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OPINION Published Monday, May 10, 2004 Professor Fernando Reimers, director of the International Education Policy (IEP) program at HGSE, encourages us to question the nature of what children learn about international issues and global citizenship in their classrooms. “What do children in the Americas learn about each other? About the interdependent nature of the challenges they face? About the opportunities for collaboration across national boundaries?” The need for these issues to be addressed within and by all schools is more urgent than ever. We live in an historical time when fear of cultural diversity and the unknown create divisions between citizens of the world that are often manifest in acts of violence instead of collaboration. As citizens and as University community members with access to a resource-rich environment like Harvard, it is our responsibility to address these questions with practical and realistic initiatives to build truly global partnerships and cultural understanding. Pursuing this idea, a group of two students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), together with three students of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), created the idea of Harvard World View Exchange (HWVE). This innovative, simple entrepreneurial venture was born of the realization that the diverse expertise of Harvard graduate students that were either from other countries or who had lived and worked for extensive periods abroad, was a tremendous and virtually untapped resource. Of course, we as students and faculty at this institution benefit from this richness of international experience and cultural exchange every day. However, we wondered if there was a simple and effective way to share this resource with the larger Boston area community. Pursuing this vision, and in just one semester, our team created a structure of teacher contacts in various local school districts and successfully began to bring teams of Harvard graduate students from our two schools to speak in classrooms. The speakers came from diverse backgrounds, some with extensive teaching experience, some with interest in education policy, and some with experience in business, consulting or management. They spoke about places as diverse as Sri Lanka, Japan, India, and various locations in Latin America. They presented PowerPoint presentations, music, videos and games to engage the students. This past Saturday, a group of 20 students from KSG and HGSE, together with our HWVE mentor, Angela Coffidis (a teacher of English Language Learners from the Newton Public School District), met for a brainstorming session and celebration of the work that we have done thus far. The consensus view at the meeting was that of overwhelmingly positive support for this initiative. HWVE is not just an international speaker program; it is a new kind of collaboration that brings together diverse groups from within Harvard, and connects these people to local schools, classroom teachers, and students. This is accomplished using already existing resources and an extraordinary amount of volunteerism. Both the supply of willing and eager volunteers, and the demand expressed by classroom teachers, are testaments to the fact that this program should be growing in size. Last Saturday, many ideas about further expansion and needs that this group could address were laid out, as were suggestions for programmatic improvement and structural adjustments. Still, a key question from Saturday was left largely unanswered. How can we transform this student-initiated and student-run project into a viable organization that can continue to grow with its increasing popularity and usefulness even after our particular group has left? This important question remains, though it will be our central focus as we wind down the semester. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ There will be one more opportunity this semester to visit a local
school with HWVE on Saturday, May 22, in Roxbury, MA. If you would like more information about HWVE, please contact: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rebekka Olsen is an Ed.M. candidate in International Education
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