Mapping Our Ways to Global Competence?

internet*

So already, I'm grappling with a global competence-related question, and I think you might be able to help me with it: what kinds of maps--that is, maps that make thinking visible--can help learners develop the dispositions of globally competent people?

Looking Ahead to August's Summer Institute
The reason for my question: I am part of the Harvard Global Studies Outreach Committee (GSOC) team planning an August summer institute for secondary school and community college educators called The Internet: Tangled Webs, Global Promises.  Our goal is twofold:

• to help participants deepen their understandings of the internet's current and potential roles in creating and solving global and local problems of injustice, inequity, and non-sustainability; and 
• to foster participants' global competence, or "the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance" (xi).**

Our long-term hope is that the students of these educators will benefit from their teachers' summer learning.

The Challenge of Focusing on Cultivating Dispositions Vs. Skills and Knowledge
Frankly, I'm not so worried about whether participants will deepen their understandings of the internet: we have an impressive array of techniques--I'll talk about concept maps below-- that will surface and make visible their evolving content-related understandings. I am worried, though, that we may fall short of cultivating participants' sense of urgency and teaching confidence in relationship to global competence.

On some level I understand why global competence takes a back seat: many institute participants are hamstrung by required curricula that are exclusively skills- and information-centered, while others are still expected to write and meet daily "know and be able to do" learning objectives. So their "accountability focus" is often not on global competence. Virtually all of these teachers value deep conceptual understandings and understand how seldom they can develop in one day. In addition, they often truly worry about the future of their students as inheritors of the world's complicated problems. Still, they feel most obligated to make clear to both students and administrators what skills are being introduced, practiced, and/or assessed for mastery on a given class day. And when time is short, global competence becomes a lesser goal.

So is there a way to have summer institute participants map their way into a greater sense of urgency about global competence as a teaching priority? And into a place of greater confidence in their abilities to help their students develop it while they're learning required skills and content? Participants really like and value the global thinking routines they experience at our summer institutes. Could some kind of map make visible the links among thoughts generated by both concept mapping and these routines?  

Concept Mapping's Benefits and Limitations:
Last year's summer institute participants mapped their conceptual understandings of urbanization and cities on their first day in Cambridge. And just two weeks ago, the ten Globalizing the Classroom Fellows who were wrapping up their fellowship year created new conceptual maps using the Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate (GSCE) thinking routine, one of the many thinking routines developed in conjunction with Project Zero's Visible Thinking initiative. 

I found GSCE to be a very satisfying way of generating a concept map. And I was pleased--and relieved-- that the Fellows welcomed the opportunity to map urbanization again. Afterwards, I reasoned that the concept at the center of the map could be a skill or competence that the daily objectives specified students would be developing--such as "revising writing," "reading a historical text written in another century," or "evaluating the reliability of an online source."

But global competence is not just about content understanding, methodologies, and skills. Concept maps make it just a little too easy to keep important global issues at arm's length. Global competence requires the desire and capacity, at the right moment, to move beyond analysis to individual or collective action, even in very small ways.

Cultivating Thinking and Global Competence Dispositions Through Mapping
So what are the best kinds of maps for helping learners develop thinking dispositions, especially the global thinking dispositions*** at the core of the global competence framework? Or are there such maps? And what are thinking dispositions anyway? The Project Zero Visible Thinking web site explains them best: "To put it all together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, attitudes, and alertness, all three at once. Technically this is called a dispositional view of thinking. Visible Thinking is designed to foster all three."****


Mind Mapping and Heart Mapping
As I first tried to answer my own question, I thought about two other kinds of mapping techniques I'd seen matter immensely to people, one courtesy of the professional development I'd had in conjunction with Nancie Atwell's In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning, and the other as a result of multiple trainings I'd had as a classroom teacher and student advisor. These were heart mapping***** and mind mapping.****** What's important about both is that they permit people to see themselves. 

Heart maps, part of my Atwell training, allow young people--actually people of all ages--to articulate what they care about. They invite storytelling and writing about how the various elements of the map came to take their places of primary emotional importance. Mind maps, like the one you're seeing with "2017" in the middle, also tell us what we care about, but in the context of galvanizing us to start doing what we believe is important and to start becoming the persons we want to be in any number of realms in our lives.

In other words, both kinds of maps make visible people's attitudes and values, even their visions of the kinds of world they want to live in. In terms of thinking dispositions, they reveal people's attitudes. But they don't link those attitudes to those people's abilities or their alertness to opportunities to use those abilities. Still, the "I" and potentially the "we" are present in these maps, whereas they're generally absent in concept maps. Alertness and attitudes can't be discussed without reference to whose alertness and whose attitudes.

The Making Meaning Thinking Routine
Which brings me to another Project Zero thinking routine that I found in a tweet from Ron Ritchhart's more than a year ago: the "Making Meaning" thinking routine. The adjacent picture and the one that follows below were posted on Twitter, the first by Ron and the second by someone offering an example of her own experience using the routine with students.

What I love about this routine is that it invites all kinds of subjective and "objective" responses from participants, actively asks people to build on the responses of others, and encourages questions. I used it myself in a professional development session with last year's Globalizing the Classroom Fellows: two small groups made meaning of "global citizenship" while two others made meaning of "global competence'" because the two terms are so often used loosely and interchangeably. The discussion that followed was fascinating, a real foray into the very different things we meant by terms we believed we were using in common ways.

Multiple Meanings of "Making Meaning"?
I like to think that "Making Meaning" could mean making not just consensual, working-definition meaning, but also personal meaning, and therefore assigning relevance and significance. Check out the adjacent example of making meaning of "gossip." Yes, it's important for there to be some collective understanding of what gossip is, especially if it's having both positive and negative (especially negative) effects on a school community or other organization. But once individuals arrive at their personal definitions that have taken into account others' perspectives, there's the potential for a "what next" step that has a great deal to do with alertness and attitude, those two qualities essential to global competence and good thinking generally.

If a mapping activity is going to help students to cultivate global thinking dispositions, then it needs guidelines that

• encourage students to represent individual and collective emotion as well as information and understanding;
• solicit global and local instances and examples; and
• provide some specific guidance for reflective annotations, or what the GSCE thinking routine might call elaborations.

Linking Thinking Language and Making Meaning
I've always believed students need direct instruction in the language that can help them express the relationships between/among ideas they care about--and also metacognitive opportunities to encourage their alertness to when they might use that language. That's why I was excited to read an article in the October 2012 Atlantic about a Staten Island High School that committed to the explicit teaching of thinking language. Not only did students' reading and writing abilities improve, but their attitudes toward reading, writing, and learning became more positive.

New Dorp High School has me thinking that students might annotate and elaborate global competence-enhancing thinking maps with statements created by filling in the blanks in sentence stems. Here are some of those sentence stems that include language that relates ideas:

Because _____, ______.
Because I/we _____. ______.
Because I/we ______. ______.
Because ______, I/we noticed ______.
Because ______, I/we could/should ______.
If _____, then ______.
If I/we _____, then _____.
If _____, then I/we _____.
If ____, we could/should/might ______.
I noticed _____; moreover, _____.
I could _____; in addition, _____.
Since _____, ______.
Since _____, I/we _______. 
_______; similarly, ______.
Whereas _____, I/we _____.

I know I've listed far too many possibilities of what these sentence stems might be--probably no more than five would best--but these are my first attempts at thinking about how some of the thinking and mapping routines and activities currently in use could be slightly altered to foster the alertness and attitudes that global competence requires. What do you think, and what would you suggest--especially in terms of map directions and sentence stems?

Thanks so much for reading, and I sure would like to hear from you about anything this question and post bring to mind.

* Screen shot of image found on this web page: Navarria, G. (2016). How the internet was born: From the ARPANET to the internet. The Conversation. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-was-born-from-the-arpanet-to-the-internet-68072 
** Mansilla, Veronica Boix., and Anthony Jackson. Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World. New York, NY: Asia Society, 2011. Print.
*** Screen shot of graphic on p. 13 of the following online publication: Colvin, R. L., & Edwards, V. (2017, November). Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world [Scholarly project]. In Asia Society/Center for Global Education and OECD. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from teaching-for-global-competence-in-a-rapidly-changing-world-edu.pdf [Note: Veronica Boix-Mansilla is a major contributor to OECD global competence framework.
**** Visible thinking in action. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/01_VisibleThinkingInAction/01a_VTInAction.html [Note: Though I can't find verification of this on the site, I am sure that Ron Ritchhart, Shari Tishman, and David Perkins are among the sources of the content found on this site.]
***** Screen shot of Georgia Heard Heart Map in Hamilton, Mrs. (2012). Writing in Cafe 1123 [Web log post]. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://cafe1123.blogspot.com/p/writing-in-cafe-1123.html  
****** Screen shot of this page: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/21/former-google-career-coach-shares-a-useful-visual-trick.html