Peace is a culture that we create by putting it in the curriculum for young people, through creating this next generation where young people get a chance to go across borders, across cultures, to learn more about each other’s life, to create a global community, learn about opportunities for helping others. It’s investing in peace and tolerance training, ending the gap between rich and poor.
Craig Kielburger
Despite the popular saying, ignorance is not bliss. As educators, our eternal mission is to continuously provide opportunities for our students to learn. This learning does not have to be limited to a specific content area or curriculum; in fact, schools would be incredibly boring if teachers kept their lessons strictly to one topic each lesson. Just as educators defend the importance of their classes, we need to advocate for global perspectives. Students need exposure to different cultures, communities, and lifestyles so they can be informed members of our global society.
Students need to learn about areas outside of where they live. Different parts of the globe live completely different lives in every aspect. Students should have endless chances to see and learn about how people from different areas live so that they can compare their experiences with others. Students living in North America versus students living in Africa or Australia all have different stories to tell about the places they’ve been, the things they have seen, and the people they have met. As individuals, our stories should be shared with others so that everyone can see life from different perspectives. If we never give our students the chance to see where people in Southern Asia live or the food that people in Antarctica rely on, we are denying them crucial social knowledge.
The importance of exposure to different communities goes far beyond knowing facts about different places across the world. When we teach our students about different cultures, we are teaching them about respect, tolerance, and acceptance of people who seem different. We are teaching our students to go into situations with an open mind without judging somebody based on their race, religion, or culture. When we introduce our students to new places and groups of people, we always need to remind them that prejudice has no place in our lives. We need to be able to respect everybody and that respect can grow from knowledge and understanding. Instead of criticizing or mocking another culture’s rituals or customs simply because they seem so different from ours, our students should be encouraged to put themselves into that community and try to imagine living there.
Technology is the best tool that can be leveraged to inform our students of the world around them. Any question can be answered, every picture displayed, and thousands of videos played whenever students are encouraged to search. There is genuinely an endless amount of research on communities across the globe that is available online. Technology is our greatest tool as educators to open the door to another culture. Google Earth is a great place to start where students can see the geographical location of the country or city they are learning about. Google Earth can also connect students with online pages that contain more information about specific landmarks or buildings. Online penpal services are an amazing way to personally connect students from different places together. Being able to directly communicate with somebody their own age who is living in this unfamiliar place creates a link between the two communities. Students can see how similar they are to people on the other side of the world!
It is crucial that students are exposed to communities and cultures that differ from their own. Ethnocentricism is the belief that one’s own culture is better than any other. It is a detrimental mindset to carry as it prevents appreciation and respect for the differences between people across the globe. This is a mindset that we, as educators, need to prevent our students from developing. We must strive to teach about cultures and communities as exciting, interesting, and amazing parts of our world that uniquely contribute to our global society.
Jessica's Blog: The Learning Curve of Teaching 