Global Competency Project
As a teacher researcher, alongside other colleagues, I began studying how children connect to the ideas around global competency with Harvard Project Zero researchers. We were curious how children in early childhood could begin to cultivate a globally competent mindset. To facilitate this we connected with several schools in Japan both their children and their teachers to facilitate some cross-cultural exchanges.
Below is more information from Harvard Project Zero's website about the project:
"This project brings together a group of early childhood teachers in the US and Japan to conduct joint classroom explorations to nurture global competence among children ages 3-5. We seek to understand the teaching and learning demands associated with setting the foundations for global competence development among this age group including children’s representations of the world, their capacity for perspective taking, communication through multiple symbol systems, and altruism."
Table of Contents
1. Teacher Planning
2. Student Experiences
3. Student Reflections
4. Teacher Reflection
Below is more information from Harvard Project Zero's website about the project:
"This project brings together a group of early childhood teachers in the US and Japan to conduct joint classroom explorations to nurture global competence among children ages 3-5. We seek to understand the teaching and learning demands associated with setting the foundations for global competence development among this age group including children’s representations of the world, their capacity for perspective taking, communication through multiple symbol systems, and altruism."
Table of Contents
1. Teacher Planning
2. Student Experiences
3. Student Reflections
4. Teacher Reflection
Teacher Planning
Planning for the global competency project took a lot of time and collaboration with many teachers over the course of several years. Below you can see emails that we collaborated on, notes that were shared, responses from Harvard Project Zero researchers and extended planning lessons that align with projects, materials, standards and global perspectives.
After I shared documentation from my classroom of the Global Competency Study this was our researcher's response:
Below are extended lesson plans that I developed in collaboration with other colleagues:
In addition, as a team we created a concept map to help guide our investigations and observations with students. See below.
Student Experiences
The global competency project has taken place over the course of several years however this past year the exchanging of gifts has taken a central role. Below are some images of what they were and how children experienced them.
(All photos taken by me unless otherwise attributed).
(All photos taken by me unless otherwise attributed).
A box arrives from Tokyo and the children take guesses as to what it might be. None of their guesses were correct but they were still thrilled to discover that the children from Japan sent bento boxes with pretend clay food that they thought our children would like!
(Photo by Marla McLean) |
Children take turns hugging and looking at where Tokyo, Japan is on the globe while we open the box together.
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Children carefully unwrap the gifts from Tokyo and discover that they're bento boxes with pretend food.
(Photo by Marla McLean). While discussing the gifts we received from Japan and trying to figure out what an appropriate gift back would be one child comments that we can't write to them in English because they won't understand and that we should try to write back in Japanese.
A child closely examines the translation for the food in his lunch and copies the characters onto his paper.
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Children continue their exploration of Japan with Japanese dictionaries. This child pretends to read them to a doll in dramatic play.
Children were inspired by the gift of bento boxes from Japan and so wanted to share what they ate too but with Japanese characters. Above are photos of children's lunches and the Japanese translations of each type of food. Children selected which ones they wanted to translate.
After posting to Instagram about our project a parent writes back about how eye opening this experience is for their children considering they'd never been exposed to Japanese and certainly not encouraged to write it before this project.
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Student Reflections
All photos by Marla McLean.
Teacher Reflection
Throughout this long term project I have grown alongside the children in our quest for global competency. Considering Japan is so far away from Washington, DC many children had no idea where it was located or what they speak until we engaged in this inquiry. In addition, many of them at four and five were still quite self-interested and hadn't thought of wishes for others. Through the exchange of gifts, introduction of materials into the classroom to remind us of language differences and encouragement to think of ways to connect with others in their own culture-specific ways instead of our own I saw children develop immense amounts of empathy. The children also gained a more global perspective especially when it came to languages.