Washington is hosting teams from the New Jersey and West Virginia State Departments of Education this week. We’ll be heading down tomorrow to Olympia for a visit at Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, then on to Vancouver, WA for the Global Competence Institute on August 11. It’s all part of our current Longview multi-state grant on “Developing Global Competence in Students and Teachers.”
Both our WA team (Kelly Martin and I from OSPI) and the NJ team traveled to WV last month to attend their Go Global Academy for teachers. It was great getting to participate in professional development workshops for teachers in a different state and especially to hear about all the excellent work taking place in New Jersey on globalizing and integrating the standards and providing helpful resources to teachers.
Today we had the opportunity to reciprocate a bit by giving our visitors from NJ and WV a bit of a tour around the Seattle area. Our first stop was a meeting with folks from Chief Sealth International High School in West Seattle. They talked about the steps they’ve been taking to internationalize their school and provide global learning experiences to many more students, as well as their partnerships with non-profit organizations like Global Visionaries and Bridges to Understanding.
Our meeting actually took place at Denny International Middle School since the recently remodeled Chief Sealth is not quite open yet. Denny has been hosting the Confucius Institute of the State of Washington Education Center this year. Dawei Yang (or Yang, Dawei if you put the last name first) is one of Seattle’s seven visiting teachers from China and teaches Mandarin Chinese at Denny and Chief Sealth, while also serving as interim site coordinator for the Confucius Institute Education Center. He shared some stories of teaching his students about global perspective by comparing how different nations view maps of the world, for example. Quite intriguing to realize that not everyone views even geographic information in the same way.
We headed north again and had a quick visit with one of the Japanese immersion teachers at John Stanford International School in Wallingford. This is Seattle’s oldest international school, founded in 2000. Their program features Spanish and Japanese partial immersion from grades K-5, where students spend half their day learning Math, Science, Social Studies, and other academic content in the immersion language. While the walls were not yet filled with student work and language-rich examples, you could still imagine the excitement of being in a school where everyone is learning a new language. In one of the Coalition’s earlier Longview-funded grant projects, we published the Seattle International Schools Model Guidelines, which documents the philosophy and practices found at the school (and now being incorporated into the other international schools in Seattle).
A quick drive west and we arrived at the offices of Bridges to Understanding, which is fortunate to be housed in a lovely building in Fremont with Getty Images. Bridges is doing amazing work with schools in America and several locations around the world on digital storytelling. They’ll be going to Vancouver with us tomorrow to present at the Global Competence Institute.
The day passed quickly by. A little too leisurely lunch at Ivar’s Salmon House caused us to miss a planned meeting at Global Washington, which is another non-profit doing important work in Washington on global development. We missed visiting our World Affairs Council Global Classroom colleagues, who are also partners on the Longview Foundation grant, but they’ll be joining us at the Global Competence Institute in Vancouver.
— Michele Anciaux Aoki, OSPI World Languages Program Supervisor
We’ll be bringing 3 of the visiting teachers to our Global Competence Institute in Vancouver on Wednesday. I’ll be very interested in their experience and perspective on global competence and education in the United States. Congratulations on the blog!