Craft an "elevator pitch" for why global learning is important within your local context, to an audience of your choosing - using a personal global learning story & Dr. Peeples' 3P Storytelling Framework (from the October conference!) below for guidance.
In the discussion board below, post your "elevator pitch" in written form (up to 200 words) or in an audio file* (up to 60 seconds), as you like.
After you have posted, please comment on at least one other person’s post.
* To upload an audio file: Click the File icon (the page icon w/ the up arrow) & an 'Upload File' window will pop up. In that window, click the 'Choose File' button, then click the 'OK' button when done. The file will then show as a link. There is a size limit of 20 MB.
Comments
As an ESOL teacher in Cartersville, Georgia, I have the opportunity to engage colleagues throughout the school because I work across departments and push-in to multiple subject areas for language support. I am also expected to engage students and their families outside of class. My school also happens to have a magnet program in healthcare sciences, which provides an opportunity to address matters of health in the community. We are also located less than a mile away from a sizable river in Georgia, the Etowah River. Last but not least, a huge Hyundai plant is being built in our county, along with two other plants that will manufacture batteries for the Hyundai plant.
My elevator pitch would be to increase student and family participation in the life of the river through river cleanup days, projects related to the water use of our river, and participation in our state's river monitoring program (all of which are great activities for college applications as well). This would also provide the opportunity to expand our study of water to the communities in Georgia and in other states and countries which are being required to divert huge amounts of water for data centers (one of which is being built about 100 miles away from our school).
I teach in a small, rural South Carolina community, and sometimes, "global" can feel rather far away. Global learning matters in my school and district because my students need (and deserve) to see and understand that their lives are connected to a much larger world. As a social studies teacher, issues such as power, resistance, segregation, citizenship, and public memory serve as a means of showing connections between local history and global history.
Over the last several years, several top-down district level decisions have stifled some school-based initiatives aimed at expanding global learning. These decisions have come about due to a desire to focus more on high-stakes testing results in U.S. History. This has led to the discontinuation of several social studies courses where opportunities for the development of global learning were beginning to flourish - current events, local history and public policy, human geography.
So, as some of our assigned readings indicated, global education looks very different across the United States. In my situation, until district and school leaders get on board, classroom teachers will need to create classroom environments that value diversity and look for natural places within the content standards to make global connections, include diverse perspectives, or reference real-world issues.
I teach in the same community where I grew up, on an island where it's easy to think the world exists somewhere beyond the horizon. Yet the challenges my students face in Nanakuli like climate change, waste management, food security, and environmental stewardship are the same challenges communities around the globe are facing. Through hands-on environmental projects and community engagement, students learn to work with diverse stakeholders, communicate their ideas, and develop solutions that make a real impact becuase it is relevant to the and the community they live in.
My job is to teach local so they are prepared to think global. By building a strong connection to their culture, community, and ʻāina, students gain the confidence and skills needed to address challenges that transcend borders. Global learning helps them see that their voices matter, their experiences have value, and they have a role to play in creating a more sustainable and connected world.
Audience: Teachers and Stakeholders.
In 2023 I had the opportunity to go to Finland and visit schools of various grade levels, The Finnish Ministry of Education and several cultural sites in the country and around the region. The first memorable thing that happened on that trip was a classroom visit to a high school where a student was off task with a phone. Every single American teacher's posture changed and kept glancing at the student then at the teacher waiting for a reaction and none came, but the student did eventually put his phone away and meet expectations. This set the tone for our journey. We would observe things that seemed counter intuitive to what we knew like 3 periods of outside play or recess, students in 2nd grade learning a vocation or home economics skill. , no standardized testing till high school. We were dumfounded and would whisper amongst ourselves things like that wouldn't work with our population of kids. Then we met the refugees and the immigrants.... and were thinking they probably struggled. Imagine our shock when we learned they flourished. Our group leaders challenged us to leave what we knew at the hotel in the remaining days and see every visit as a moment to learn and grow, and we did.
That led to some of us going back to our own buildings and providing recess and outside time to middle schoolers who didn't have it before, introducing more cross curricular project based learning activities, and creating more multi modal learning inclusive classrooms that made every student empowered and welcome. This unbeknownst to me at the time was an example of global learning. I was able to connect glocal problems, or problems that are present on a local and global level, and see how it was being addressed by my peers across the pond, and learn from their successes, or failures, and adapt accordingly what I could within my locus of control or at the very least bring it to the consideration of professionals and stakeholders such as yourself who are vested in creating a well rounded 21st century scholar that is an empathetic critical thinker and problem solver.
I love that you and your colleagues were able to be open to new ideas! Several things that you observed in Finland seem to make a lot of sense to me - no standardized testing until high school and more outside play and/or recess. I read Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing in grad school, and many of its core arguments hit home when my son entered school. My teaching background has always been at the secondary level and I was dumbfounded by how much time my son was expected to spend preparing for standardized testing and completing homework after being in school all day with very little opportunity for active learning or social interaction -- even in the early primary grades! Kudos to you for making changes in your local schools upon returning home!
Chunmei Guan's Elevator Pitch:
Being a world language teacher in Indiana, I am very lucky and blessed to a member of the Advocacy Committeeof Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association ( IFLTA), one of the member of NNELL Advocacy Committee ( National Network of Early Language Learning), the member of CLTA Advocacy Special Task Committee( National Chinese Teachers Assocition of the US) and the member of LAD ( Language Advocacy Day) Planning Committee ( 2024-2026) organized by JNCL-NCLIS( Joint National Committee for Langauges & The Nationall Council for Langauges and International Studies). The experience of the leadership, advocacy strategies, local, state and national advocacy practice have helped our Indiana World Language educators and other WL teachers nationwide to work together and joined the Langauge Advocacy Days either virtually or personally. The most powerful and effective practice was the personal LAD, where I joined our Indiana Advocacy teams to join the congressional meetings with the Senators, Congressmen and theri staff, told our stories, shared our Pagers with the local data and global connections in economy, workforce and education, etc. At the same time, we successfully keep the Seal of Biliteracy in Indiana, which is called Certificate of Multilingual proficiency in January, 2025, which has become the great example of successful advocacy in the US.
In my own school district, I founded the Logansport High School Multicultural Festival in 2022. On May 9th, 2026, we just celebrated the Fifth Annual LHS Multiculutral Festival, which was so successful that the President of Cass County Foundation and the Director invited me to co-organize this event with Cass County next year. We were in the partnership with the City of Logansport and received the grant of $5,000 from the City Council. The event has greatly helped the development of the diverse, multilingual and multiculutral Logansport. And this event has also helped us to increase the enrollment of world language programs.
I am glad to have your resources from our website to use as inspiration for a possible, future festival at my school. I believe celebrating other cultures would give our ESOL students and families the chance to share their pride in their cultures and also show how much we value their participation in our community, at school and beyond.
In speaking with my PLC colleagues, I shared that students say school feels irrelevant, especially in my English12 classes. I honestly think part of the problem is the literature we teach. Too many books they encounter are classic and the characters or their experiences have nothing to do with them. Our students are growing up in a diverse, connected world, but too often the texts in our classrooms don’t reflect their lives, questions, or realities.
In Maryland, many of our students come from different countries, cultures, and experiences. They’re carrying conversations about identity, violence, belonging, mental health, and injustice into our classrooms every day. If we want students to engage deeply, our curriculum has to meet them where they are.
Recently, my students wanted to talk about the gun violence affecting communities around Silver Spring. Their questions pushed me to rethink the texts I was teaching and look for literature that connected more authentically to what they were seeing and feeling. Once students saw themselves and their concerns reflected in the material, the discussions became more honest, thoughtful, and meaningful. Additionally, in my American Studies class we look at texts from different perspectives- partularly from voices that are often left out of mainstream classrooms such as ZitKala-Sa's American Indian Stories, Joy Harjo's poems, and Exit West.
Global learning doesn’t have to mean completely rewriting the curriculum. Sometimes it starts with simply asking students what matters to them and choosing texts that help them see those issues as both local and global. That’s how we make English class feel relevant, human, and worth showing up for.
At my school I am part of 4 member team that are working on a project to create a Culture of Reading. The first thing we did was give out books that were representative of the various cultures and identities found in our school and the sorounding communities. We then worked on creating reading spaces with culturally responsive books. Then we started a what I am reading campaign via social media and other mediums. This is when I had to really examine what we were trying to give our kids, was it authentic, was it genuinely of interest to our students. Seeking student voice and input is essential in creating relevant learning experiences for students like you did. Using this approach will be also helpful as we transition to more globally competent classrooms.
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