Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/30/2021

• NAIS - An International School Shares Six Touchstones to Cultivate Global Citizens

  • To be sure, we benefit from a multilingual, multinational school community and from bilingual, French, and International Baccalaureate programs. But we believe any motivated school can offer an internationally minded education. At French American, we call it cross-cultural cognition — the ability to think, feel, and act across cultures.
  • We aim for students to understand and appreciate identity as a rich mix of national, regional, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, orientation, socioeconomic, and other factors. This keeps the focus on what we have in common so we don’t become ensnared by differences, stereotypes, and simplifications that incite conflict at home and abroad.
    
  • Languages are loaded with culture, attitudes, tradition, history, etiquette, and more. To learn another language is to gain an alternate perspective, increase empathy, and become open to cultural cues.
  • We also honor our students’ home languages. If we are educating global citizens, we are affirming the value of each child’s identity, including his or her language.
  • Rather than pushing international faculty members and students to assimilate into our school culture, we encourage them to share their cultures with us. We believe having an educator or fellow student share his or her personal cultural background significantly enriches all students’ experiences.
  • Middle schoolers in our Arabic and Mandarin language classes do not just learn the language; they are exposed to our educators’ cultures, thereby developing an understanding of different countries’ lifestyles, customs, and attributes.
  • At French American, we define cross-cultural cognition as the ability to grapple with challenging and abstract concepts from science and math to humanities, social science, and arts in more than one culture.
  • In pedagogy, this can mean highlighting the different ways that cultures approach the academic disciplines — and even learning itself.
  • We have seen how an international school approach to identity, language, community, curriculum, travel, and sustainability can shape the character of our students for the benefit of our communities — in this country and across the world.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.