global education and global teacher

GLOBAL EDUCATION AND THE GLOBAL TEACHER

“Benchmarking is learning thebest from the best practices ofthe world’s best educationalsystems.”


To compete globally would mean to prepare teachers who arecapable of changing lifelong educational needs.

How do you prepare for these needs?What are the emerging technologies that will shape the future? How can we use our technologies for the best learning

advantage?What will be the jobs of the future and how should curricula be

shaped to prepare students for their future?


Global EducationGlobal education has been best described by two definitions:

1. UNESCO defines global education as a goal to become aware ofeducational conditions or lack of it, in developing countriesworldwide and aim to educate all people to a certain worldstandards.

2. Is a curriculum that is international in scope which preparestoday’s youth around the world to function in one worldenvironment under teachers who are intellectually,professionally and humanistically prepared.


The United Nations entered into an agreement to pursue six goals toachieve some standard of education in placed by 2015 worldwide. Toachieved global education, the UN sets the following goals:

1. Expand early childhood care education.2. Provide free and compulsory primary education for all.3. Promote learning and life skills for young and adult.4. Increase adult literacy by 50%.5. Achieve gender parity by 2015, gender quality by 2015 and6. Improve quality of education.


James Becker (1982) defined global education as an effort to helpindividual learners to see the world as a single and global system andto see themselves as a participant in that system. It is a schoolcurriculum that has a worldwide standard of teaching and learning.This curriculum prepares learners in an international market placewith a world view of international understanding. In his article “Goalsof Global Education,” Becker emphasized that global educationincorporates into the curriculum and education experiences of eachstudent a knowledge and empathy of cultures of the nation and theworld.


Thus, to meet the various global challenges of the future, the 21st

Century Learning Goals have been established as basis of variouscurricula worldwide. These learning goals include:

21st century content: emerging content areas such as globalawareness, financial, economic, business, and entrepreneurialliteracy; civic literacy; health and awareness.

Learning and thinking skills: critical thinking and problem solvingskills, communication, creativity and innovation, collaboration,contextual learning, information and media literacy.

ICT literacy: Using technology in the context of learning so studentsknow how to learn.


Thus, to meet the various global challenges of the future, the 21st

Century Learning Goals have been established as basis of variouscurricula worldwide. These learning goals include:

Life Skills: Leadership, ethics, accountability, personalresponsibility, self-directions, other

21st Century Assessment: Authentic assessment that measure theareas of learning.


Global education is all about diversity, understanding the differencesand teaching the different cultural group in order to achieve the goalsof global education as presented by the United Nations. It iseducating all people in the world from the remote and rugged ruralvillages in developing countries, to the slum areas of urbanizedcountries, to the highly influential and economically stable societiesof the world. Global education addresses the need of the smallestschools, to the largest classrooms in the world. It responds toborderless education that defies distance and geographical location.


Global Teacher

Looking back at that concept of global education, how do we definenow a global teacher? Is this teacher somebody who teaches abroad?Is this person teaching anywhere in the world, and is able to teach the21st century learning goals? These are some of the fundamentalquestions which should be answered in order to understand, who a

GLOBAL TEACHER is.GLOBAL TEACHER


Global Teacher

A GLOBAL TEACHER is a competent

teacher who is armed with enough skills, appropriate attitude anduniversal values to teach students with both time tested as well asmodern technologies in education in any place in the world. He or sheis someone who thinks and acts both locally and globally withworldwide perspectives, right in the communities where he or she issituated.


More specifically a global Filipino teacher should have the followingqualities and characteristics in addition to knowledge, skills andvalues:

Understands how this world is interconnected; Recognizes that the world has rich variety of ways if life; Has a vision of the future and sees what the future would be for

himself/herself and the students; Must be creative and innovative; Must understand, respect and be tolerant of the diversity of

cultures;


Must believe and take action for education that well sustain thefuture;

Must be able to facilitate digitally-mediated learning; Must have depth knowledge; and Must possess good communication skills (for Filipino teachers to be

multilingual).And lastly but more importantly, Must possess the competencies of a professional teacher as

embodies in the National Competency-Based Standards forTeachers (NCBTS).


The need for global teacher is on the rise in several countriesworldwide. Even develop countries are in dire need of competentteachers who will man the countries’ rural and urban classrooms. Thisis true with our neighboring countries like Singapore, Cambodia andThailand. The regional data of United Nations show the number ofteaching posts needed by 2015.


The table below shows the teaching posts needed by 2015, which you may avail of, if you are qualified.

243,000.00

80,00022,000

104,00010,000

155,000

292,000

1,115,000

0.00

200,000.00

400,000.00

600,000.00

800,000.00

1,000,000.00

1,200,000.00

Numbers of New Teaching PositionsNeeded by 2015 by Thousands

Numbers of New TeachingPositionsNeeded by 2015 by Thousands


EDUARDO O. SABANGAN