Connectivity and Expandability
Planning and teaching using the World Readiness Standards (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Community) means allowing students to become the agents of their own learning. Students are expected to be active rather than passive and speak more than the instructor while communicating (as instructors, we are expected to foster the creation of a learner-based classroom). More importantly, the World Readiness Standards, or the 5 C’s, allow learners to significantly broaden their horizons. While using the foreign language, learners are not expected to only communicate, but also to become global citizens by learning about the culture of other countries, comparing their own culture with those of other countries, using the foreign language they are learning to expand their knowledge of other disciplines, such as geography and history, and collaborating with the international community while, of course, competing in a rapidly changing globalized world. To me, as a twentieth first-century foreign language teacher, it is absolutely critical that these standards shape all of my lessons. I want my students to be able to act and negotiate like global citizens.
As a historian and geospatial data analyst, I am obviously thrilled by the idea of connecting the language I am teaching to content areas that relate to my own academic background and also to that of others. As my mentor, Dr. J.B. “Jack” Owens, taught me, the history of a place is shaped by the histories of other places. Having the opportunity to teach a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in Portuguese, for example, means, to me, as an educator, being able to invite my students and peers to reflect on how we, as humans, are connected to one another through space and maps. I want my students to learn how space shapes historical events, cultural landscapes, and our own identities. As the historian Ian Gregory observed, virtually everything that we care about –for example, sports, fashion, money, ideology, and religion– moves through the physical space, and GIS gives us the unique opportunity to map and visualize the things we value and care about. In mapping such things, we are able to see that the borders that separate us from one another are like imaginary lines. We are able to visualize the greater picture. We are able to discover that we, as humans, are more connected to and have more in common with one another than we think.