Children Taking Action on Global Issues

The willingness to take action in order to create social change is essential to developing intercultural understanding and becoming a global citizen. This chapter describes each of these principles along with the theoretical perspectives that support each one and examples of how they played out in classroom practice. Before focusing on the principles, it provides a brief description of the instructional context and an overview of the two inquiry units from which the classroom examples are excerpted. The context for our work was a small K–5 public school of two hundred students within a large urban district with a culturally and linguistically diverse population in a middle-class/working-class neighborhood. The framework of a Curriculum That Is Intercultural was significant in enacting our theoretical beliefs and organizing instruction at the school. Action involves the recognition that a real need exists and is viewed as such by children.