Worldwise Learning
A Teacher's Guide to Shaping a Just, Sustainable Future
Illustrations by Chris Gadbury, Foreword by Verónica Boix Mansilla
Corwin Teaching Essentials
Nautilus Gold Award Winner (Books for a Better World) in Social Sciences & Education
Create inclusive, democratic classrooms that prepare knowledgeable, compassionate, and engaged global citizens.
Today’s global challenges—climate change, food and water insecurity, social and economic inequality, and a global pandemic—demand that educators prepare students to become compassionate, critical thinkers who can explore alternative futures. Their own, others’, and the planet’s well-being depend on it.
Worldwise Learning presents a “Pedagogy for People, Planet, and Prosperity” that supports K-8 educators in nurturing “Worldwise Learners”: students who both deeply understand and purposefully act when learning about global challenges. Coupling theory with practice, this book builds educators’ understanding of how curriculum and meaningful interdisciplinary learning can be organized around local, global, and intercultural issues, and provides a detailed framework for making those issues come alive in the classroom. Richly illustrated, each innovative chapter asserts a transformational approach to teaching and learning following an original three-part inquiry cycle, and includes:
- Practical classroom strategies to implement Worldwise Learning at the lesson level, along with tips for scaffolding students’ thinking.
- Images of student work and vignettes of learning experiences that help educators visualize authentic Worldwise Learning moments.
- Stories that spotlight Worldwise Learning in action from diverse student, teacher, and organization perspectives.
- An exemplar unit plan that illustrates how the planning process links to and can support teaching and learning about global challenges.
- QR codes that link to additional lesson and unit plans, educational resources, videos of strategies, and interviews with educators and thought leaders on a companion website, where teachers can discuss topics and share ideas with each other.
Often most curricular reforms start with asking ’What’ to change - resulting in recycled old ways to teach the ’same’ - garnished with activities that masquerade as agency. This book starts with the ‘WHY” and sets out to invite the ‘WHO’ into designing the journey of change. What you get are simple, yet mature frameworks and proven strategies to support educators in empowering their students with the tools to see the wondrous interconnectedness of life and their role to sustain and nourish this web. This book is a must for all those who want their children to graduate with optimism and skills to design a more compassionate, sustainable tomorrow, today!
"Educating young people to be ‘worldwise’ and to integrate heart, head, and hand in order to become the citizens the world so desperately needs has just become a whole lot easier. This brilliant and essential book provides the vision, blueprint, examples, and direction that teachers can utilize right now to ensure their students – and the world they will shape – are both able to thrive."
How can we, as teachers, create classrooms that tap students’ innate desire and capability to shape a better world and how can we use this as a catalyst to develop our students’ knowledge, skills, understanding, and dispositions? Worldwise Learning delivers what it promises. Through a clear vision, an easy to follow framework, ready to use strategies, and real examples drawn from classrooms around the world, educators now have a guide to turn this aspiration into a reality. Transformative learning centered on local, global, and intercultural issues not only speak to students’ passions and lived experiences, but it cultivates the modern skill set needed for students to pursue their own dreams and to become a transforming influence in our world.
Carla Marschall and Elizabeth O. Crawford, with Worldwise Learning, have delved deep into the complexity and multifaceted nature of providing learning journeys for children to become contributing global citizens, something the world needs desperately. I particularly love the emphasis and support around co-planning lessons.
Carla Marschall and Elizabeth O. Crawford have written a masterpiece that affords a guide for educators to build, alongside their students, a just and sustainable future. Not only do the authors present a vision for transformative education, they offer a dynamic learning cycle, practical strategies, and stories from diverse classrooms throughout the world to support the development of students’ global competences. This book is a must-read for the 21st century educator.
Marschall and Crawford compel readers to see schooling in a different way, one that is focused more on worldwise learning. Using examples from their own lives and schools around the world, they illustrate how teaching and learning can be more globally-minded. For any educator or community member who wants to critically reflect on their own practices and work to envision a more sustainable approach to education, this book is for you.
Worldwise Learning opens a door on to the kind of learning that David Perkins has memorably called ‘life worthy.’ This is a door that many teachers are looking for as the importance of connecting learners to local and global issues, and to their sense of passion and purpose strains against more traditional models of learning that no longer serve our needs.
Collaborative Learning Network will make it a priority to share Worldwise Learning with each team of thoughtful educators we are fortunate to work with. The inspiring stories, spotlights, and strategies in each of the chapters will deepen the practice of educators around the world. This book illustrates many ways to meaningfully connect learners to their natural curiosity, to understand the world around them and to extend their learning into harmonious action.
This book represents a message of hope for the future, calling on educators to honour each of our stories, passions and concerns. Through a pedagogical framework designed to give students meaningful connection with their lived experiences, deep relational understanding through being seen, heard and valued and empowerment to take authentic action in their communities, Worldwise Learning demonstrates how educators can design learning for students of all ages to become positive contributors to the world. With inspiring spotlights, practical strategies for applying and transferring learning, and easy-to-follow ideas for co-planning with students, Worldwise Learning provides educational tools and frameworks that align with Globally Reconnect’s vision: to co-create a harmonious world in which we can all flourish. This beautiful book will be a must-read for all educators co-creating with us.
We are living at a time when global competence is essential, not only for individuals but also for global stability, prosperity, and peace. And yet developing globally competent students is complicated. Luckily Worldwise Learning has provided a roadmap that recognizes the value of voice and agency, as well as the transformative power of storytelling to engage, illuminate, and, perhaps most importantly, connect young people across a diversity of cultures and geographies. In this very large world that is going to keep getting smaller and more interdependent, the message of Worldwise Learning – Connect, Understand, Act – has never seemed more relevant.
