Growing Up to Shape Our Place in the World

The Global Children: Growing Up to Shape Our Place in the World project seeks to develop an approach to Early Childhood and K-12 Education that is locally-rooted and globally informed. 

Attentive to this historical moment of global interdependence and rapid local development, the project seeks to maximize children’s potential, nurture an appreciation for their cultural context and roots, and lay the foundations for learning at subsequent educational levels and across the life span. 

This multi-year study brings practitioners, researchers and experts together at the Little Embassy School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to design, implement, document, and refine quality global teaching and learning innovations.

The project aims to help children develop physically, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, preparing them to be curious about- and investigate the world, to take perspective (their own and others’), to express and communicate using multiple languages, and to take action as young citizens able to influence the world around them. 

We ask: 

• How do children make sense of the world and multiple cultures within and beyond their immediate environments? 
• How do children begin to take perspective and expand their universe of care? How do they participate to make a difference in their worlds? 
• How do we as educators deepen our own global competence as we learn to teach about, with and for the world? 

Through a dynamic dialog between theory, practice, documentation, and reflection our project examines ideas of inquiry, culture, dialog, empathy, altruism and action as foundational to the development of global competence among the youngest of our citizens. 

Our group for this project includes Marla McLean (Atelierista and Educator) from School within School, a public school in Washington DC, and educators from Little Em’s Preschool in Ho Chi Minh.