This month, One World Youth Project has launched its global education program at four new universities in the U.S., Turkey, Guyana and Pakistan, recruiting over sixty university student leaders to facilitate our global competence curriculum in local secondary school classrooms. Check out a short video of our work and recent global expansion:
Watch more episodes of One World Youth Project TV at this link: http://bit.ly/GVrfog
The Guardian featured a great article on government support of internationalizing higher education institutions in Japan. ”Beyond student mobility, however, internationalization has been less developed in Japan, especially in terms of curriculum reform,” said Hiroshi Ota, director of Global Education Program at Hitotsubashi University. We’re seeing a change here in the USA with organizations like NAFSA crafting proposals to increase the number of American students studying abroad while also increasing the number of incoming international students.
While I fully support the missions of organizations that focus on increasing studying abroad numbers, which are at a dismal 1% in the US, I believe that this single approach is not enough for substantial change. There are financial barriers and issues of student access with study abroad programs, and these opportunities usually favor countries like the UK, Italy, Spain, France, China and Australia — six countries that claim nearly 50 percent of the total US study abroad pool (IIE, Open Doors 2011).This leaves a group of countries, which might not have an established partnership, isolated from becoming a part of the ‘global network’. For example, no country in Africa is in the top 25 leading destinations for US students studying abroad — yet the continent is incredibly diverse, rich in history, important to world affairs and open to such exchanges — which is why One World Youth Project is concentrating expansion efforts in Africa for the 2013/2014 program year.
Depending on the student and the program, the study abroad experience could change perspectives or could simply be a prolonged summer, semester or year of partying with other Americans in a foreign nation. It takes dedication from the students, a sound host family (if this route is even chosen at all) and an intentional program that allows cross-cultural engagement to really create an intercultural experience. Nonetheless, the focus of this article is not to completely undermine or berate the concept of study abroad. 
In fact, I myself am a product of some amazing study abroad experiences which changed my life and career trajectory. I would not be working for OWYP if it weren’t for the opportunities I’ve had to go abroad. Organizations that promote study abroad continue to work tirelessly to extend these opportunities and we at OWYP are in solidarity with them concerning this same mission: global citizens with global competence.
The point I’m trying to make, which echos Ota’s conclusions in his article, is that studying abroad isn’t the only way to internationalize a populace. There needs to be an internationalization of a curricula throughout the educational pipeline from pre-school until university graduation. There need to be activities in schools that promote diversity, cross-cultural exchange and working with individuals of different cultures. The challenge is two-pronged and we cannot achieve one without the other. The government needs to take global skill sets and a 21st century education seriously, so that public education systems can adapt appropriately.
Ota’s column reiterates this when he states that “…the Japanese government is expected to continue to support the strategic initiatives of university internationalization in order to provide a catalyst for the functional transformation of Japanese universities towards meeting the demands of the 21st century’s global knowledge-based society.”
While governments around the world like Japan are focusing such efforts on their educational system, it seems the US is falling behind and focusing too much on areas like STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math), and although important for economic development, even engineers need global competence to operate in the reality of the integrated and globalized world we now live in.
This month, One World Youth Project has recruited over fifty new university student volunteers from each of our partner universities after sorting through a flood of applications from interested students. Curious about the high interest among students in our partner schools, we asked the applicants why they signed up for the program. Their responses?
”Challenging students to expand their views outside of their typical personal bubbles by directly connecting them to global peers will allow them to be respectful to other people’s beliefs and practices” -Project Ambassador, Washington D.C., U.S.A.
“Having experienced living abroad and studying abroad I understand the importance of global awareness built through interacting with others. I want to pass that on.” -Project Ambassador, Boston, U.S.A.
“I have a keen interest in working alongside other university students from around the world, to make the outer world accessible to my community.” -Project Ambassador, Georgetown, Guyana
“I’m excited to interact with other people around the world and build cross-cultural relationships, and also act as a link to other countries among students who don’t have access to technology and media.” -Project Ambassador, Islamabad, Pakistan
“Even though people live very far from each other and may belong to different religions and cultures, they will realize through this project that they all have the same rights, same capabilities and common goals.” -Project Ambassador, Prishtina, Kosovo
“It would be an amazing experience to communicate with people around the world, and this is an original way. I am keen on taking part in anything that is international and allows us to connect with others that we wouldn’t ordinarily meet.” -Project Ambassador, Istanbul, Turkey
All of these reasons and motivations have a common thread: a desire for a connection. A student’s connection with his/her surrounding community, and a connection with peers from other countries. We’re seeing university students from the U.S., Kosovo, Turkey, Guyana and Pakistan eagerly apply for the Project Ambassador position with the same fundamental goal: to impact lives by connecting people. The opportunity for technology-facilitated international exchange wasn’t there for their parents and the generation before them, but it is available for them now and they are taking advantage of it.
“Many of our university students sign up for our program because they want to bring the world to students and youth in their community,” said Cady Voge, Program Director. “It’s been really inspiring hearing university students all around the world say they really think students in their community need an international experience for their next steps in life, and how they came to this common mission from such different places.”
Every layer of One World Youth Project, from the international network of universities, to the collaborative platforms for university students, to participating university students connecting with the local community, down to the technology-facilitated international exchange between our secondary school participants, is saturated with human-to-human interactions. And this year One World Youth Project will be connecting 60 university students and over 200 secondary school students globally in international exchange.
Groups of university students from six universities around the world have been recruited and are now undergoing a six-week Online Training Course to build the knowledge base and skill-sets needed for their roles as global education facilitators. Through the online course and upcoming in-person trainings, OWYP student leaders will learn how to instruct a global competence curriculum in local secondary schools, facilitate cross-cultural dialogue among their students and and inspire global citizenship in their communities. Stay tuned.
A recent spate of, yes online, media in the form of TED Talks and a New York Times op-ed made me recall a conversation I had at Singularity University in Silicon Valley. I had been explaining the OWYP program of facilitated student exchanges through digital technology, and how we use a robust curriculum to ensure meaningful interactions. This struck a chord with my fellow raconteur, who shared an anecdote about his own son playing video games, online, in the middle of the night, with adolescent peers across the ocean in Japan, but still not learning anything about Japanese culture – nor growing closer to any of his own peers in his own community.
And that’s the crux these TED Talks and op-eds are getting at: our new technological world enables connections in an unprecedented way, and at an unprecedented rate, but the mere availability of such connections does not guarantee any substantial connections or meaningful exchanges. In fact, these superficial connections can actually work against meaningful human-to-human interactions, distracting youth from the sometimes messy, but necessary entanglements of human relationships, which is what Sherry Turkle argues in the above TED Talk.
It can often seem, and may very well be likely, that technological progression is inevitable and unstoppable, kind of like globalization itself. So, with that, we can again turn to Sherry Turkle who during the TED Talk said, “I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them and with ourselves.”
Currently, at OWYP, we are working on developing a robust curriculum to support each and every one of our connections between participating classrooms. Ossob Mohamud is our staff member working hard researching and developing this curriculum. She faces the challenge of creating lesson plans that simultaneously put those classroom connections front-and-center, imbue them with deeper meaning and reflection and make them culturally relevant and adaptable to ministry-set standards in a wide variety of countries and cultures. Structuring these exchanges around reflections and questions that are applicable at both the local community level and the international level help transform otherwise vapid, ad hoc digital encounters into moments of real learning and reflection.
As Ross Douthat points out in the above-mentioned NYT op-ed, there is a “sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He meets a friend for coffee, but the video cuts away from this live interaction, leaping ahead to the moment when he snaps a photo of some ‘cool’ graffiti and shares it online.”
This makes Turkle’s call to action even more urgent: “We all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet — they need us. Let’s talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life, the life we can love.”
Turkle is calling us to build relationship. And that is essentially what we at OWYP, a group of young, social entrepreneurs obsessed with cultures and countries, traveling and technology, are trying to do with the technology we have at hand, everyday.
