Some Ideas on EGC: Credits/Abstract

Some Ideas on Education for Global Citizenship
for Adult ESL Educators

by Lisa Braley
M.A. TESOL, SJSU (completed 12/07)

For ANTH 187 – Global Citizenship

Suggested Audience:
ESL Teachers, Teachers, people working with Immigrants

Interconnected Topics:
ESL, Global Citizenship, Immigration, Citizenship, Immigrant Rights, Diversity, Social Policy, Leadership and Training, Social Consciousness, Political/Cultural Identity, the Internet and civic engagement, Poverty, Education, Ethnic Community Groups, Terrorism, Welfare (TANF), Government Resources, and more.

Abstract Draft
Immigrants’ connections back to home countries may be more important than we think. Whether immigration gives people a safer existence or greater opportunities, those who teach to English-learners should try to prepare them for a new future. However, ESL students will never forget their home countries. Just as these hereditary links, maintained so devotedly, are one kind of substantiation of our interconnected globe, simple classroom exchanges may also have further implications. What if what happens in an ESL classroom could also offer prospects toward educating and creating a new global citizenry with a capacity for change agency in their present community or home nations?

If today’s English lesson may one day travel forward to a student’s home country associations, what should Adult ESL Teachers be teaching, and adding to their daily lessons? This paper explores the idea that when teaching English to Adult students in ESL classes, educators could also be shaping global citizens. This paper discusses the possibility that immigrant ESL education may have more long term effects and be more far reaching than is currently imagined today. It also looks at what student needs might be and what areas, topics, and lessons could be included. (182 words)

Interconnected Topics

ESL, Education for Global Citizenship, Global Citizenship, Immigration, Citizen, Citizenship, Immigrant Rights, Integration, Diversity, Social Policy, Leadership and Training, Social Consciousness, Political/Cultural Identity, the Internet, civic engagement, Poverty, Education, Environment, Ethnic Community Groups, Terrorism, Welfare (TANF), Government Resources, Environment, and more.

List of Ideas

1. Find ways to encourage students’ environmental interests on issues that are personally meaningful to them

2. Include classroom activities that create a framework for learning global citizenry skills

3. Identify skills that require students to grow to be global citizens, name them and their applications.

4. Ask them to define their own cultural identity and share that with other students

5. Find a way to ask students to share pertinent non-western perspectives to intercultural communication activities, incorporate “culturally responsive teaching”

6. Help students understand general workplace language, skills and dynamics as foundation skills that will assist them anywhere on the globe.

7. Introduce key vocabulary (sustainability, waste, excess, green, recyclable, trade-offs, long term, short term, consumption, consumer, social responsibility, fair trade)

8. Ask them to make an environmental pledge (I will put all plastic bottles in a recycle bin, not a garbage can)

9. Ask them to make a list of services we get for free from the environment

10. Learn how to be a wise consumer, spend with a conscious

11. Encourage some kind of action as a new production of knowledge

12. Study the city or school’s recycling policies

13. Help make the classroom more efficient for recycling and energy

14. Have the class design an informative display/bulletin board about their learning on recycling

15. Encourage welcome groups for new students

16. Promote activities that encourage student leadership
Living and working only within their own ethnic community or not integrating means that they don’t take a leadership role in the community. It could take one or more generations to understand roles and civic responsibilities. Ethnic community groups don’t know how develop leaders that can take a role both inside the group and outside to the larger community. Hence a diverse city needs to understand global citizenship leadership qualities and build consensus with other minority ethnic groups in the community to get their issues heard and understood rather than continue to be marginalized.

17. Discuss choices people/government/and communities make about the environment, the tradeoffs and connections

18. Elicit information from the class and write about something from a totally different point of view than people are used to

19. Have a group of students try to point to places on a map with a pencil. Each person has a string attached to the pencil. Do it with a rubber band. Do it blindfolded. Do it with your hands tied behind your back. This really shows how we must try to act in concert. (Idea from Dr. Reckmeyere.)