Connecting to the world through global education page 13

Educating for Global Citizenship by Head of School Christopher Garten
Last spring, Seven Hills received a generous grant from an educational foundation to
inaugurate a pilot program to fund summer curriculum renewal grants for teachers.
Teachers were encouraged to submit proposals to work over the summer to
redesign a curriculum unit. Though proposals of all kinds were permitted, in
accordance with the school’s strategic plan, priority was given to curriculum
projects which engaged students in utilizing instructional technology to explore
the global community or to projects which would foster students’ critical
reasoning and problem solving skills.
The result was an explosion of faculty creativity. Though we anticipated just a
handful of proposals, in the end we funded 28 individual and group projects.
At Doherty and Lotspeich, several teachers developed a host of highly creative
social studies and foreign language units. The focus of these units was to encourage
students to explore life in other cultures and to interact with their
peers from other countries.
In Middle School, the sixth grade World Geography class was significantly
redesigned to include substantial electronic research and digital projects. In
seventh grade, American History students will work in production teams to
write, storyboard, film, edit, and produce video-podcasts tracing the impact of
Constitutional law on current legal controversies facing the Supreme Court.
Eighth graders will participate in an extended interdisciplinary unit comparing
the Germany of the 1920’s and 1930’s with the society of William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies. They will also communicate online with their peers in German
schools comparing how the events of World War II are taught in our respective
cultures. In a physical science project, students will analyze the effectiveness of solar
cookers used in Africa and design and build more energy efficient models.
In the Upper School, teachers have introduced several new courses, including
a second year of Mandarin Chinese, a video editing course called “Time-Based
Media,” and an Advanced Statistics course. In addition, the Environmental Science
class will conduct a longitudinal study of biodiversity on our campus. The tenth
grade research project has been redesigned to focus students’ attention on a
contemporary social, political, or environmental issue. In a unit called “Global
Connections,” history students will create interactive digital maps tracing the flow
of goods and information along the Silk Road. Ninth grade English students will
look at how cultural differences affect marketing and advertising, and they will plan
and execute their own video advertisements. Senior English will refocus around
the theme of social justice, exploring, through literature and current events, our
collective responsibility as global citizens to work toward resolving social, political,
and racial inequities.
This goal of creating instructional units that focus on fostering global awareness is
but the latest chapter in a movement that began over a decade ago at Seven Hills and
at leading schools across the nation.
In a position paper called “Educating for Global Citizenship” approved in August
2006, the Board of the National Association of Independent Schools identified
the following goals for twenty-first century education. “Independent schools must
prepare students to be knowledgeable, compassionate citizens and effective leaders
within a rapidly transforming world.” NAIS outlined the following Principles of
Good Practice to guide its member schools in this effort.