Kay Gibson

Developing global awareness and responsible world citizenship with global learning

Global learning is a student-centered activity in which learners of different cultures use technology to improve their global perspectives while remaining in their home countries. This article examines the use of global learning with gifted students to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary for world citizenship. We describe a pedagogical approach that is based on a set of conditions for global learning, associated learner attributes, and processes developed in global learning leading to acquisition of world citizen characteristics. Six processes and nine attributes are identified as essential for global learning. Two examples are presented of how this approach can be used to integrate global learning into the curriculum—one at a university level and another in a middle-school setting.

Moral Development in Preparing Gifted Students for Global Citizenship

Gifted students have the potential to become tomorrows world leaders with a strong grasp of the ethics and morality of issues related to global politics, economics, health, religions, and the environment. The heightened sensitivity of the gifted to justice, fairness, honesty, and a sense of responsibility to act on such ideals, accelerates the development of knowledge, attitudes and skills needed for global citizenship in the twenty-first century. If gifted students are provided with an appropriately challenging and respectful global curriculum, we can help them prepare to do good works with global impact. This chapter examines ways that global learning experiences in schools can encourage the gifted to adopt high ethical standards, moral behavior, and attitudes in order to lead our interconnected, interdependent, globalized world.