Why would you want to involve others in an already culturally diverse classroom? In the last podcast I gave a shout out to Global Collaboration Day (GCD)on September 17th. This is a new initiative but follows in the footsteps of others such as Skype in the Classroom, Flat Classroom (now Flat Connections) and the Day of Intercultural Dialogue. GCD grew out of the annual Global Education Conference which has been offered free online for the last six years.
Why
The culturally responsive classroom is about making the best use of all the resources available in the classroom; different ways of knowing; different ways of learning; knowledge about different parts of the world; leveraging the value of collaboration and ensuring that any differences in status are minimised. All of these results could be amplified through contact and collaboration with global partners. An added bonus is that the group that is present in the classroom is likely to feel a greater sense of belonging when they need to collaborate with external groups.
What
Possible suggested activities include:
- Asynchronous Collaborative Short Term Project
- Synchronous Collaborative Short Term Project
- Asynchronous Long Term Project
- Synchronous Long Term Project
- Birds-of-a-Feather Virtual Meet-Up
- Book Discussion
- Debate
- Informational Session
- Interview with an Expert
- Lecture
- Gaming Experience
- Minecraft Build
- Mystery Hangout
- Mystery Skype Call
- Performance
- Poetry Reading or Slam
- Survey
- Twitter Chat
- Webinar
Caught my eye
While it may be too late to organise event in time for Thursday, it is certainly not too late to join in some of the scheduled events. Some of them would be of interest to teachers generally, not just school teachers. A couple that caught my eye include:
- A film for the Global Goals for classrooms everywhere’ about the new UN Development Goals for the next 20 years which have just been agreed. Partciipants will be watching a short film and having a follow-up Twitter chat.
- Collecting Soundscapes from around the world. I can imagine that when there are several soundscapes collected here that the site could be used for all sorts of different purposes.
- The Marshmallow Challenge: in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. I don’t know if the teams will be global or whether local teams will be competing against each other globally, but it sounds like fun.
See the full list of events here (you need to choose your time zone first so that the times shown are accurate). As far as the adult education classroom is concerned I would recommend getting your learners to come up with their own idea for an event when it repeats in 2016. And certainly, the play acting of the Palestinian class featured in the last podcast sounds as though it would have been an ideal event to include on this special day.
I will be speaking about Culturally Responsive Teaching at this years Global Education Conference. so join me there on November 19th at 20:00 CET for a session entitled ‘Making the most of the cultural resources in the adult ed classroom’.