Carla Marschall on Worldwise Learning

So, world-wise learning is an approach where we use local, global, or intercultural issues as curricular organizers to support the development of students’ global competence, their connection to their communities, and their ability to feel agente, so have agency in the learning process and then take action on their learning. We love everything about that.

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rook. Today I’m talking to Carla Marshall. She’s the co-author of a great new book called World-Wise Learning, the Teacher’s Guide to Shaping a Just and Sustainable Future.

Carla is my favorite book title of 2021. It’s a fantastic guide for K-8 teachers and learners. It helps teachers understand how to build global competence. Carla learned global competence professionally as an international educator. She has had leadership roles in Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong, and now in Singapore,

where she serves as the director of teaching and learning at UWC Southeast Asia. That’s part of a global network of United World College schools. We’ll talk about that later in the episode. Their mission is that education is a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.

Carla, good morning. Thank you for joining us. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. We really love your book.

I imagine it was a labor of love. How long was it in the making, Carla? Yes, so Elizabeth and I, so Elizabeth, my co-author, she’s based in North Carolina. She’s a professor of education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Interestingly, she and I got speaking to each other on Twitter.

We connected on Twitter and said, oh, you’re interested in writing something on this topic, that we don’t feel that there’s something right now that’s available practically for teachers about how to take ideas around teaching for sustainability or global competence or even experiential learning and bring it down to a practical classroom level. She and I got started around January 2020 when we signed the contract with Corwin.

How did we know that we would be thrown into the complexity of the pandemic, which both showed the relevance of the ideas that we were trying to speak to in the book? So that was very affirming for us. But of course, we’ve both got young kids and trying to do this at the same time as working from home and everything else was challenging.

Carla, we just love this definition of global competence. I want to read it and comment on it. If global competence is the versatile application of learning to navigate complex issues, super important, underline, that’s really what the future is all about. Carla, it’s navigating complex issues.

Students need to be presented with rich learning experiences that require them to problem solve. They need to be nudged into that territory where they feel challenged to use their learning with adaptability. Love that. If I was highlighting or just highlight this whole paragraph, such learning nurtures students

a holistic, well-being, peaceful relationships with others and appreciation for nature. We love that. That’s the power of place. In other words, simply understanding an issue is not enough. We want learners to feel a genuine concern.

Mason, our producer and I talk about a mutuality, gaining an appreciation of mutuality, a genuine concern and love for the world around them. We want learners to view themselves as capable and confident in affecting positive, long-lasting change. That’s just such a beautiful summary of what you call world-wise learners.

There’s so much to unpack there. I guess maybe you could try to help us understand a little bit of the backstory and how you came to that understanding because it’s really a profound summary of how you view education today. Yes, so I think there’s a few premises before talking about global competence.

One is this idea of a VUCA world. We have this idea that the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That VUCA world, combined with forces such as globalization, has produced some intended and unintended outcomes, which means that our learners are going to need to navigate that territory where, number one, they’re not going to necessarily know what the answers

are or even what kind of questions they should be asking about what they’re seeing around them. That’s a premise about how they should be engaging with the future. The second is that because of globalization, we have a few overarching trends that we’re noticing.

One is cultural diffusion, migration has increased over time, which means we need to learn to interact with people who may not think the same as us or be from the same linguistic or cultural or national background. The second is around this idea of the world of work, the way work is changing within that context of globalization.

And then the third is the presence of global challenges. These are persistent. They go across scales. They don’t have one solution. You can’t break it down into parts and just say, oh, this is the answer to global warming.

It doesn’t work that way. With all these things together, global competence in our students is one way to try and prepare them for a world that we’re not really sure what it’s going to look like. We know that it will be volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And then the question becomes, well, what does a pedagogy look like that actually allows

students to feel comfortable with that or at least be able to ride the wave of complexity that they see around them? Well, if anybody didn’t get VUCA the last two years, I think convinced most people that the world is extraordinarily complex and really volatile. We talk about novelty and complexity, that young people are going to face so much more

new stuff and that every system, every society is just so much more complicated. While I was struck by my first school visits in two years last week, I visited a half a dozen schools. And many of those schools, I still saw worksheets with small problems with right answers. And what you just described is a very different world where many of the problems that young

people face are going to be very complex, never having been experienced by this race. And as you said, they’re going to address those problems with a diverse team. That team may be local, but it also may be a virtual team. And they’re going to be using smart tools. So just everything about that, new problems, new tools, diverse teams is a very different

world, right? Absolutely. And I think the important thing here is we’re not necessarily advocating for throwing the baby out with a bathwater. There’s much to be kind of kept from a disciplinary approach in terms of learning.

We want students to become literate, and that’s across the different types of literacies. You know, traditional reading and writing, of course, is important, but digital literacy, information literacy, data literacy, media literacy, these are also important literacies that we are developing in the classroom. The question just becomes, how do we ask students to actually use what they learn?

So I don’t think it’s going to work to say to students, yes, at some point in 10 or 15 years after you’ve done your worksheet, then you can finally actualize the learning that you’ve just encountered in some kind of real world context. Number one, I think our learners are feeling like it’s not serving them. You know, there’s research from organizations such as WISE based out of Qatar, where they

interviewed students about, you know, do you feel that you’re able to understand and take action on the issues you see in the world? And the large majority of them, more than half saying, no, I don’t. But that they actually have a deep desire and kind of will to take action on them. So there’s a mismatch between our model of education, the issues we have in the world

that require problem solving and our students desire to feel that ownership and agency over the learning process. I love that you called it a genetic learning. And I appreciate you mentioning the WISE Foundation. The last recipient was Larry Rosenstock, our friend from High Tech Eye, who’s been advancing

project and problem based learning for 40 years. Let’s dive into pedagogy. In the book, you call it a pedagogy for people, planet and prosperity. We love that to nurture ways of thinking critically with compassion to explore alternative futures, take action to ensure their own others and planets well being.

So we appreciate a lot about that. The action orientation, the agency to make a difference now, not preparing for 10 years from now. How would you describe this pedagogy? So the way that this pedagogy came about was through the development of our world wise

learning cycle. So we have a cycle where we’re using issues, which can be local, global or intercultural issues as organizers of our curriculum and taking our learners through an inquiry process where we ask them to connect, to understand and to take action on them. And through that process, they’re also engaging with the disciplinary knowledge and skills

that allows them to feel agentric in the learning process to take action with intention and purpose. So the idea of the pedagogy of for people, planet and prosperity comes from the outcomes that we want students to experience as a result of their learning. We want learning to feel purposeful, experiential, contextual, interconnected and transferable

for our learners. And so then the question becomes, what are the pedagogical moves I could use as a teacher to be able to make sure that the learning is that way for the students? So if I want it to be interconnected, how can I make authentic links between and across disciplines?

And then that becomes one of our tenets for this type of pedagogy. Or how can I help my students develop the ability to think in systems? Because we know that complex systems don’t have a simple one, one right answer. They have, you know, they include us. We’re part of many, many systems that are interconnected.

And I think we saw that in the pandemic where education was being affected by the health system, being affected by political systems, etc. And so the idea with this pedagogy is that it helps teachers see what the classroom and learning outside the classroom could look like to be able to promote, you know, this type of learning that’s purposeful, experiential, contextual, interconnected and transferable.

We love those. Those design elements will include a graphic in the show notes. How and where do the UN Sustainable Development Goals fit into this picture? So they’re definitely part of this idea of a tenets of a pedagogy for people, planet and prosperity, because it comes from what’s called the five Ps of sustainable development.

So in addition to people, planet and prosperity, the idea is that this is underpinned by peace and partnerships with others. So the Sustainable Development Goals are definitely goals which can be worked towards in the classroom. We caution a little bit with that, which is that these are goals which have been developed for countries.

There are indicators under each of those goals, but it may not be developmentally appropriate to always go with a huge goal like gender inequality. It might actually be better to start with something which is local, which feels relevant and purposeful for those learners. And then what we do is in the process we can say, look, this is really important work.

There’s countries all over the world that are doing this, and then we can connect it back to the larger goal as opposed to starting with the goal and saying we’re working towards something like climate action, which feels so big and how am I supposed to make an impact and it doesn’t matter what I do because there’s a whole bunch of people that aren’t doing that.

We want it to feel like, no, actually my learning makes a difference. We love that. In power of place, we talked about local to global, and it’s this beautiful opportunity for young people to discover, maybe through curiosity or inquiry, that an issue that they care about connects to a global issue.

But it can also work the other way around. They can hear about an issue on TV or on social media and then discover a local version of it. So you can toggle back and forth from something right in front of them where they can take action to a bigger issue.

Yeah, I mean, Robinson calls that the localization, and I think that’s quite a beautiful word, this idea that the local reflects global trends and the global is being made up of many, many local issues that exist all over the world. This is part of our conception of global competence, which is that when we say global, we don’t mean it only happens at the global level.

Global means encompassing. It means all scales. So students are able to show that competence, to be able to take ownership of their learning, find problems and recognize possible solutions and take action on them also within small scales like their classroom, the school, the surrounding community, their region, and not

only this thing that exists kind of halfway around the world. Karla, I’d love to have you create two sort of word pictures for us. Beginning in primary, maybe second grade, what might this look like in second grade? Maybe the nature of the tasks that young people would be engaging in and how they’re authored and what kind of scaffolding comes with them.

And then maybe we can zoom up a middle grade and do a quick compare contrast of what the pedagogy looks like in primary and in middle grades. Sure, yeah. There’s an important premise in the book, which is something we took from David Sobel, who is from Antioch University, writes a lot about place-based learning.

And this is the idea that there is no catastrophes before fourth grade, which is his quote. I love it because I think it’s such a good way for teachers to think about what are they presenting to students. You’re presenting something to kindergartners about rainforest deforestation and Amazon. Of course, they’re going to feel connected, but actually there’s a disconnection that

happens as well because they can’t do anything about it. So it actually builds passivity, even if we’re not intending it to be so. So to give an example, I’ll give a kindergarten example to show what this looks like at the earliest kind of grades. So one class was looking at the role of pollinators.

As part of kindergarten’s look at life cycles, they learned about the life cycle of butterfly, life cycle of the frog. Why not do this in a way that it’s going to be connected to issues in the local community? So looking through the lens of pollinators, visiting pollinator gardens in the community, actually engaging in slow looking, which is a strategy from Sherry Tishman from the Harvard

Graduate School of Education Project Zero. So going multiple times to visit that place, not just one-off kind of field trip, going multiple times and seeing the interactions that exist within that habitat for those pollinators. So recognizing that the lizards might eat the caterpillars and that you might have bees that are competing for the flowers with the butterflies to be able to really understand

the interconnectedness of this particular system, which is like a little mini habitat. And then taking that knowledge of life cycles, knowledge of pollinators, and how they interact in a kind of garden habitat and saying, well, what does this mean for farming? Because we have pollinators that are helping the production of food. Why might this be important for us to kind of make this connection?

And then looking at farming systems and how pollinators produce basically 70% of the food on our plate and what happens if they’re gone. And then starting to look at stewardship issues around this. So how can we protect the pollinators that we have locally? How can we produce a pollinator garden in our school community that would allow pollinators

to thrive? And there are great projects in the states such as Project Monarch. I think they’re based in Iowa where they create like little stops and stations for the Monarch butterflies on their way down south. If they don’t have those stopping points, they won’t actually be able to complete their

migration. So having them connect in that way, actually, yes, it’s a really, really important issue. We know pollinator dieout is going to affect our global food systems, our supply chains, but we don’t do it from the level of, oh, doom and gloom, it’s coming, we’re not going to have any food in 40 years because that’s not going to help our learners feel connected

to nature. We do it in a way where we allow them to make those connections to the organisms first, to the connection to that habitat. And then we start to kind of unravel this to complicate the narrative a little bit and say, look what’s happening in other places in terms of farming practices and what can

we do about this? Thanks for those vivid pictures. The book is really amazing. It’s just richly illustrated. We love how it’s organized.

It’s super practical. We appreciate the examples of student work, the stories, even has unit plans for how to get started. Tell us how you organized the book. It’s obvious that you just really had making it both purposeful and practical for teachers,

but we love the features in the book. Yeah, so it’s organized using the inquiry cycle that we have kind of put forward, so this idea of connecting, understanding and acting. And then each of the chapters relate to one of the pedagogical moves we might be able to do within that cycle.

So for example, or that part of the cycle, so for example with Connect, we have two chapters, one that’s related to storytelling strategies that we can use to help students make emotional connections to issues before looking at them analytically and also a chapter on perspective taking because we know that this is crucial, not kind of thinking in binary terms, this is wrong, this is right, but actually coming to more nuanced understanding of issues.

So we have a chapter on that. In Understand, we have two chapters, one that’s about systems thinking and using systems thinking to understand the way that systems function, looking for leverage points and understanding kind of the interrelationships and interconnectedness of those systems. And we also have one on conceptual thinking.

So how can you take learning about an issue in your local community and make it transferable? So I’ve learned something about food deserts in the Bronx because I’m a student in the Bronx and that’s appropriate and relevant for me. But then how can I take that to the conceptual level and understand that access is going to have an impact on nutrition?

And that is not just something that exists in a food desert, that is something that is now a globally relevant kind of understanding. So we have that and then the last part, Act focuses on kind of strategies for co-creating solutions with our students and also developing them as local and global citizens. Thanks.

It’s a spectacular book. It’s a Quarwin book and we really appreciate all that went into making it super useful for teachers. Carla, last question. I just would love a little bit of background on United World Colleges.

You’re part of a, I don’t know, 60 year tradition of excellence worldwide. What’s the backstory on UWC? Yeah, so it was founded by Kurt Hahn, who was a German Jew who unfortunately had to leave Germany around the time of conflict in the 20th century. And he went to Wales and founded Gordonson School first, but then also Atlantic College.

And Atlantic College became the first UWC school. I believe we’re at 17 colleges now and we’re all over the world. Most of them are only secondary in like the last part of high school. So generally grade 11 and 12 doing the IB diploma program. Some of them like our school are K-12.

And really Kurt Hahn was interested in not just developing the academic side of students, but really the intersection between academic learning, dispositions to learning, and a values-based education that’s grounded in experiential learning. And so with many of the UWCs around the world, they’ll often be in relatively remote settings where there’s a natural environment, often by water because he was quite interested in

kind of sailing and this idea that you could rescue someone and then that would help you feel that connection to someone that may be different to you. In Singapore, obviously because of our context, we have a much more built urban environment that we’re around. But the whole idea with his kind of connection was that going out and engaging in expeditionary

learning actually helped identity development, relationship formation, and the kind of the solidification of some of those academic dispositions such as taking responsibility, feeling ownership, compassion and whatnot that are needed to be good in academic, quote unquote, areas too. So he actually founded Outward Bound.

He founded Duke of Edinburgh Award, which I believe is maybe not what they call it in the US. I’m not sure if they call it the end or not, which is also called the NYAA here in Singapore, National Youth Award. So yes, he’s had a big ripple effect, although we don’t necessarily always hear his name

in reference to experiential learning. No, we don’t. But Carla, I’ll mention for US listeners, Outward Bound inspired the formation of expeditionary learning and EL Education, one of our favorite school networks. So really a great global legacy that Kurt left.

You really are building on the shoulders of giants both in your school and in your book. So we appreciate that. We’ve been talking to Carla Marshall. She’s the co-author of a terrific new book that every K-8 educator on the planet should have a copy of.

It’s called World-Wise Learning, a Teacher’s Guide to Shaping a Just and Sustainable Future. My quick reflection is that this book does such a beautiful job of extending and making even more practical, particularly for a K-8 audience. My last two books, Power of Place and Difference Making, that was really about place-based education and viewing the community as the classroom and difference making is really

about purposeful, eugenic learning. Carla’s just done such a beautiful job of extending those two concepts and unit by unit, theme by theme, making it super practical for any team of teachers on the planet to take on these difficult and challenging topics. So this is a book we love.

It’s a book we recommend. Carla, thanks for writing the book and thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thank you so much. And to all those listeners out there that do get the book and try ideas out in the classroom, Elizabeth and I would love to hear from you to hear what you’re doing and how you’re modifying

the strategies for your context. So please feel free to get in touch with us. I can be found on Twitter at CarlaMarshall. We also have a website which is teachworldwise.com. Thanks.

The website again? Teachworldwise.com. Teachworldwise.com. I’ll also note that there’s a QR code in every chapter that unlocks additional resources. So get it, use it.

And as Carla said, contribute to this growing network of worldwide learners and teachers. Carla, thanks for joining us. And to our listeners, keep leading, keep learning, and keep innovating for equity. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for tuning in to the Getting Smart Podcast today.

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