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Anthony Jackson is Vice President for Education at Asia Society. He also leads Asia Society’s Partnership for Global Learning (PGL), a national membership network of practitioners and policymakers dedicated to integrating knowledge about Asia and the world as a mainstay of American education. Over the past six years, he has led the development of Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network, an effort within the PGL to create a network of small, effective, internationally-themed secondary schools across the country. Before joining Asia Society, he was a Director of the Walt Disney Company’s Disney Learning Partnership. Trained in both developmental psychology and education, Jackson is one of the nation’s leading experts on secondary school reform and adolescent development. Jackson worked on Capitol Hill as a senior staff member on the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, and later directed the Carnegie Corporation Task Force on the Education of Young Adolescents which produced the ground breaking report Turning Points. He also co-authored the follow-up blueprint Turning Points 2000, which transformed many of the design principles in the original report into concrete action steps for new and reconstituted secondary schools. 

To begin, could you tell us about the Asia Society, what the organization does, and what is your role there?

Certainly. The Asia Society was founded over 50 years ago to essentially create a greater understanding between the people of Asia and the people of the United States within a globally interconnected world. And to do that it is a multi-faceted organization that really kind of has several different foci to try to actualize that mission. We are for example a public programming and arts organization; we have a museum on Asian art and we do a lot of cultural programming to help people know and understand Asian culture. We also are a policy organization. We do policy analyses on issues of international security that are particularly relevant to Asia and the United States; everything from issues of particular countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan – to issues such as food security or water security. We are an organization that does a lot of work to bring together economic interests within Asia and the United States. We did recently, for example a report on Chinese investments in the United States and how that could be done to be mutually beneficial to both countries. And then of course we have our Education department, which is the largest department within the Asia Society that I run. Within the Education department we believe that in order for young people to really understand and appreciate Asia, they must develop what we consider, what we call “global competence.” And I’ll talk later perhaps about what the definition of “global competence” is. But in effect, we believe the mission of the Education department should be to develop youth to be globally competent citizens and workers and leaders by equipping them with the knowledge and skills needed for success in postsecondary education and an increasingly interconnected world. So all our work within the Education department is kind of vectored toward developing global competence and college work readiness for all young people.

What 21st century skills do you think are internationally focused and how do these skills support economic growth, trade, and mutual understanding? How does the Asia Society support 21st century readiness and global citizenship?

Sure. Well, first with regard to the global economy, we realized that globalization has really leveled the playing field for workers across the world. And I think we know jobs that involve routine tasks or scripted responses really now can be done by computers or workers with very little training at a very low cost. You may know that in the United States 85% of the new jobs created in the past decade require really a complex knowledge and skills, that’s analyzing information or problem solving or rendering judgment and thinking creatively. In effect, commentators such as Daniel Pink pointed to the emergence of a conceptual age that requires more than specialized skills and basic information, but rather the ability to synthesize different types of information creatively. So the bottom line really is that the economic advantage will go to people who can analyze and solve problems, who can recognize patterns and similarities and really, communicate and interact with other people, and especially those coming from other cultures. I think we also realized that it matters for young people to be globally competent, as we describe it, because of trends in the world like international migration. International migration is happening on a larger scale than ever and it’s really changing the demographics of classrooms and neighborhoods and really societies from Bangalore to Buenos Aires to Boston. According to data from the United Nations, by 2010 the total number of immigrants, the total number of migrants in the world was about 214 million people and if we considered migrants as a country, it would the 4th largest country in the world, behind China, India, and the United States. So from the point of view of our changing demographics within our society and even really as a national security issue, I think we realize more and more that we must have ways to understand our young people, for young people to understand each other, to be able to communicate with each other, and quite frankly, we need to realize that we can’t really make peace with people around the world, if we can’t understand them and can’t communicate with them. And it’s definitely the case that people need to understand the world’s languages and cultures in order to meet those goals. So at Asia Society what we’ve tried to concentrate on to begin with really is to define what are those skills and competencies that young people need to be successful in the global economy and the global civic environment, if you will. And so what we’ve done within our own work and also in conjunction with organizations like the Council of Chief State School Officers, is to define global competence and to think about kind of what are the capacities that undergird that? What are the things that kids really need to be able to know and do to be able to be successful? And I think what’s critical to realize from the very start is that students both develop and demonstrate global competence through the disciplinary and interdisciplinary work that they do within the content areas. So, to be sure content knowledge and understanding it brings matter. It’s not a matter of developing skills outside of a discipline but rather using the disciplines and using disciplinary study to develop global competence as a set of skills, understandings and capacities. What we’ve tried to do is to think about what are the kind of undergirding cognitive and emotional capacities that enable students to access and act upon their knowledge and understanding? What is it that kind of are the foundational pillars, if you will, of global competence? And we’ve grouped these into 4 areas. The first of which we call “Investigating the World.” Global competence really starts with paying attention to what’s going on in the world and then identifying important issues worth examining closely. So globally competent students can frame essential questions. They do not necessarily have one right answer, but can be systematically engaged - intellectually and emotionally. And very importantly globally competent students can explain how a local issue like their school recycling program exemplifies a global process far beyond their backyard. In other words, how the local relates to the global and then vice versa. Globally competent students can respond to these kinds of questions by identifying and collecting and weighing the credibility of information from a variety of sources including international resources available through digital technology. And they can analyze that information and then kind of put it together in a compelling evidence-based argument that considers multiple perspectives and draws a defensible conclusion. There is another set of capacities that we put under the title of “Recognizing Perspectives.” And a big part of recognizing perspectives is for a young person to recognize that they in fact have a particular perspective, but others may not or may not share. And they can understand some of the reasons why perspectives differ. So what’s really critically important, globally competent kids are able to enter into a kind of authentic negotiation of perspectives. They are able to go from recognizing that someone holds a different view to a frame of mind where they can enter into real discourse between perspectives in which they are open to broadening their own view. The third kind of pillar of our definition of global competence is “Communicating and Collaborating Around Ideas.” Globally competent students understand that audiences differ on the basis of culture and geography and faith and ideology and wealth and lots of other factors and that they may perceive different meanings from the very same information. So, globally competent students can effectively communicate, and that’s verbally and non-verbally with diverse audiences and that very definitely includes speaking more than one language. And globally competent kids they are media savvy as well. They know how to choose and effectively use appropriate technology and media with diverse audiences. And then finally, being globally competent means having the disposition to take action. And here we’re talking about going from learning about the world to making a difference in the world. First it takes as seeing oneself as capable of making a difference to be globally competent. Globally competent students see themselves as players and not bystanders. And this is important for all students, but it’s especially important, in my view, for immigrant or ethnic minority students and students from poor families. Many of these kids, they may not travel beyond their neighborhood, much less the world. Yet to know that they have the power to change the world starting in their own neighborhood is, we think, absolutely essential. A big part of leveling the playing field is opening up the horizons of possibilities for all students and then really inculcating a belief that even though they may be poor and even if their communities have fewer resources that they have the right and responsibility to try to compete and collaborate on a global stage. So that’s how we define success, what it means to be globally competent. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge learned and applied through a global lens coupled with a capacity to investigate the world, recognize and negotiate perspectives, communicate ideas and take action.

The Asia Society has worked to recognize and encourage U.S. schools to meet the challenges of international education and identify the best examples of international schools working to provide an international education. Could you tell us about the characteristics of such schools and some of the challenges in identifying them? What else is the Asia Society doing to promote international education in schools in the U.S. and internationally?

Sure. We’ve actually tried, we’ve done a lot of work in trying to isolate, if you will, the best practices within international education and then kind of put it together in a holistic model of what an internationally-focused school should look like. And we’ve sort of thought about that along 4 key dimensions of what a school should have to be globally competent or to be able to teach global competence. We thought about what the vision, mission and culture of the organization should be, what the curriculum assessment and instructional program should look like, what professional learning teachers should be involved in and what they should bring to the task, and then really what are they ways in which schools need to be connected to families and community institutions to assist them in becoming really high-powered globally-focused schools. And I’ll just touch on those quickly. If you go into a school, and it really has an internationally-focused culture, what you see are different ways that dedication to global competence gets actualized through the school culture, including an actual mission statement itself. So, for example in a school that we work with in Denver, the Denver Center for International Studies, the mission statement reads: “The Denver Center for International Studies prepares students for college by developing multilingual, inter-culturally competent students who are actively involved in a rapidly changing world.” So as you can see from the very beginning a school that has that kind of mission has got to be a very different place and have a very different kind of culture that’s more supportive of international education and global competence than other schools without that kind of mission. In terms of curriculum assessment and instruction the kind of core capacity schools, if you will, A common feature that we found of very effective internationally focused schools is that every student is expected to study one or more world languages or English as a second language throughout their entire tenure at the school. And at a school that we work with for example, we emphasize teaching Asian languages, Mandarin, for example. But there are others. But the capacity to speak a world language is really fundamental to global competence. So the schools have to have the capacity to teach world languages as well for that to happen. But the real hallmark of internationally focused schools is that systematic integration of the study of world cultures and the kind of bringing in of international perspectives across the entire curriculum. So in American History, for example, rather than the standard litany of dates and places and events, the courses are organized to focus on a series of enduring understanding of essential questions such as “How is American history shaped and been shaped by global forces? And what does it mean to be an American?” Or in Biology, students examining issues such as the spread of disease and prevention and cure have to take into account global difference and resources and world view and belief system. So, I think, hopefully you get the picture. There is a consistent effort at these schools to consider the global perspective within each subject area and then across subject areas as well. And of course there is no more authentic form of internationally-focused instruction than for students and teachers to have the opportunity to travel and study outside of the United States and to host people from other countries through international exchange. What we also think is important is that international studies education extends to teachers as well. We believe that it’s critical that teachers come to the job not only with deep content knowledge and pedagogical skills, but with a real interest of teaching with the world in mind. And so a lot of the work that we do, frankly, at the Asia Society is to provide teachers with the opportunity to improve their teaching through the infusion of international knowledge and skills. We provide onsite coaching, professional development, online seminars, leadership training, lots and lots of digital-based resources and a range of other supports, again to develop a capacity of teachers that teach toward global competence. The point is if teachers are going to be able to kind of ratchet up the quality of their teaching, while at the same time integrating international perspectives, the school needs to be all about teachers learning as well and having the structures in place to do that. We think that internationally-focused schools that really are of a high quality always strive to embed themselves in a web of supportive partnerships – with families and universities and businesses and cultural organizations and individuals that can support the international mission of the school. On that point, we consider our students’ varied ethnic backgrounds to be a huge asset to schools and schools really need to try to find ways to mine that asset continuously. In addition though, internationally-focused schools of high quality have organizational partnerships that provide lots of important opportunities and resources for internationally-focused internships and service-learning opportunities. So the school is connected locally and through those connections is connected globally as well, if you will. So that’s a kind of summative sketch of the model that we believe best captures what’s important in global education. And really our answer to the question of how a school can bring global knowledge and skills to students to develop their global competence. And in terms of the challenge of finding these kinds of schools, I think that the real challenge is that there are few and far between and don’t really know each other and don’t have ways to communicate with each other so that they feel isolated as if their kind of on their own in doing this kind of work. Several years ago, Asia Society ran a national competition called “The Goldman Sachs Foundation Price for Excellence in International Education” and we would bring together the winners of these awards. They would almost always say that they had no idea that there were other schools who have the same mindset and the same goals around global education as they do. And that’s actually why we formed a Partnership of Global Learning because there are lots of institutions and schools who have a global mission but who don’t have a place or a means to come together, to learn from each other and to form a network. And that’s exactly what the Partnership of Global Learning is meant to do.

Thanks again to you and the Asia Society for your time and cooperation with the APEC Human Resources Development Wiki in furthering the goals of International Education Week 2011.

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