The world has become a very small place in the 21st century, and DC students need to be a part of it.
The Need
Our economy is increasingly globalized, new technologies accelerate global communication, and new migration patterns significantly increase the cultural diversity and global connections within our local communities and workplaces. More than ever, the big social, economic, and environmental challenges facing us in the 21st century require global cooperation and global solutions. For anyone who needed convincing, the two great events of 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic and the global reverberations of the Black Lives Matter movement following the brutal killing of George Floyd – stand as undeniable evidence that for better and worse, across the world, our lives and futures are inextricably bound together.
Over the last two decades, national and state-level leaders in the government, business, and education sectors have begun to assert the critical importance of equipping American students with global competencies – the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and experiences they will need not only to compete but also to participate in and contribute to our globally interconnected world community. A new consensus is emerging that global education, including world language study, can no longer be treated as elective or boutique subjects, primarily for high-achieving or privileged students, but must become part of the core learning experience for all PK-12 students, regardless of economic or social circumstance.
Beyond addressing what is taught in our city’s classrooms, serious attention must be paid to creating equity, expanding access, establishing appropriate support systems, and most importantly, challenging head-on the deeply embedded beliefs that suggest that a global future is beyond the reach of many of our students – Black and Latinx, the poor, first generation immigrants, the geographically marginalized, and the academically low performing. We know that, given the opportunity, these students can thrive in global and cross-cultural settings. In fact, we find that the impact of global education and quality international experiences, by expanding horizons and opening a world of new possibilities, is most powerful among those very students who have been traditionally excluded.
The Opportunity and DC’s Unrealized Potential
More than any other American city, Washington, DC is uniquely positioned to respond to this call to action. One might imagine DC students would be among the most globally savvy in the nation, given DC’s unparalleled concentration of international and globally focused resources (embassies and international organizations, government agencies, NGOs, universities, think tanks, businesses, museums and cultural institutions), rich with expertise and real-world career connections. Many of these organizations have a genuine interest in helping create a new generation of diverse and globally aware citizens and have a demonstrated history of reaching out to local DC students, educators, and schools, offering a range of free programs, resources, and one-of-a-kind opportunities. But these programs have too often tended to be “one off,” discontinuous, uncoordinated, tangential to the core curriculum, and inequitably available, with limited access in the more underserved schools and geographically distant neighborhoods. Even with renewed commitment to global education commitment from DC Public Schools, structural impediments create significant challenges and inefficiencies for the many organizations and individuals with resources and expertise to share.
As with so much else in the nation’s capital, we still have a wide gulf between the “global city” and young people in our local neighborhoods – representing many disconnects, missed opportunities, and huge unrealized potential. We have the power to change this.
The Solution
In order to achieve the quality, sustainability, and equity in K-12 global education and language learning that truly matches DC’s aspirations as a global city, we need to adopt a strategic, intentional, and coordinated approach. We need to build the infrastructure necessary to facilitate and support connections between our city’s global assets and our local students and educators; that can provide a platform for public-private collaboration; and serve as a catalyst for innovative, equitably available global education and language learning for DC K-12 students – both DCPS and charter. We need to develop creative solutions that cut across individual schools and education sectors, and re-think the role of out-of-school time programs as a vehicle for offering academic content and experiences not available during the school day. Globalize DC was created to fill this unique and much needed role.