Coloring Our Maps

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OR YEARS, I HAVE WALKED ON A GIANT MAP OF THE UNITED STATES painted on the pavement in front of our school's community center, musing on its many visible layers of paint as I tread on the states I know and love. Lately, though, I see that the map lies there disconnected from any context. Where's the map of the rest of the world? I've also come to see the map in personal terms. What if each of us had a metaphorical map in our brain and heart — one that we could "color in" as each new experience brought us closer to understanding countries and cultures other than our own?

This is where we must focus faculty professional development as we pursue a global education agenda in our schools — creating conditions for all of us to color in our maps of the world, virtually, locally, and globally.

I had known my colleague, whom I will call Teresa, for six years. She and her family had fled Cuba when Castro overthrew Fulgencia Batista y Sald’var in 1959. They moved first to Kansas City and then to South Carolina, where Teresa settled in to teach high school Spanish. Teresa was an excellent Spanish teacher, her methodologies and cultural studies bringing alive the world's Spanish-speaking cultures. I asked her to accompany me on a college trip to New England — chaperoning, driving vans, reading maps, adjusting to the frigid climate, and eating unfamiliar foods. Six hours into the trip, I realized that Teresa was frightened — of the traffic outside Boston, of the brusque Yankee people, of the responsibility for 20 high school juniors. But as the 10-day trip unfolded, Teresa was transformed into a confident navigator who took initiative as situations evolved; an adventurer, willing to take advantage of a sledding opportunity as students got their first taste of "real" snow. The following year, Teresa planned a student trip to Spain — and she has been leading that trip ever since. When Cuba opened its borders to American visitors, Teresa went home, with her students, for the first time in 20 years.

Teresa's story suggests many lessons for us as our schools launch aggressive global education initiatives. The reasons we feel strongly about creating travel and outreach opportunities for students also apply to faculty. Teresa was bicultural, and her personal experiences came into the classroom with her to enrich students; yet since she had not been out of a regionally unique part of the United States for two decades, her world — as well as that of her students — needed broadening. Teresa's map had many colorless spaces, but going to New England started her on a journey of self-actualization.

In one of our many school discussions about global education and its implications for Catlin Gabel, upper school head Emily Jones once described the power of the presence in her division of a beautifully educated Rwandan administrative assistant. "The dissonance between what the students and faculty knew of the Rwandan atrocities and what they learned by getting to know this remarkable woman changed the way they viewed Rwanda forever," Jones said. "For them, another piece of the world map was colored in."

What has been done nationally and internationally for teacher education that will lead to us coloring in our maps? While teacher training is frequently cited on global education websites and in books, most of the material is about curriculum and global experiences for students, with almost nothing about how a world view can transform the teachers — and in turn, how they can transform students. Much of the good thinking on this topic, which is emerging out of Europe and Canada, suggests a strong framework for curriculum development, but little information on how to ready teachers for the work.

Although many organizations concentrate on global education skills for students, the very university faculty who train teachers are themselves not prepared to teach these skills, even in schools of education. International education consultant Ann Imlah Schneider, in her 2003 paper "The State of Teacher Training for K-12 International Education," noted that "teachers are ill-prepared to introduce students to factors contributing to both conflict and cooperation in today's world."

Schneider recommends increasing the international content of general education courses and says that agencies accrediting international programs should "include requirements for international experience through coursework, foreign language study, study and internships abroad, faculty qualifications, and even internationally oriented extracurricular activities." She says that, if schools encourage teachers to travel internationally for professional development, their thinking would become decreasingly insular and they would more readily revise their courses.

With a lack of guidelines from higher education about adult learning, what philosophical framework should we use to think about professional development for global education? I suggest two: cognitive dissonance psychology, and multicultural and diversity training implications from cultural competence theory.

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n the psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, discomfort occurs because of a discrepancy between what a person already knows or believes and new information and interpretation — creating the need to accommodate new ideas. Whether faculty members travel or not, it is important that they are provided with opportunities to experience this cognitive dissonance. As psychologists Don Bannister and Fay Fransella state in The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1989), "Our behavior is our continual experiment with life." A few years ago, I spent a month in Turkey and was horrified by the treatment of street dogs I saw wherever I went. My passionate canophilia disregarded the local cultural attitudes about dogs, where humans cannot afford to feed canines, and neglected, unvaccinated dogs spread disease. For years, I worked on Habitat for Humanity projects on the sea islands of South Carolina. Fast-paced, armed with our building materials and a one-week deadline, we were uneasy with the slow pace of the locals, where work began when enough people gathered to make it happen. We learned to relax into that different concept of time. Cognitive dissonance can happen in the classroom as well, but firsthand experience helps us grow — and understand.

Certainly, the work that goes on in an inclusive classroom informs our thinking about how teachers can become powerful learners in this enterprise. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, feminist scholar bell hooks declares that personal success is intimately aligned with self-actualization, citing education as an act of liberation that frees teachers and learners from the powers of domination. The diversity work of hooks and others is far ahead of our present conception of the skills needed for global understanding.

This raises the question of why we look so far outside ourselves when we have not resolved our continuing issues of diversity and multicultural education in our schools and in our local communities. At the 2006 National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) conference, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, suggested a necessary connection between diversity work and global education, noting that "understanding diversity locally is the first step toward global understanding." Reflecting hooks' thoughts, Simmons asked "How are we transforming ourselves in the act of getting there? How are we then transforming our adult selves in the liberation of our students?"

The pathways to understanding are the same whether you are teaching children in crowded, disadvantaged classrooms or preparing prep school students for travel abroad. Diversity and multicultural work is local; global education is the world, but each necessitates a disequilibrium — a cognitive dissonance — for the teacher, if she or he is to make the experience valid for her or his students. None of these opportunities can be missed.

As I attended sessions at the 2006 NAIS conference and listened to presenters and colleagues on this subject, the prevailing view was that, through hiring and setting the expectations for teachers, they would become strong global educators and risk-takers. What would a professional development program look like that would combine the opportunity to create cognitive dissonance and the powerful work of cultural competence? Most of our faculty members teach students from the dominant culture. How can teachers learn to interact authentically with students who are different from the ones they are accustomed to teaching?

Here are some ideas:

• Create internships with local organizations, such as Migrant Head Start, juvenile justice programs, or inner-city after-school programs, so that our teachers may observe and interact with teachers and leaders in those organizations on a regular basis and share their insights with their peers or with others in their schools. We can provide graduate credit for these experiences through a local university.
• Redirect professional development dollars to global education opportunities for faculty. We can provide research and development funds to create an overseas experience for any faculty member who would benefit.
• Provide language classes for faculty, on-site, geared to adult learners — and pay for it. We can make it available and, over time, make a second language a requirement of the teacher's skill set.
• In the yearly evaluation process, require a cultural competence goal for the year and provide support for getting there. ¥ Invite the board and parents on inaugural trips and to take language classes with the faculty.
• Hire faculty and staff members who have colored in their maps to some extent, so that they can contribute to the coloring of others' maps.