Exploring Learning

Even as far back as 1988, Elise Boulding stated that to point of global education is to “create a peaceful, interdependent world which would be a good place for people to live”. Idealistically, this is what we all want - however, having worked in five different international schools, and having experienced global education in four different countries, the “tensions between the national and the global, as well as between unity and diversity, remain highly relevant in today’s increasingly globalized world” (Ho, 2009). Finding this balance, of retaining identity and culture whilst at the same time promoting tolerance and peace, is exactly the point, to me, of what a global education means, echoed by Global Education for Canadians (2017), which recognises that “relationships with emerging countries are becoming increasingly important” for a successful future. If the global workforce is increasingly dependent on technology (Adams, 2002; Karkouti, 2016) and the point of education is to ready...

Learning Issue: Basic Sentence Conventions As a teacher of Grade 6 Language and Literature, I have found that many learners enter middle school without basic foundational knowledge of sentence conventions, particularly capitalisation and ending punctuation. The IBO May 2018 MYP Subject Report for the Language and Literature examination supports these observations, stating that “candidates seemed to have lost track of basic conventions like capitalization and the use of ending punctuation despite exhibiting good control in other areas of language use” (2018). In addition, data from externally marked online examinations in Language and Literature, at the exit point of the MYP in Grade 10, also indicate that our learners are not quite yet reaching the global average grade. Data has also been gathered from a diagnostic writing test administered to the sample group at the beginning of the academic year. Anecdotal evidence of the learning issue also comes from teaching Grade 6, leading the E...