and Shari Tishman. "About Us." Out of Eden Walk. Project Zero, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. <http://learn.outofedenwalk.com/about/>.

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