Reset the Future I: Educating Globally Competent Children

Howard Gardner、Hope Jensen Leichter、Mingyuan GU

In the 21st century and beyond, the development of global competence is more important to all children than ever before. The interconnected, diverse world is increasing our children’s intercultural encounters, which require them to have the skills and knowledge to not just appreciate different views and world perspectives, but to learn to become global citizens and cooperate in solving global problems.

Please join Dr. Hope Leichter, Dr. Howard Gardner, and Dr. Mingyuan GU from Columbia University, Harvard University, and Beijing Normal University to learn about global competence and how we can help the next generation prepare for today’s rapidly changing and complex world.

• What is global competence?

• Why do we need global competence?

• How to teach your children global citizenship?

• Why is STEAM education important to global competence?

This is the first webinar of Beijing Global Center’s Reset the Future symposia series.

Hope Jensen Leichter is Elbenwood Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and Director of the Elbenwood Center for the Study of Family as Educator dedicated to “improving education through discovering the creative intelligence in all families.” She teaches courses on the family as educator, focusing on family memories and community education through museums. The topics of her writing include: the family as educator, families and communities at educators, listening to and learning from families, stories as forms of learning in museums. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for the study of family memories.

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also an adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University and senior director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1981 and 2000, respectively. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education. In recognition of his contributions to both academic theory and public policy, he has received honorary degrees from thirty-one colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In 2011, Gardner received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, and in 2015, he was chosen as the recipient of the Brock International Prize in Education. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. He serves on a number of boards, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the American Philosophical Society.

Mingyuan GU is a Professor at Institute of International and Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University. Gu was born in 1929 in the small town of Jiangyin, about halfway between Shanghai and Nanjiing in southern Jiangsu province. His father was a secondary school teacher and his grandfather was a shop assistant in a tea store. The rest of the family lived by subsistence farming, as they did not own any land. However, the location of Jiangyin in proximity to these major cities meant that it benefited from a highly developed progressive education movement in the early 20th century, as well as regional traditions of scholarship going back many centuries. Thus Gu was able to benefit from the excellent primary and secondary education, which his family arranged for him in spite of their modest means. This laid a foundation for him to become one of China’s outstanding educators and leading specialists in comparative education in the period after Deng Xiaoping set China on a course of education for modernization in the late 1970s.

Baitong YAN, TC ’16, is the founder of the No-Boundaries Committee.

Reminders

• This webinar will be livestreamed at 8:30 a.m. in Beijing Time (8:30 p.m. in NY Time) and conducted in Chinese with simultaneous English translation.

• Registration required.

Columbia University Teachers College

Beijing Normal University School of Arts and Communication

BNU-ANOBO Children’s Global Competence Research Committee

Columbia Global Centers | Beijing

ANOBOteam

NOBOundaries Committee