The global perspective brings an added sense of purpose and depth to the work of the English classroom.  It also makes the English teacher’s life easier because it provides a wealth of entry points for actively engaging students in learning, for enriching the curriculum, for facilitating positive and productive interactions between people and for building a classroom environment that is both relaxed and stimulating.

Focusing on the rich and complex interconnections that characterize our human story, global education is about our interactions with one another and with the environment, about our diverse perspectives and about our efforts to achieve the futures we desire.  It is also about using our minds, thinking about the potential consequences of our behaviors and taking responsibility for our individual and collective decisions and actions.

Beyond the obvious appropriateness of the global perspective to the English classroom, there is an important social reason for incorporating the global perspective into our work with students.  Today, there is an urgent need for people everywhere and in all walks of life to understand and effectively address the global issues facing humanity.  We English teachers, in helping our students to develop global perspectives combined with high level thinking and communication skills help to prepare them to take on this vital task.

In my classroom, I try to build the global perspective into the way I teach as well as what I teach; in other words, I view global education as a question of process as well as content.

I think that an important part of the global education process is to establish a friendly and respectful classroom environment.  I generally use role plays in working with students to identify respectful behaviors, and once everyone clearly understands the expectations, nothing less is accepted.  Students generally appreciate the comfort they find in a respectful setting and find it easier to take risks and to learn.

Co-operative learning  reinforces the values implicit in global education and   provides opportunities for students to develop the skills they need in order to work successfully with others.  Additionally, research shows that cooperative strategies such as jigsaw learning are among the most effective strategies for addressing critical social issues like racism because when students of diverse backgrounds must work together and depend on one another in order to accomplish a task, they become interdependent; this interdependence leads to friendship which carries over from the classroom to the playground.

To facilitate the building of interdependence among my students and also to take advantage of the rich resource base coming from the students themselves, I emphasize heterogeneous grouping.  I reorganize the groups from time to time so that over the course of a year each student will have the opportunity to work with all of the other students.

One of my favourite approaches to the study of novels and plays is the use of literature circles in which students combine group roles (facilitator, reporter, recorder and so on) with literary roles (i.e. issues explorer, geographer, character analyst, literary luminary).  This allows students to develop a wide variety of literary skills while creating links from the work of literature under study to the broader issues pertaining to global education.  Where links can be created to the students’ own experience of the world, the relevance of the lesson is again reinforced.

For me, becoming a global educator has been an ongoing and deeply satisfying process.  I think the best part has been to see students grow and develop as fine human beings intent on making a contribution to the world. “Perhaps,” they leave me thinking, “just maybe… yes, the work we do in school does make a difference!”