Nexus

One of the things I love most about teaching is the opportunity we have to “start fresh” each school year - with new students and new possibilities. As we plan for the learning opportunities we will facilitate for our students, we need to step back from our curricula, lists of outcomes, and standards; step way back, and keep backing up, until a bigger picture starts to come into focus. Once we have the perspective of that bigger picture, we can zoom in again on the outcomes and standards as required.

In our ISS07 Project, students are blogging with astronaut Clay Anderson, currently stationed on the International Space Station. In his blog entry from last week, Clay talks about his perspective of the Earth as being free of borders and our home:

Living on the International Space Station (ISS) gives me a perspective that I often imagined on the ground, but now I am blessed to have first hand knowledge of that perspective and to put it simply, it boggles my imagination! As many before me have often said, “…our world is a beautiful place; devoid of all boundaries.” Indeed it is! I have seen the glory of God’s own hands from 220 nautical miles above the Earth. It is a place that is absolutely free of borders; a place where its beauty is for lack of a better word…overwhelming. I have been amazed at the differences you can see from orbit, simply by the change in the sun’s angle, the time of day or the direction from which I look.

On board the ISS, we circle the globe once every ninety minutes. During our 24-hour days, we have the opportunity to witness 16 sunrises and sunsets. When the weather cooperates, I have revered the rugged snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the U. S. and Canada. I have admired the cool, green-fanned delta of the River Nile and the silent (for now!) and sleepy volcanoes of the Galapagos Islands. I have been in awe of the endlessly expanding tentacles of the vine-like Grand Canyon and the quiet, sweeping majesty of our moon, smoothly and quickly sinking below the multi-shaded blue atmosphere of our home, just waiting for its next appearance over our home…the planet Earth.

I think that it is imperative that educators view curricula and plan their course outlines with this global perspective in mind. Our students will be living and working in a world where economies, scientific advances and social interactions happen not only on a global scale, but also on an interplanetary scale.

This coming Friday, (Aug. 3), the Phoenix Lander is scheduled to launch to Mars. Like all space exploration projects, this is an international effort, a collaboration between scientists, industry and governments from several countries. (This particular mission is led by the University of Arizona in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Space Systems and supported by the Canadian Space Agency, York University, the University of Neuchatel, the University of Copenhagen, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany). The purpose of this “scout” mission is to take samples from the North Polar ice cap of Mars to study the geologic history of water on that planet. Further robotic missions are planned by the international community, followed by manned space missions to the Moon by 2020 and to Mars, possibly by 2025.

Students entering kindergarten this fall will graduate from high school in 2020. This group of students will likely be the young people who train to become the scientists, engineers, communication specialists, systems analysts, computer programmers, agriculture specialists, materials specialists etc. etc. who plan for and take part in manned interplanetary missions. These young people will work collaboratively to solve problems on international, global, and interplanetary levels.

So, as you plan for the new school year, ask yourself:

• What experiences will help my students develop the sense that they belong to a much larger community?
• What parts of my curricula lend themselves to collaboration with another class - a neighboring class, or a class on the other side of the world?
• What tools will we need to use to promote and facilitate collaborative problem-solving?
• How can I build my own professional support system to help me think globally?

Don’t stop there! Ask these questions of your colleagues, your administration and your parent groups. Join an educational networking community such as Classroom 2.0, EduBloggerWorld, or Global Education to make contact with educators from around the globe.

Think big!

Technorati tags: global education ISS07 Project Clayton Anderson Phoenix Lander Classroom 2.0 Edubloggerworld

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Image Citation
NASA. The Canadian Rockies. 5 july 2007. 29 Jul 2007 <http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-15/hires/iss015e16590.jpg >.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 6:07 am and is filed under global education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.