Not long ago, I asked a freshman enrolled in an Arabic-language course what motivated her to learn this important but difficult language when she was already bilingual with native Spanish and acquired English. It was her middle and high school teachers, she said, who stimulated her interest in the Middle East and its people. This interest led her to major in Middle Eastern and North African studies at UCLA, with plans for graduate study in business and a career in international banking.
As it happens, her teachers, and more than 1,250 others, are graduates of workshops and seminars organized by the UCLA International Institute, where they learned to inspire students to think outside of their immediate cultural settings and explore the world beyond their own doorsteps. In this age of globalization and worldwide interconnections, such programs are a high priority for the U.S. Department of Education, with the aim of giving teachers expertise to nurture young minds and cultivate student interest in global regions deemed vital to America’s interests.
Meeting the national interest has been a significant function of our education system since the founding of this country. Our schools rallied to the cause in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and we realized that the United States was lagging far behind in math and science education. Some 20 years later — on the brink of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran — a U.S. presidential commission concluded that our students’ knowledge of the world was lacking and that as a matter of national security it was imperative to improve teaching about international issues and promote the study of foreign languages, especially those that are less commonly taught.
Since that time, the Department of Education has helped to establish a university-based network of some 200 federally designated National Resource Centers (NRCs) for education and research in area studies, foreign languages and international business. A key goal of this network — which includes five such NRCs based at the UCLA International Institute — is outreach to train teachers to advance the study of global regions in their classrooms.
Postgraduate teacher training is an effective and practical way to address the shortcomings of teacher preparation in the field of international studies. These training programs, ranging from intensive summer workshops to year-round teachers-as-scholars seminars that address issues critical to Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, take advantage of the inherent synergies between formative and higher education, especially in areas where curriculum and coursework intersect — from world history, international relations and global economics to multiculturalism as practiced around the world and in cosmopolitan Los Angeles.
While teachers are conveyors of knowledge about our world, students are the future generation who must interact competitively in a complex global environment. One of the best ways to provide younger students with a clear perspective on international topics is to send advanced graduate students from various global regions into the K–12 classroom.
At Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, for example, a doctoral student affiliated with the Center for Near Eastern Studies recently spoke to sophomores about Ramadan and the tenets of Islam — a topic that clearly is of significant importance at this time. Offering insights from her personal experiences in Afghanistan and the U.S., she was able to demystify Islam and provoke students to question some of their preconceptions of non-Western societies and cultures.
Connections are further extended through projects that directly link students here with their contemporaries in other countries. One such recent project brought together via the Internet students from five middle schools in the San Fernando Valley with those from two middle schools in Kabul, Afghanistan. Working collaboratively with specialists affiliated with the International Institute, faculty members at Holmes Middle School International Humanities Magnet in Northridge designed a curriculum to build common ground and facilitate exchanges between the American and the Afghan students. At the same time, the National Geographic Society produced a special map and the global aid group Relief International provided translations, equipment and technology.
The exchanges between the students were quite revealing. When asked about the “10 Things That Make Us Smile,” the American students cited movies, malls, theme parks and air conditioning; the Afghan students talked about girls again being able to go to school — something that was prohibited under the Taliban regime — and sharing the same classroom with boys. Such interactions promote the goal of creating global citizens and establishing connections between peoples across cultural and territorial divides.
Travel is another means to encourage connections. Teachers have been taken on study tours of China, Korea and Japan, after which they return with an abundance of resources, experiences and good will that enriches their classroom instruction with fresh content and enthusiasm. These experiences help to meet the national need in the post-9/11 era for citizens, especially educators, to gain firsthand knowledge of other societies and cultures, just as visitors from abroad who have traveled here have learned to value and appreciate the United States and its people.
While the impact of K–12 international-studies outreach may be immeasurable in terms of intellectual stimulation and professional growth for the teachers who go through such programs, it is quantifiable in terms of the millions of students nationwide who are the beneficiaries of enriched education across the pre-collegiate curriculum. Students who have been exposed to these programs may, like the young woman in the Arabic-language class, be inspired to enroll in university courses that will help to further shape them as global citizens. And by so doing, they will participate in the fulfillment of the mission of the university, and that of the International Institute to educate a new generation of citizens and leaders “who are wise enough to know that an open mind is the passport to a better future world, and committed enough to devote their energies to building it.”
