This open access book addresses how to help students find purpose in a rapidly changing world. In a probing and visionary analysis of the field of global education Fernando Reimers explains how to lead the transformation of schools and school systems in order to more effectively prepare students to address today’s’ most urgent challenges and to invent a better future. Offering a comprehensive and multidimensional framework for designing and implementing a global education program that combines cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political perspectives the book integrates an extensive body of empirical literature on the practice of global education. It discusses several global citizenship curricula that have been adopted by schools and school networks, and ties them into an approach to lead school change into the uncharted territory of the future. Given its scope, the book will help teachers, school and district leaders tackle the change management needed in order to introduce global education, and more generally increase the relevancy of education. In addition, the book offers a “bridge” for more productive collaboration and communication between those who lead the process of educational change, and those who study and theorize this important work.
At a time when the urgency of our shared global challenges calls for more understanding and collaboration and when the rapid transformation of societies requires that we help students develop a clear sense of relevancy and purpose, this book offers a way to pursue deep and sustainable change in instruction and school culture, so that students learn that nothing human is foreign and that they can find meaning in lives aligned with audacious purposes to make the world better.
Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education, and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative and of the International Education Policy Masters Program at Harvard University. An expert in the field of Global Education, his research and teaching focus on understanding how to educate children and youth so they can thrive in the 21st century. He is a member of UNESCO’s commission on the Futures of Education. He has authored or edited thirty three scholarly books, including Audacious Education Purposes, Empowering Teachers to Build a Better World, Teaching and Learning for the 21st Century, Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students: An International Comparative Study, Letters to a New Minister of Education, Learning to Improve the World, Empowering Global Citizens, Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons, and Learning to Collaborate for the Global Common Good.
Professor Reimers has combined an academic career studying the process of educational change, writing, and educating the next generation of system level leaders, with active participation in efforts to make schools more relevant in a changing world, through work on the governing boards of numerous education organizations, as well as advising schools, school networks, governments, education organizations and international development agencies. He is also the author of a series of children’s books designed to foster inter-generational conversations on inclusive values.
In 2019, he received a Centennial Medal from the International Institute of Education for his work advancing international education. In 2017 he received the Global Citizen Award from the Committee on Teaching About the United Nations (CTAUN) for his work on global citizenship education. In 2015 he was appointed the C.J. Koh Visiting Professor of Education at the National Institute of Education in Singapore in recognition of his work in global education. He holds an honorary doctorate from Emerson College for his work on human rights education, is a fellow of the International Academy of Education, and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
