School Leadership: Are YOU internationally minded?

Are YOU internationally minded?

Sunday 22 April 2018

Do you know the PIN code of the world?

YOU are probably wrong!

"Almost nobody knows the basic global facts." (Hans Rosling)

This month a new book was published that challenges all of our views of the world. Bill Gates describes Factfulness by Hans Rosling as "One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world."

It is one of those books that challenges us to reorder how we think about the world, and as such is essential reading for anyone who would call themselves internationally minded. It is a chilling to read that when asked simple questions about global trends - what percentage of people around the world are living in poverty; why the global population is increasing; how many girls finish schools - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates and investment bankers - people who frame our view of the world!

Although I highly recommend that you read this book to get the full picture this blog will present you with an overview through an introductory quiz which will test your own understanding of the world and one of Rosling's famous TED talks.

Activator: Test Yourself

This blog is about the world, and how to understand it. As international educators we are committed to developing international mindedness in our students and staff. But how internationally minded are we? Use the Gapminder quiz to test your knowledge about the world. You can access it online. The slides below use the data from the book to give you explanations around a few of the questions mentioned in the Gapminder quiz.

Use this quiz to introduce subjects such as global health, population growth or as starting point to discuss what development is. What do the indicators in these quizzes say about the world?

  

KEY FACTS

Some key facts of this complete world make-over taken from Factfulness:

  • No longer a gap between developed and developing countries: Most people are in the middle income bracket: tofday there is no gap between the 'West and the rest', between 'developed and developing', between 'rich and poor'. We should all stop using such simple pairs of categories to suggest that there is. Low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them.
  • The world is getting better.  For example consider the following list of things which are decreasing and on their way out: battle deaths, HIV infections, death penalty, children dying smallpox, hunger, child labour, oil spills. Now consider the following wonderful things that have got better: mobile phones, water, electricity coverage, girls in school, immunization, democracy, science, women's right to vote.
  • The world's PIN code which tells you how many people are in the world. Currently the PIN code is 1-1-1-4. From left to right the number of billions are Americas (1) Europe (1), Africa (1) and Asia (4). By 2100 the new PIN code of the world is projected to be 1-1-4-5.

Learning Engagement: Learn about the world as it is TODAY

The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We started the Ignorance Project to investigate what the public know and don’t know about basic global patterns and macro-trends. We use surveys to ask representative groups of people simple questions about key-aspects of global development.

As you watch the following TedTalk consider:

  • What do you see?
  • What do you think about what you see?
  • What do you wonder? What questions do you want to ask?

Everyone lives on $ Dollar Street

Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. Everyone lives somewhere on the street.

The poorest lives to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else live somewhere in between. Welcome to visit all homes on Dollar Street!

Dollar Street is a compelling look at a cross-section of humanity that reminds us of how much we share in common, despite however many of miles or thousands of dollars in household income separate us.

This is how Gapminder describes ‘Dollar Street’. It “was invented by Anna Rosling Rönnlund at Gapminder.  For 15 years she spent her workdays making global public data easier to understand and use. Over time her frustration grew: carefully selecting data to present it in colorful and moving charts made overall global trends and patterns easier to understand. But it did not make everyday life on different income levels understandable. Especially not in places far from home. “People in other cultures are often portrayed as scary or exotic.” Anna explains: “This has to change. We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels. Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling. A team of photographers have documented over 264 homes in 50 countries so far, and the list is growing. In each home the photographer spends a day taking photos of up to 135 objects, like the family’s toothbrushes or favorite pair of shoes. All photos are then tagged (household function, family name and income).”

Encourage your students to access Dollar Street. Get them to travel on dollar street and find differences within countries and similaritires across countries.

Reflections

  • Do we teach our students about their own country's socio-economic position in relation to the rest of the world, and how that is changing?
  • Do we teach our students to understand how their own country progressed through income levels to get to where it is now, and how to use that knowledge to understand what life is like in other countries today?
  • Do we teach our students how to hold the following two ideas at the same time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things are getting better?
  • Do we teach our students how to consume the news and spot the drama without becoming stressed or hopeless?
  • Do we enable our students to understand that the world is constantly changing and that they will have to update their knowledge and worldview throughout their lives?

FREE Resources

All of the resources provided by Gapminder are free to use so long as you provide the following attribution: you must make clear to others the license terms of this work and include this citation below: In your use of our material, you must attribute it to us like this: ”Free [ ---- ] from www.gapminder.org”

Teachers' Guide: 200 years that changed the world - this teacher guide explains how you can use Gapminder World to lecture about global development from 1800 until today.

Gapminder PowerPoint slides to download.

Tags: intenational mindedness, gapminder, dollar street

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1 May 2018
China - International Education
17 Apr 2018