Global Collaborative Project
When it comes to Global Collaborative, I immediately remembered the first article read on the Zoom blog. This article introduced an international organization called Reach The World. They use Zoom to connect volunteer teachers who went to different countries and share cross-cultural experiences with students back in the United States. Allow students to explore the whole world without leaving the classroom. (Montgomery. J, 2020)
I contacted several friends in China, including teachers, self-media workers. And through zoom for several discussions and exchange ideas; to explore whether we can organize a similar event like Reach The World.
However, after several discussions, we all agreed we needed to have a focus theme for this event. And one of the meanings of our activity this time is cross-cultural, so we decided to encourage students to understand and practice Global citizenship. At the same time, we believe that in the post-digital age, through the Internet and digital tools. People will have no restriction by geography. It has a good understanding. And a harmonious relationship with people of different cultural backgrounds and even live and work together. From this perspective, we believe that the most valuable among them is empathy. So we also hope to bring this message to students in this event. And encourage them to think about how to practice in life. Especially people sometimes lose empathy due to a lack of face-to-face communication in the digital world.
Purpose of Global citizenship
Through this exchange and activity, we hope that students will not be able to achieve the following goals:
- Understanding of world events.
- Think about their values and what’s important to them.
- Take learning into the real world.
- Challenge ignorance and intolerance.
- Involve in their local, national, and global communities.
- Develop an argument and voice their opinions.
- See that they have the power to act and influence the world around them. (www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship)
- Learn to understand the differences of others, try to think about problems, and understand and accept the differences from the situation of others
Design & Plan
Our audience is students from high school to higher education. The main reason for choosing this range is that they have more opportunities to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds. I also hope to lay a solid foundation for them to work in society.
We hope to achieve the following three goals from this project:
- Understand why Global citizenship is affecting the present and future society
- The role of empathy in Global citizenship.
- Encourage students to realize and respond to the action in life real-life environment.
- Encourage students to use social media,digital and electronic tools to help them understand and keep in touch with Global citizenship information, or as a solution to the problem
The event design is divide into several parts, including:
- Because teachers and students are located in different countries or regions, all activities are carried out via the Internet and through the video conferencing platform Zoom. Our goal is about 1 hour and 30 minutes for each activity, including 30 minutes for teacher sharing, 15 minutes for case and topic sharing, and 30 to 45 minutes for group discussion and sharing. Meet once a month for six months.
- Thematic discussion and sharing: Mainly led by teachers. In this part, teachers will share their cultural background and the cross-cultural experience they have experienced. Teachers will also have some real cases and stories, asking students to discuss and express their opinions. Teachers will lead and encourage students to try their point of view or try to put forward solutions from the perspective of the story or the case protagonist’s background. The teacher will guide the students to think about why the protagonist in the case. Why did he /she do this? Or why does not he/she decide this way? Is it anything to do with his cultural background?
- Cross-cultural discussion: For this project, we mainly invited some local students and overseas students in China to participate in this event. Therefore, we also divide them into different groups. There are local students and students from other places in the group. In addition to encouraging them to have group discussions at activities, we also encourage them to establish contact groups outside of the activities. And encourage them to get to know each other and learn about each other’s differences in culture and living habits. And encourage them to select one of the members of the group’s cultural background for in-depth research. And create an article or a short film record as a group report.
- In addition, we also encourage students to make personal reports and share how they implement what they have learned in class in their lives. You can also share the difficulties encountered in the process and their reflections.
Result & Reflection
So far, we have been able to complete the first part. We invited one of ours teacher. From southwest China to share the difficulties and challenges she faced in her cross-cultural experience. Among them, she shared about leaving the small city where he grew up to study in a foreign country. She shared it was difficult for her to meet new friends in the beginning. Because of the language barrier and different lifestyles. Also, felt discriminated against by others, but he did not give up. In turn, he tried to change the angle to understand why others understand her expression and what misunderstandings are in it. In the end, she learned that everything should not first require others to comprehend about you, but should take the initiative to understand others. That is the empathy she learned from the process of cross-cultural. And it is the qualities and values of Global citizens. We believe it will start. It is a good testimony and sharing, which has laid a good foundation for the students understanding this topic.
The other part we have already achieved is to share the case and the true story. We used a story about the residents crossing the river with a zip line in the Nujiang River area, China as an example. The story tells that residents have used ziplines to go from one side of the river cliff to the other since ancient times. This method is very dangerous, but even in modern society there are already bridges connecting the two sides, but many residents still maintain this tradition. We encourage students to ask questions and try to find solutions to help these residents. Some students proposed to change the living habits of residents through cash reward methods or implement laws to learn to use the bridge as a method of crossing the strait.
But soon some students considered that the use of the ziplines by the local aborigines was already a tradition, or they wanted to preserve this tradition and culture. So they proposed to change this kind of zipline into a kind of tourism project, so that this kind of culture can be preserved. At the same time, residents are encouraged to learn to use bridges. And can use the benefits from tourism projects to repair bridges and improve the education level of residents.
The teacher did not point out which method is better, but we believe that students will be able to understand step by step the most important attitude of empathy in dealing with contradictions and conflicts in the face of culturally different environments. Although, as teachers, we did not point out that we directly explain the importance of empathy, we believe that students can become interested and concerned about this topic, which has achieved our goal.
In this plan, the remaining part that we have not completed is mainly to enable our students to have real cross-cultural communication. At the same time, we found that there are certain restrictions on interaction with the use of Zoom, this type of online meeting software. If we hope that students can have more opportunities for interaction, we may be in the next activity use the platform like Gether Town or other virtual event programs. Hope to improve the interaction and communication between students.
In addition, we also encourage students to try to download some relevant global citizen app or following blogs. Continue to pay attention to what is happening in different parts of the world and try to think with empathy about how to solve these problems and challenges.
Finally, due to the epidemic situation, all our activities can only be carried out virtually online. There seems to be a face-to-face relationship in the middle. But we encourage students not to feel helpless in this way. Instead, we must actively think about how to use technology to break through these boundaries. Because we believe that in addition to empathy, optimistic facing things, positive thinking and seeking solutions, all these are good global citizens who possess character and attitude.
Reference:
Montgomery. J, (2020) Students explore the world without leaving the classroom, https://blog.zoom.us/students-explore-the-world-without-leaving-the-classroom/
What is global citizenship, www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lr.globalcitizen.com&hl=en
