Expanding My Global Mind

So already, recently the NEA (National Education Association) Foundation wrote to those of us who had been participated in their Global Fellowship Program, and asked us to write about any one of three questions they provided. I chose to answer the following question: How have you personally become more globally-minded as a result of the Fellowship program? My answer is below. 

At Tiananmen Square, June 2012

In early February 2012, I traveled to Washington D.C. as one of the 2012 National Education Association (NEA) Foundation/Pearson Foundation Global Fellows to begin learning about China. For ten days in June, our Fellow group would explore this fast-developing but ancient superpower by visiting Beijing, Shanghai, and their surroundings. During the following school year, each of us would share aspects of our learning with colleagues and students. We needed to prepare both to take advantage of our time in China and to disseminate our learning effectively later at home.

To help us manage and focus our learning, we were each encouraged to identify a research question/topic of interest to guide our pre-trip studies and during-trip observations. To help us better share our learning with colleagues and students who probably hadn’t seen or studied modern China, we were introduced to the Global Competence framework as a tool for designing our teaching and outreach efforts. 

I knew very little about China, but I had met the Global Competence framework before, most recently and formally through Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Anthony Jackson’s Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World.[1] Having had the privilege of working with Veronica several years earlier on an initiative[2] that emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems and phenomena, I understood global competence as the natural extension of her work on interdisciplinarity: problems and opportunities with global roots and ramifications could only be solved and maximized respectively by reflecting and responding to divergent viewpoints, contexts, and needs.

Over the course of the spring, our Fellows group continued to gear up for our major learning adventure. A required online course helped prepare us for what would be for most of us our first encounters with the cities we’d be visiting and the nation as a whole. I personally set out to learn as much as I could about China through reading, viewing, and talking and listening locally.[3]

One weekend I headed to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts to see two exhibitions, one directly related and one seemingly unrelated to my China education. The first, entitled “Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art,” explored the vital relationship between tradition and innovation in the Native American art of North America. The second, entitled  “Perfect Imbalance, Exploring Chinese Aesthetics,” invited an exploration of the art created by Chinese people to appeal to the artistic sensibilities of Chinese people: 

Chinese culture is diverse, longstanding and ever-changing. Yet common ties unite. This exhibition offers an approach to understanding Chinese culture through a study and celebration of the aesthetics of Chinese art. Objects included reveal key aesthetic clues that define the art of China, and distinguish it from art produced by neighboring regions, or art made in China for the export market. These aesthetic standards prevailed with the passing of time and foreign influences.[4]

But it turned out that I had more to learn from the Peabody-Essex that Saturday than I had anticipated. 

Screen Shot of PEM web site page

• Unexpected Lesson #1: Chinese artists were deliberately creating different kinds of art for different audiences and markets, many of them Western. Examples of this art-for-export were featured in another China exhibition I hadn’t known was at the museum, a companion exhibition to “Imperfect Balance.” Every piece of art displayed in this companion exhibition represented one of “four essential motifs Westerners often associate with China -- fish, silk, tea, bamboo . . . [that were] cultivated for artistic expression as well as profit.”[5]  

Screen Shot of PEM web site page

• Unexpected Lesson #2: Chinese design principles weren’t confined to Chinese art. This I learned from an artifact in the “Shapeshifting” exhibition. The design of a magnificent, large nineteenth-century hand-woven basket reflected its creator’s choice to replicate the shape of the Chinese ceramic vases she observed selling almost as quickly as they could be unloaded onto nearby Pacific piers. So innovation could sometimes be defined as cultural appropriation based on market forces.

Suddenly, I was struck by two pervasive and related phenomena that I wasn’t used to thinking about while in art museums: encounters and economies. Who was there, and how did they get there? Whom did they encounter when they got there? What was that encounter like initially, and how did it evolve over time? Who had come to buy? to trade or sell? to find work? What goods and services were being bought? sold? exchanged? Who was benefitting most and least—how and when? Who stayed? moved on? went back? What did the encounter explain? suggest for the future?

These questions in some form or another, and my new sense of myself as having the curiosity, commitment, and tools to explore them, have been on my mind much ever since then, and especially in the last year.

• First, they’ve shaped my choices as a traveler. My visits to Singapore, Penang (Malaysia)[6], and Vancouver (Canada) in this past year would have felt incomplete had I not visited each place’s local/national museum. I felt especially compelled to explore the history of each city’s diversity because all three have significant numbers of residents with roots in China. In Vancouver, I couldn’t resist the Vancouver Art Gallery’s “Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art”:  Yun-Fei Ji’s long scroll painting “The Three Gorges Dam Migration” captured the human emotion that often surrounds mandated “progress.” 

• Second, they’ve shaped what news and books I read, what television I watch, what movies I rent. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng consumed me last winter; Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh’s Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore is next on my global reading list.  

Kimbrough Scholars, Kimbrough Teachers, & Kimbroughs

• Third, they’ve shaped my work as an educator, whether the topic is American history, as it is with Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s Kimbrough Scholars Seminar teacher team[7]; human migration, as it is with the fellows associated with the Harvard Global Studies Outreach program[8]; or overfishing, as it is has been with the Global Lens Project, also a Project Zero initiative.[9] My role in all three of these contexts is to provide pedagogical and facilitative expertise, but I keep feeling that I’m the one who’s growing in global competence. Sometimes in these contexts, I deliberately seek the global content knowledge that I lack. For example, earlier this year, in preparing to guide a group of Singapore teachers through their first experience of a “Consultancy” protocol,[10]
  
  I chose to create a sample teaching-and-learning dilemma that asked the group to explore the advantages and disadvantages of using divercity singapore: A Cartoon History of Immigration,[11] a paperbook book sold at the National Museum of Singapore, as the primary text for teaching lower secondary students the history of immigration in Singapore. I hoped that while the teachers came to value structured conversations as tools for professional learning, I might gain some understanding of the book’s political point of view.

• Finally, they are reshaping my understanding of where I live. In late August, I attended the first commemoration of the Middle Passage at Boston’s Faneuil Hall—and learned that the building in which I was sitting had been largely constructed by slaves who’d survived the Middle Passage and been delivered to Boston where they were either sold to Massachusetts residents, or sent elsewhere to be sold or traded.  Hardly what I was taught as a Boston Public Schools student! Hardly what I learned in high school, where the focus was on Boston’s pure-hearted, freedom-loving, consistently principled abolitionists and revolutionaries!

Great Fellows on the Great Wall

Lunch Option at the Great Wall

The experience a few years back of encountering China and re-encountering the Global Competence framework in the company of thoughtful, enthusiastic fellow educators, many of whom I consider to be friends as well as colleagues, has combined with my subsequent experiences as a traveler, teacher, and learner to expand my view and and my learning behavior. I now look and listen more widely and more deeply, ask more questions, and speak up and out when encounter threatens to injure rather than connect and/or enrich. Wherever I am virtually and actually, I look to see who’s there as well as what’s happening—not just who’s front and center talking and explaining, but who’s positioned closer to the edge, who’s listening hopefully and expectantly, who’s listening in quiet resignation or simmering rage, who’s expecting to be perceived negatively, who’s expecting to be perceived not at all. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a room or on a bus with my fellow Global Fellows, but just knowing we’re all out there energetically doing and sharing—and that other educators are also out there with similar priorities and understandings--keeps me believing in the possibility of the development of a variegated, self-aware global “we” that can work together to survive and then to thrive.

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[1] This book can be downloaded from the Asia Society web site: <https://asiasociety.org/files/book-globalcompetence.pdf>

[2] Veronica Boix-Mansilla is a Principal Investigator at Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that explores the nature of learning and seeks to strengthen the relationship between teaching and learning, especially as it relates to best practices in the arts.

[3]  I also imagined that learning about China might increase my ability to make some sort of connection with my neighbors. China is pretty close to home for me: the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, where I live, is 70% Chinese; businesses in Wollaston Center boast street signs in English and Chinese. Because I couldn’t speak Chinese[3] and they couldn’t speak English, I didn’t know how my neighbors had come to live in Massachusetts, what aspects of their lives in China they wished to preserve, which they wished to relegate to the past, how they felt about living in a city that prides itself on having produced two American presidents.

[4] "Past Exhibitions: Perfect Imbalance, Exploring Chinese Aesthetics." PEM. Peabody-Essex Museum, 2009. Web. 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.pem.org/exhibitions/3-perfect_imbalance_exploring_chinese_aesthetics>.

[5] "Past Exhibitions: Fish, Silk, Tea, Bamboo: Cultivating an Image of China." PEM. Peabody-Essex Museum, 2009. Web. 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.pem.org/exhibitions/17-fish_silk_tea_bamboo_cultivating_an_image_of_china>.

[6] As in the Peabody-Essex Museum that is less than an hour from my home, the East India Company dominates Penang State Museum’s local history of trade and encounter. It was thrilling to realize that I was at one of the “far ends” of an East India Company trade route. I never in my life had imagined I ever would be!

[7] You can read about the Kimbrough Scholars Program by checking out this link on the Northeastern Law School Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project web site: <http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/the-kimbrough-scholars-program/>

[8] For more information about the Globalizing the Classroom Fellows Program, check out this link: <http://globalstudiesoutreach.harvard.edu/global-migration-21st-century>

[9] For more information about Project Zero’s International and Global: Understanding Our Contemporary World initiatives, check out this web site: <http://idglobal.gse.harvard.edu/>. Veronica Boix-Mansilla is the principal investigator of the Global Lens Project.

[10] Allen, David, and Tina Blythe. The Facilitator's Book of Questions: Tools for Looking Together at Student and Teacher Work. New York: Teachers College, 2004. Print. 18-19.

[11] Divercity Singapore: a cartoon history of immigration Morgan Chua - Justin Zhuang - Cherian George - Mix Media – 2010. The book is also available online as a pdf.