Speaker 1:

Welcome advocates to another episode of the Leading Equity Podcast. A podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Today's special guests, I actually have two special guests with me today. Some folks that I have interacted with multiple times, and it's just great. I wish you could see the Zoom right now. Smiling faces. This is an awesome experience right now, but I want to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Crawford and Miss Carla Marshall is here with us today. So without further to do Elizabeth, Carla, thank you so much for joining us.

Carla Marshall:

Thanks for having us.

Elizabeth Crawford:

Thanks so much for having us.

Speaker 1:

Carla, why don't you start off and let us know a little bit about yourself and what you currently do?

Carla Marshall:

Yeah, so my name's Carla Marshall. I'm currently based in Singapore. I'm the director of teaching and learning at United World College Southeast Asia, which is actually a movement with 18 schools around the world. There's one in Montezuma and New Mexico. Actually, there aren't very many that are K-12 schools, but I work at one that is a K-12 school. So I'm responsible for K-12 teaching and learning. We have a very strong mission, which is to make education a force for peace and sustainable future, which connects to both my interests related to the book and just more broadly the work that I'm doing here.

Speaker 1:

Nice. Okay and what about you, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Crawford:

Yeah, I'm an associate professor of elementary education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I've been here for 11 years. I work in our master's and undergraduate programs, teaching courses and instructional design and social studies methods and prior to that, I was a classroom teacher in Georgia, Florida in Paris

Speaker 1:

In Paris? You just threw that one in there. I like, okay. Okay. Cool. Well welcome, welcome. Welcome to the show. I like to talk about today in regards to worldwide learning. I'm actually been fortunate enough to have some contributions to that book. So thank you so much for reaching out and then that's how we kind of connected. I always like to ask this question when I see two authors that aren't in the same space, like you don't live next to each other. So I want to kind of start with Elizabeth maybe. How did the two of you connect?

Elizabeth Crawford:

So Carla and I actually never met in person. I connected with her through Twitter, just like I reached out to you. Carla has coauthored a book on concept based inquiry and action that I use in my instructional design courses, the primary texts and so I think for maybe a year I was tagging Carla on all the posts that I was implementing, the book strategies and my instructional design class. Eventually we reached out and had a conversation and we actually share a lot in common about not just instructional design, but also how to harness the power of education for social and environmental good.

Speaker 1:

And here we are. Fast forward, you have a book together, so that's awesome. You said you have not physically met each other yet.

Carla Marshall:

Not yet. Not yet, but part of it is the pandemic, right? So we started writing this book January, 2020. I think that was right after we signed the book contract with Corwin. Little did we know what was coming. The tsunami wave of complexity and volatility, but in some ways that's actually been a beneficial thing to live through because what we're advocating for in the book is that we need to make issues like the pandemic organizers for learning in the classroom, and that students are interested. They want to be engaged in things that are around them in their local communities, and that we need to really unlock the power that students have to be able to be active citizens and be contributing.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's do that. Let's unpack that a little bit more. So I like the idea that we need to have our students to be more connected to the community that their surroundings and what's happening in the world and what's happening local as well. Why is it important to guide if I'm a teacher, why is it important as a teacher for me to be shaping a just and sustainable future?

Carla Marshall:

So I think the first thing is just to consider what do we mean by just unsustainable, because these words get thrown around quite a lot. So one way to think about them, the United Nations, when they talk about sustainable development, they use what they call the five P's. So they talk about people, planet, prosperity, and that this is underpinned by peace and partnerships. These are kind of like mental buckets that we can be using to think about when we're engaging in actions or trying to implement solutions in our community. We're really thinking about what kind of issue is this? This is more connected to people, more connected to planet, more connected to prosperity. Of course, every issue is going to be interconnected and draw across these different buckets but that's one way for us to kind of conceptualize what we mean by this.

               I think a core piece here is that when we say just unsustainable, we're advocating for looking at intersectionality between social justice and ecological justice. So we've seen time and time again, that these things are intertwined. So for example, we have case studies of indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, who are much better at protecting the land in terms of biodiversities. They did studies where they looked at national parks in Brazil and then looked at land that was controlled by indigenous people in Brazil and that the land that was actually controlled by indigenous people had much more biodiversity, had less poaching, less deforestation. So advocating for indigenous rights is absolutely connected to biodiversity before station climate change, all those things that we might hear in a kind of partitioned or pigeonholed way. So it's really about starting to see the relationships between these things to help students recognize the complexity that's around them, but then in a way that's scaffolded so that they feel safe and kind of confident to be able to engage in things which may be pegged as being complex issues in their communities.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to throw this over to Elizabeth because I like the sustainable part and I kind of want to unpack that a little bit further because if I'm a student and I just learned about the rainforest in Brazil and I live in Texas somewhere, if I'm the educator, what would be the next steps for me to help my students to again, be more just as citizens.

Elizabeth Crawford:

I think the importance is understanding how these issues have common causes and common effects. If you're looking at deforestation in the Amazon, you could look at deforestation in Texas. Your example, deforestation in my state of North Carolina has resulted in only 4% of pine forest remaining here in this state. Oftentimes we teach about these issues that are really disconnected from the students' lives. They don't see it, it's not relevant to them, but it's actually happening in our backyards and so we can see the booming economy here in Wilmington has caused massive deforestation that impacts not only our ability to withstand a hurricane, which has happened increasingly the last few years. It's also resulting in clogged roadways and fewer resources and a variety of other effects. I think the importance is finding connection between these global issues and what are common causes and common effects so students can actually connect to them.

Speaker 1:

All right. All right. Let me throw this back over to Carla now, because here's my next question. Who is the audience, I guess for the book? Is this for a science course or science teachers, stem related, or is it broadened that to just if you're elementary or secondary, like who can benefit I guess, from this book?

Carla Marshall:

So I think when we were conceptualizing this book, we wanted to think about who has that locus of control, where they can actually make choices in their classroom and so we've said that the book is for K to eight educators, simply because there's more flexibility in middle schools than there are in high schools. When you get into high school and you have an AP course or whatever, it might make it very difficult for those teachers to shift what they're doing. That said, if teachers are in more progressive or more flexible learning environments with high school students, they could definitely use strategies in the book as well. They're not limited to only younger learners. It also would work for anyone who is a coordinator of things like community service or service learning project based learning, because obviously these issues are amazing organizers that can both motivate students and provide access to real world situations in contexts where students can take action.

Speaker 1:

I want to play the devil's advocate for just a moment. Okay. I could hear folks saying why should we be so concerned about what's happening in the world when our current status, for example, the United States has so much going on within its own country that we need to fix, or we need to be addressing these local issues. Why should I care or why should I spend the extra time in preparing for worldwide lessons? How would you respond to that?

Carla Marshall:

So the thing is that when we talk about in the book global competence, we're not talking about some abstract halfway around the world situation where kids are thinking about a far context, we're talking about global as an inclusive. That means that students can use it at multiple scales. They can use it within their local community, around the corner, from the school. They can use it more broadly like their region or their state or their nation level and the whole idea here is that we want to be developing active citizenship and that active citizenship is across those different scales. So students are starting to see their civic identity being both yes, I'm connected to my local community. I'm rooted. I also understand that I'm kind of a national citizen of the place where I live in this case the United States, but then also I'm a global citizen because there are choices that we're making in terms of our food fashion, et cetera, that have repercussions for people that are not in a particular national boundary.

               Students need to recognize the interconnectedness, especially when we see the effects of globalization, the exploitation that's happened, both in terms of people and the planet. We need to make sure that students have that awareness, because first of all, there can be opportunities for solidarity there, that there are people in different countries that are doing really good work to work towards social and ecological justice and doing it in their own context, in their own way but also that we can look for patterns and connections in terms of the way that people have tried to address these particular issues and hopefully get inspiration from elsewhere.

Speaker 1:

Is this current events only, or is this for if we went back in history as well? Is that part of the process?

Elizabeth Crawford:

Yeah, I can give an example. I teach instructional design, as I mentioned in one of my students designed a unit on our global food system, and she went back to the great depression and brought in those primary source documents and the social studies block to have students analyze the migrant workers and the conditions that they worked in and compare that to current day, migrant workers in North Carolina and students were able to make connections across time and place. That's really powerful in addition to studying the contemporary issues at hand.

Speaker 1:

Love it. Okay. Okay. That was going to be my next question. I was like if this is 2021 only are in and above. Okay. That's good that they're eight and how do you encourage students to do so because I know a lot of kids especially the folks that I, in my own household, I have two kids and like my daughter, doesn't like to hear about what happened she thinks I'm ancient. She doesn't like to hear about all these quote unquote old school or that's retro and all these. She calls history such as the great depression or something like that would be retro to her. When you have a lot of students who could care less about what's happened 50 years ago, how do you encourage them to, why don't you dig deeper and look back to how these are all connected? What would be a strategy maybe to help folks that are our younger generations to touch on what's happening? What's happened in the past?

Elizabeth Crawford:

Sure. Yeah. We feature dozens of teachers like you in the book and one is Shannon Hardy who teaches an explore school, eighth grade teacher. She uses design for change with project based learning to allow students to research and take action on issues that they care about and one year about five years ago, a group of her eighth graders discovered that there was an undocumented lynching that had happened in their county. During their research in the history block and then language arts, they unearthed this one article that led them down this path of researching civil rights issues in the community and they ended up interviewing a civil rights leader, Joel Holt, Jr. to find out what school was like in Wake County when he was a student in the fifties, right after brown V board of education passed. Schools were still segregated in Raleigh a year later.

               He was actually the first student to try to integrate Wake County schools as an eighth grader, who was the same age as those students. They felt this deep connection to the past, through this contemporary civil rights leader. He became a mentor to them and he helped them understand the past, but also ways that they can use their voices as children, as adolescents. The students actually ended up creating a website where they documented all these stories that were not in the mainstream so that the public could become aware of the history and what had happened in their own community and try to lead change to happen today to rename the schools that were named for white supremacists, for example, and try to create, change that way as eighth graders.

Speaker 1:

This is awesome. Okay. How do I get started? What would be the planning process for integrating a worldwide learning approach to my pedagogy?

Carla Marshall:

We're trying to work within the systems that we know already exist in schools. We're not going to be able to throw out the curriculum and say get rid of the standards and whatnot. We're actually advocating that teachers recognize the learning possibilities that live within the standards, that these are not. There's the map and there's the territory, right? So do we have to follow it as a map or can we say, this is the general learning territory? We can be flexible with the ways in which we're extracting some of these standards and coupling them, putting them together. We have learning that's more connected and coherent for our students and so we would advocate that obviously you need to know what your standards are. You need to know what you have as end goals for your students.

               But then we do co-planning with our students where we have flexibility to invite them to the conversation, bring them to the table and say what are some of the things that you're interested in? What are some concerns you have, and not as a kind of individualistic, I'm going to put you into your own separate groups. Now you're going to be working by yourself, but actually to create that sense of collective identity in the classroom. The things that kids share, having I've done this with some of my grade seven social studies kids, there might be some students who don't share as much, but then the kids that do share, they will share things that, you're like, how do you know about this? They're very switched on. They do have a lot of insights to be able to bring to the classroom and then sharing those within their community with their peers, allows us to be able to kind of extract some trends and patterns to then use, to shape the learning experience.

               So we obviously have to do an issue identification, like what issue are going, wait thinking about and then the teacher will be using those standards, flexibly to plan more interdisciplinary approaches in the classroom. We advocate for an inquiry cycle, which is connect, understand and act. We want students to connect to issues by looking at perspectives, thinking about the mental models, that underly that issue, looking at stories that kind of talk about that issue to be able to connect it and have empathy and compassion for people. So it's not kind of this analytical thing. Then we understand by using as some systems thinking to think about the relationships between parts and the system. We pull out kind of transferable concepts that we can use to look at situations in the past or in the future to kind of future proof, the learning and then we ask students to take action in some way.

Speaker 1:

What does taking action mean? Tell me more.

Carla Marshall:

So it could be a variety of things. It could be that students create advocacy campaigns to share within their local community. It could be direct action so planting trees or cleaning a river or whatever. It could be indirect action. Let's say they've identified an NGO or an organization that's doing great work, and they want to support that. They might do a fundraiser or something else, but we generally don't advocate solely for kind of a charity approach because we want to change things at the root cause level and to make sure that these are sustainable changes. If you do charity and you give money as a one-off, that's not going to be sustainable over time and in many ways it can make communities dependent on funding and they don't develop the capacity to be able to make changes internally.

Speaker 1:

Hmm. Elizabeth, did you have anything to add to that?

Elizabeth Crawford:

No, but I think this ties into what Carla said about helping students look inward at their own identities and who they are, because not everyone wants to March in the streets. Not everyone is comfortable making phone calls or we all have different personalities and talents and interests and so I think honoring where everyone is coming from in the classroom, helping them see themselves in each other, helps them identify ways that are comfortable for them.

Speaker 1:

Well, I think, between the two of you, it sounds like that is some awesome ways that we can get started and kind of implement this pedagogy in our classrooms. I love the piece about the co-teaching. As teachers, sometimes we want to kind of do everything ourselves. We want to do the research. We want to identify the problem. We want to put this whole lesson together as a unit together and we don't have the kids involved and say, this is what you're doing. We go from there, but I love the piece of collaboration between the teacher and the students and I think that's ideal. I think that is very important.

Carla Marshall:

That whole thing of the tacit hidden curriculum what are we teaching our students through what we don't teach or the way that we construct our classroom environments. Even just to say, the unit's done, I've done it all. I'm super teacher. I'm all ready for you and the classrooms ready and everything's finished. Where's the invitation? Where can students become owners of the learning in that environment? I think as teachers, we need to keep asking ourselves these questions of where are the access points for students to bring their identities to be able to share who they are and to be able to shape the learning journey together.

Speaker 1:

Yep. Yeah. Well, I definitely considered the two of you as voices in leading equity. We'll start with Elizabeth. What is one final word of advice that you can provide to our listeners?

Elizabeth Crawford:

Always think of the purpose. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Get at the heart of what really matters.

Speaker 1:

Okay. What about you, Carla?

Carla Marshall:

Start small, make it sustainable, include your community. Don't do it alone. Talk to people who are different than you and purposely seek out their perspectives to be able to shape this work.

Speaker 1:

Nice. Carla, if we got some folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you online?

Carla Marshall:

Yeah. I'm on Twitter at Carla Marshall with a sch in my name a little bit hard to find, but I'm on Twitter.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Crawford:

I'm on Twitter as well. Teach global ed is my handle.

Speaker 1:

All right. I am so thankful to have Dr. Elizabeth Crawford and Ms. Carla Marshall here, authors of world wise learning a teacher's guide to shaping a just sustainable future. Thank you so much for your time.

Elizabeth and Carla:

Thank you.

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