Educating Young Global Citizens

I've been reflecting recently on what this recent economic crisis means for education and how we can better instruct tomorrow's leaders. The recent upheaval in global markets and the trickle-down effect it has had on all aspects of our daily lives has highlighted the importance in being resourceful, creative and deeply aware of our roles as members of both a local and global community. How can our classrooms inculcate these values and encourage the kind of innovative thinking needed for the future?

IDEO, one of the world's leading design firms, recently published an article focused on better design in the classroom. Using a human-centered design approach, the firm developed an "investigative learning" approach that makes education less about a transmission of knowledge and rote learning, and more about the creation of an environment that encourages kids to be seekers of knowledge. Some of their recommendations include:

1. Create an environment that encourages kids to raise plenty of questions (and that no question is a dumb question, I'd say), because "real learning" occurs when a child is able to reconcile a question s/he is facing.
2. Kids should learn by doing and experiencing, with the teacher becoming not the "expert," but rather an enabler of learning and a guide to inform when necessary.
3. Educate students to become anthropologists, not archaeologists: whereas the archaeologist seeks to understand the past through the investigation of relics and an understanding of what was, an anthropologist seeks to understand people through a study of values, behaviors, needs and desires. IDEO argues that in order to design solutions for the future, we must learn to understand what it is that people need now, and create around that.
4. Create a way to assess AND value skills such creativity, collaboration and empathy because they will be just as important as things like SAT scores or other numerical assessments of academic achievement. These abilities should no longer be referred to as "soft skills" because they are just as critical to being an effective problem solver.
5. "Incubate for the future" by highlighting students' role as global citizens. Talk about topics such as poverty or the environment. These can be opportunities to talk about social issues as well as teach topics such as economics or engineering. Even corporations such as Adobe have gotten involved in this movement with the Design Ignites Change project (a collaboration with Worldstudio Projects), which challenges students to tackle social problems by using creative, innovative thinking.
   

The tricky part will be to figure out how to get buy-in on this kind of change in a time of budget cuts: if art and music is disappearing from schools, what makes us think that teachers will be able to take class time to take unconventional approaches? I think the key will be baby steps... are their ways in which teachers can begin to slowly integrate some of these practices into their daily routine?