Challenge 1

How does globalization challenge us as professionals in education?

Globalization describes the process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a global network of political ideas through communication, transportation, and trade.  However, globalization is usually recognized as being driven by a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural, political, and biological factors. The term can also refer to the transnational circulation of ideas, languages, or popular culture through acculturation.

So globalization can be understood as a positive or negative process. It is an assimilation of different cultures to integrate them into their own. This brings a negative aspect when we forget our own culture and only began to exhibit strange customs of another culture, which is usually dominant. This can lead to the disappearance of a culture and the entire world has the dominant culture. Such negative consequences are to be avoided in the process of globalization and the best way to avoid this is with education, through school and families. 

This should promote values education, understanding and acceptance values in all cultures and get the globalization but always from the culture itself. It is also is very important the education of children, as they will envolve and promote their own culture in the future. In this way, they must learn to make their own judgments about everything and we must teach them that the most important thing is to develop knowledge about different existing cultures. Also, they have to know that the knowledge is created from information. Therefore they can have a firm view to promote positive globalization.

All this and more we discussed in our group. Different topics were discussed and there were different solutions about the topics, which were collected in the next picture. I also tried to show which topics are for me the most important in the text above.

Here is the summary of what we talked in our group too.


February 08th 2011

GLOBALIZATION

1: The 3 biggest challenges in the World today

We had a vivid discussion about the general Challenges of the world in opposite to challenges causes by the Globalisation.

a. poverty

- hunger

- education

- disease

b. climate/global warming

c. environmental consequences

In addition there are challenges worldwide especially caused by Globalization:

d. cultural loss / cultural borders

e. immigration/ refuge

f. war/ terrorism

2: How can we work on that as professionals?

- create awareness/cultural awareness

- provide contact between different cultures / lifes / people

- compare lifes

- little action by starting from the bottom

- look towards what others have done with a (similar) challenge and learn from their experiences. Study and be open to all ideas

- be an example: information -->knowledge -->awareness