How to Raise Global Learners

March 26, 2010June 30, 2016 / Laura Grace Weldon / 9 Comments

raising global learners

Living on a farm we don’t have the time or the means to travel. But we want our children to be global citizens. We want them to truly understand how fully they are linked to their fellow beings on this beautiful blue green planet.

When they were small we read stories, ate the foods, played the games and celebrated festivals from far-off lands. As they got older we paid close attention to a rich variety of in-depth materials that helped us discover the global fibers that run through history, art, science, literature, really through any field of interest.

More than any materials we introduce, the connections my kids find most pivotal are those they make on their own, person-to-person across any distance. For example, one of my musician sons got interested in acoustics. He joined special interest forums to talk with fellow aficionados around the world about technical details of repairing historic microphones, the artistic nuances of found sound recordings, and other topics. Friendships developed. Now they converse about everything from politics to movies. Some day, when he travels overseas, he plans to take them up on their offers to stay in New Zealand, Finland, Brazil and elsewhere. Already he’s visited friends made online in the U.S., finding the rapport they developed holds fast in person as well.

Perhaps the most important connections any of us can make are lasting, caring relationships with people who live far away. For our family, one of the most enduring relationships we made was with an effervescent girl from Belarus named Tatiana. She came as part of the medical program Children of Chernobyl. Even in her first week here, the strength of her personality more than made up for the few words of English she knew and our poor pronunciation of Russian words we thought we knew. Tatiana was horrified by my vegetarian meals, refused to participate in the activities my outdoor-loving children preferred and let us know that she hadn’t traveled so far to live like a peasant. She wanted to be entertained! Like anthropologists to our own culture, we explored shopping malls and tourist sites, we bought kids’ fast food meals for the prizes and went to amusement parks rather than wilderness areas. Tatiana displayed her brilliance in many ways, typically beating any of us at board games we’d played for years and she’d just learned. Tatiana lived with us for five summers. She became a member of our family, a family which feels to us as if it extends to Belarus.

Each connection made of understanding and caring warms our planet—but in a good way. Which leads me to recommend two new books about raising global citizens.

Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World by Homa Sabet Tavangar is packed with enrichment ideas, games, service activities and resources to help raise children with the world in mind. Here are five great ideas from Tavangar’s book:

*Boost cultural understanding and fun by listening to pop music from around the world. (I suggest using online translation to figure out the lyrics.)

*Talk about the origins and trading routes of products used every day in your home. Try tracing back a chocolate bar or t-shirt.

*Discover what foods are said to heal common health conditions. Lime juice in armpits is recommended in Paraguay to solve odor, ginger and green onion tea is recommended in China to cure a cold.

*Learn about practices for welcoming newborn babies into the family and community. Consider adapting customs to commemorate a new arrival in your family.

*Make humanitarian work a family affair. It’s possible to extend benevolent choices even to the search engine you use. Try http://www.ripple.org where 100% of search revenues help alleviate urgent global issues.

And for a vigorous “go there” perspective, give The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education by Maya Frost a read. A cure for any but the worst helicopter parents, Frost shows how learning in other countries best prepares today’s teens for the real global workplace. That means choices resulting in self-reliant, confident and bold adults.

Here are five great perspectives from Frost’s book.

*Stories throughout by young people who live and study abroad. Frost calls them “bold statements” and they offer invigorating examples of what travel can provide.

*Why Rotary International Youth Exchange program www.rotary.org offers the best exchange programs. Frost says it has to do with the network of volunteers around the globe providing support to families and students, the affordable price and the commitment to humanitarian work.

*The stage of life between fifteen and twenty, when pivotal life skills are being developed, the reach of our young people tends to be limited. As Frost writes, “They zero in on the fit of their jeans rather than on the fit of a cultural identity within a larger population, and they devote hours to enhancing the clarity of their skin instead of the clarity of their thinking. They are digging into a plate of pettiness because that is precisely what we’ve served them. They deserve–and are ready for–so much more.”

*How to arrange study abroad credits outside of university affiliated programs for more freedom and frugality.

*Ways to connect with helpful people in countries around the world.

May your children become global learners. May our shared home be one of peace and goodwill.

Open-Eyed Optimism

November 2, 2009 / Laura Grace Weldon / 3 Comments

hillside

Our dinner table topics tend to be obscure and in-depth because my kids delve deeply into their own interests. Detailed conversations about plant classification, advanced computer cooling methods, arachnid behavior and diesel fine-tuning require little from me except that I keep my eyes open.

But elections are coming up and we also tend to talk a lot about politics. These are conversations I can get into. These are also conversations where I need to temper myself. I know it’s important to stay open to everyone’s perspective around the table so I can hear what they have to say. This is difficult when I have strong opinions built on years of activism.

It’s easy to utter pat answers and give what may seem like trite explanations. It’s more valuable to build bridges of understanding than to be “right.” So I try, often unsuccessfully, to keep myself from snorting in derision about moneyed interests and short-sighted politicians. I want my family to continue to care deeply about things.

I also have to temper myself because politics are one of the few areas where my natural optimism wears thin. Still, it’s terrifically important to me that my family remain optimistic. According to The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and BuildLifelong Resilience by Martin E.P. Seligman, there are major differences between pessimists and optimists. People who are cynical believe negative conditions will last a long time. They give up easily and tend to blame themselves when things go wrong. In contrast, optimistic people look at negative conditions as a challenge and look for ways to prevent the next misfortune. In fact optimists find life more fulfilling and rewarding. That’s an outlook worth cultivating.

Seligman recently spoke about infusing meaning and optimism into education. In one study, high school students not only read the classics but focused on the strengths of main characters. They also turned good intentions into actions benefiting others. The result? Greater love of learning and increased social skills.

Looking for what’s valuable, what works, what brings joy is something we can do in all aspects of our lives.

Every day our children observe the direct kindness we demonstrate. They also witness the generosity of spirit we express as we talk about others, discuss issues and yes, listen. Our words and actions show them how to approach to the world.

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light.

Gary Snyder

from Turtle Island (A New Directions Book)

Edible Knowledge

October 18, 2009January 29, 2010 / Laura Grace Weldon / Leave a comment

cherrytomatoes Living on a farm we can’t help but be connected to the food on our table. We’re by no means perfect when it comes to eating locally. We’ll never come close unless chocolate and coffee start sprouting up in Ohio.

While more of us are paying attention to adopting better habits for our own health and planetary health, it’s easy to overlook the vital and wondrous learning that is directly related to food. For my family, those lessons often have to do with shared experiences.

~Many years we head out to pick apples together on a bright fall day. After an indulgent week of eating and baking with as many apples as possible, we devote a day to applesauce. We cook the remaining bushels of fruit down, cranking Grandma’s Victorio strainer that pushes with sauce out one side and pulp out the other (pulp eagerly eaten by the chickens), then can jars of applesauce to eat all winter long.

~We have encouraged each child to choose his or her own “crop” to plant and tend in the vegetable garden. Harvesting and sharing the bounty of one’s own fresh green beans teaches the satisfaction of work right along with lessons in botany and soil health.

~We try recipes from around the world, not only while learning about other cultures, but also because we freely trade garden bounty with friends, and have to do something with unfamiliar herbs, roots and fruits.

~We visit nearby farms. Observation and conversations with those who live on the land have been instructive, teaching us practices we want to emulate and those we hope to avoid.

~We eat meals together every day. Cooking frugally by choice as well as necessity has brought us myriad conversations about health, trends, politics and defining worth for ourselves. Of course our meals also precipitate family humor related to home ground grains that result in breads darker than wet cardboard and yes, we’ve had one or two loaded spatula chases around the kitchen. Oh wait, that didn’t involve the kids, just me thinking it might be funny to fling frosting at my husband.

~Unintentionally we learn by making plenty of mistakes. Ordering 25 pounds of organic buckwheat from the food co-op before knowing if anyone would eat it, raising our first flock of turkeys on faith more than fact, repeatedly attempting to make cheddar cheese although we can’t maintain the temperature needed to age it, well, this list could go on.

10 Things We Should Teach Every Kid About Food, recently posted on Every Kitchen Table, offers a handy list of important food-related categories to explore with our children. The ideas are important and too often overlooked, such as the precepts of the industrial food system and the insidious effect of food advertising.

Here are some related resources:

Improve School Lunches With Locally Grown Food This article offers information plus strategies to bring positive change to your school district, whether you have children in school or not.

Don’t Buy It A non-profit site with learning games to help kids evaluate and analyze media messages.

I Buy Different A website sponsored by New Dream and World Wildlife Fund with tools to help tweens and teens be, live, and buy differently to make a difference.