Our Fulbright Presentation

Our Fulbright Presentation
Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Today was the International Education Task Force Plenary Session. This was the final session of the conference, and it we had a large audience. It was held in the Regal Palace VIP Room. The moderator of our panel was Jenise Englund, who is an International Education Consultant and the co-chair of the International Education Task Force. Jenise is the person who invited us to be
part of the panel for this conference.

In addition to us, other presenters included Ana Gil-Garcia, a Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and Dr. Yun thi Hoang Nguyen, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Hanoi National University of Education in Vietnam. Dr. Gil-Garcia spoke about the need for more global education at all levels: from University down into the primary grades, and Dr. Nguyen spoke about her work starting a master’s program to train educators in special education in Vietnam.

We were the first presenters on the panel, and we spoke about our research and our work on Malindi’s Journey (see our post #2!). We also spoke about the importance of teaching global education in our classrooms. We showed slides of our students at work – pictures of students from Young Achievers at work on projects about East Africa, and pictures of Odyssey students participating in workshops on Environmental Justice at Harvard with the Harvard Program in International Education. We spoke about the students’ learning as examples of how global education can be woven into different aspects of the curriculum in different subjects, and we connected this to the Superintendents’ Pathways to Excellence initiative in Boston’s schools.

We are happy to report that our presentation went really well! We had many people ask us questions during the comment period – they were very impressed by the students’ level of engagement and by the quality of their work. A number of people sought seek us out after the panel to compliment us on the presentation and the importance of our work for all students in the world. We traded business cards and ideas with several university

professors, researchers, teachers and teacher trainers.

Our paper and Power Point will be posted soon on the Fulbright conference website, and we will post the link as soon as it’s up.

That’s all for now! Much more to come!

在 见
zài jiàn!

Lucy and Alicia