During the years of Trump, global collaboration was diminished to a whimper. Banning people from Muslim nations and making it difficult for people from other countries to secure visas removed the power of citizens interacting with each other in a framework of trust and acceptance.

Decades ago, in the later part of the 20^th century there was a movement to engage students and teachers to work across the world to participate in localized and global ecological investigations. The emergence of new technologies increased the opportunities to bring people to communicate with each other. The Global Thinking Project[1] and other initiatives were developed during this period such as Global Lab[2] and iEARN (International Education and Resource Network).[3]

The Global Thinking Project was a collaboration among researchers, teachers, students, and parents from the United States and Russia, as well Australia, the Czech Republic, and Spain. The GTP emerged during a time when the Internet was in its infancy and was becoming a way for people to communicate with each other. Educators grasped onto the Internet as a tool of collaboration.

What follows here are discussions I had with educators from Spain, the United States and Russia.  Each of the educators explains why cross-cultural collaboration is important and how they contributed to fostering international relations.

Teaching in or for the Earth.

Narcís Vives is an educator from Barcelona. I’ve known Narcís since 1992 and worked with him on several telecommunication projects. He is one of the most experienced educators using international telecommunications to link students and teachers together on common problems. Vives points out that “being an individual change-maker is not enough.” He reminds us that when each and every one of us tries to change things for the better, along, “the results are poor, although better than nothing.” [4]

Narcís and many others have been involved in global collaboration projects for decades. He explains that “when we, teachers and students collaborate, sharing the same vision and trying together to solve environmental or social problems, the results are great.”

Narcís and his colleagues in Spain and more than 22 Latin American countries have found that it’s worth inviting teachers and students to participate in international telecommunication projects. However, he says that “projects that deal with the quality of life on our planet should be for learning with the world, not just about it.” Traditional teaching has over emphasized “teaching about” ideas, rather than showing students how to be involved within those ideas.

Global collaboration should begin with a strong local curriculum, that helps students think locally. Vives says: “I am in favor of a local curriculum that invites students to learn about different aspects of their neighborhood: places, people, and data. Students’ contributions should be meaningful, and useful for the local community because when this happens, it is the whole village, neighborhood, or local community that learns.”

Being open to collaborate globally is essential to deal with the economic, social and ecological problems that the world faces. During the Trump administration, work across cultures was denied and exasperated by bans on Muslim citizens from traveling to the United States, and the denigration of immigrants approaching the U.S. Southern border.

In our experience, students’ ideas about the world grow when they are involved in global telecommunications projects. As Vives points out, successful global projects occur “when we are linked with and involved in common projects with different schools around the world.”  He adds that  “we can share our best experiences, learn from others and have an open dialogue about controversial issues or problems that arise. When this happens, we are creating a Global network for learning and change, and we are making a meaningful contribution for the planet and its people.”

Youth Empowerment

Ramon Barlam, Professor of Social Sciences at The INS Cal Gravat in Manresa, Spain, is a colleague and friend that I met in 1995 in Callús, a small community near Barcelona in the state of Catalonia. He is one of the world’s pioneers in the use of the Internet to connect students worldwide. Ramon told me that he was lucky enough to discover the internet, and “I did so thinking that this tool would offer us a great chance not only to improve education but also to promote global friendship.” [5] He regarded this early period as historical, and, as he said, “coincided with a project, the Global Thinking Project and a teacher from Atlanta, Georgia.”

Ramon became very involved in the Global Thinking Project. He described that “at that time, I was working at ‘L’Escola Joventut’ primary school in Callús, where we did a research project over the quality of the water of the Cardener River, which flows nearby. We also worked together with county institutions on the deforestation caused following the worst fires that we have suffered in ‘Catalunya Central’, those that took place in 1994. From the school we contributed to the reforestation of nearby forests as well as undertaking many other actions.”

Barlam goes on to say: “With this project and many others that followed which I took part in, we have tried to promote and foster youth empowerment to make a better world.” Then he adds this, “three decades later, the world has seen a distressing twist: the end of the Cold War has not led to times of stability and fair prosperity. The internet has not been able to keep the romantic spirit of its beginnings as it has succumbed to the big technological multinational greed.”

In my communication with Ramon, he warns of the rise of authoritarianism by saying, “It is not only the rise of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in America but also the resurgence of extreme right-wing political parties in Europe, In Hungary, France, and even in Germany the clamor for Hitler and radicalism resonates. In Spain, the shadow of Franco, the fascist dictator, persists, and his followers walk down the streets with impunity openly hurling fascist anthems and military salutes.” One if reminded of the “Unite the Right,” rally in Charlottesville, in which Donald Trump said had very fine people on both sides. It didn’t.

In the context of where Ramon resides, he added this comment: “We cannot forget that Spain is the country in the world, after Cambodia, with the largest number of murdered citizens for political reasons in ditches and common graves. As for Catalonia, a country which has peacefully demanded its independence,has seen the Spanish government answer back with sheer violence against it. Watching the news programs on TV has become more and more depressing day after day.”

Fighters for the Environment

Dr. Galina Manke, a biology teacher at Moscow School 710, and researcher at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, was also the head or director of the GTP in Russia. She traveled around the country and held sessions with Russian teachers on the content and pedagogy of the GTP. I recall her saying to me that the GTP was showing students how to be “fighters for the environment.”

The GTP designed a curriculum that would enhance collaborative environmental research and cross-cultural communication.[6] The American-Russian student and teacher exchanges made it possible for students to live and go to school with each other. Sara Crim said “to travel as a teacher from a small country school was such a rewarding experience. Each time I participated as a teacher in the GTP, I and my students were able to visit and live with Russian families in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Chelyabinsk.” In each city, she brought ten of her students, each of whom lived with a Russian family, as she did. She and her students reciprocated and hosted the Russians when they traveled to the northwest mountains of Georgia.

Sara Crim, a science educator and middle school science teacher from Walker County Schools in Georgia participated, in three student exchanges from 1995 – 1998. Sara was one of more than 35 American and 30 Russian teachers that participated in the GTP exchanges. Global collaboration among these educators was remarkable in that many have maintained communication with each other.  By their willingness to embed themselves for weeks at a time in another culture, living in homes, and teaching in a foreign nation, they helped their students become global collaborators and participants at the same time.

In an interview  with her she said that “during our exchanges we developed friendships and gained new families. Since finishing the project, some of my students have traveled back to Russia to visit their partners and have taken family members with them.”[7]

Sara explained, “students worked with each other at a distance and face-to-face on ecological projects such as an investigation of ground-level ozone and air pollution, an open-ended ecological study of a local stream, and other projects including a study of the local environment, soil studies, and solid waste.”

Sara reminded me that “from our participation in the GTP, we learned that people from entirely different cultures can work together and develop long-lasting friendships.” She also told me that “we can learn to work together to solve problems that are important to our countries.” She then emphasized that “problems are not so big when you can understand how a problem affects someone else in a way it doesn’t affect you.”

New Type of Thinking

One of the leaders of the Global Thinking Project in Russia is Dr. Anatoly Zakhlebny. He is an ecological researcher and educator and was instrumental in involving scientists and educators in the GTP. At the very last student conference held in Moscow, where there were 100 American and Russian students plus 30 teachers, Zakhlebny invited 25 Russian scientists to mingle and talk with the students about their projects. It was not a competition, but a collaboration among students and scientists. The scientists wanted to find out what ideas students were working on and how they dealt with ecological issues.

I asked Anatoly about the implementation of the Global Thinking Project in Russia. He recounted, “For two decades, together with my colleagues from the Russian Academy of Education, we have tried to popularize the ideas of the Global Thinking project among teachers in a number of Russian regions – in the Baikal region, in the Urals, in the Moscow region.”[8] Anatoly conducted workshops to help teachers become acquainted with the method of integrating natural science with humanistic education.

He said that the humanistic ideas underlying the Global Thinking Project were at least fifty years ahead of the mass consciousness of most people. He said, “For almost twenty-five years (after the Rio Summit 1992)[9], politicians and diplomats of many countries have mastered this type of thinking in order to reach agreement on the common goals of sustainable development.” In his view, global thinking is the psychological basis for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Global thinking is not unlike global citizenship or education for a global perspective.

Global Thinking Project teachers and researchers viewed global collaboration as learning to see problems and issues through the eyes and minds of others. Project learning also incorporated empathy, being able to put oneself in another’s shoes, and intercultural competence, being able to function within the norms and expectations of another culture. This is humanistic collaboration.[10]

According to Zakhlebny “in Russia, we consider global thinking as an intellectual product of the integration of natural science knowledge about the modern scientific picture of the world and the general cultural value orientations of the individual in order to maintain established ecological quality and conditions of life of the environment.”

At the end of my conversation with Anatoly, he said “I regret that at the present stage, political relations between our countries are at a low level, and we cannot interact now on the ways of best conveying a new type of thinking about the common future on our planet to the young generation.”

[1]Hassard J. Teaching Students to Think Globally. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 1997;37(1):24-63.

[2] Global Lab was developed by TERC in Concord, MA and was a science program used by schools around the world.

[3] iEARN is a world-wide network comprised of thousands of schools in more than 140 countries. iEARN has been an active project since 1989. It’s website: https://iearn.org/

[4] Narcís Vives (President of Itinerarium Foundation, Founding member of International Education and Resources Network, Honorary president of IEARN, co-founder of Clowns Without Borders, Director of Atlas of Diversity, and former teachers, Barcelona), email interview with the author, September 18, 2021.

[5] Ramon Barlam (Professor of Social Sciences at The INS Cal Gravat, Manresa, Teaching Professional, K-College, Member of LaceNet educational network, and World Mobile City Project), email interview, September 17, 2021.

[6] Hassard, J. & Weisberg, J. (1999). Environmental Science on the Net: The Global Thinking Project. Good Year Books, Parsippany, NJ.

[7] Sara Crim (retired science teacher, Walker County Schools, Georegia, and artist, Pampa, TX), email interview with the author, September 9, 2021.

[8][8] Anatoly N. Zakhlebny, (Chief researcher of the Federal State Institute for Development of Educational Strategy at the Russian Academy of Education, professor, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences; the Chairman of the Scientific Council on Environmental Education Problems of the Russian Academy of  Education), email interview with the author, September 29, 2021.

[9] The Rio Summit 1992 was the United Nations Conference on Environment and  Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

[10] Hassard, Teaching student to think globally.