Curriculum Innovation:  Global Citizenship & Leadership

08/07/2008

Girls' Preparatory School's (TN) Global Awareness Initiative cultivates active global citizenship, social involvement, and student engagement by helping our girls both to identify their passion and to learn how to mobilize that passion toward the greater good.

An emphasis of the initiative is to develop students who understand the historical and current perspectives of our local, national and international neighbors. With international videoconferencing, age appropriate international news magazines, and electives such as Global Conflicts and Democracy in a Global Setting, students examine the critical issues and problems in the world today.

Today's students must be inspired to be "change agents" for the world, as documentary photographer David Johnson said during a visit to GPS. With the help of their teachers, alumnae, and families, GPS students in 2007-08 set records in fund raising to build a school to educate girls in Pakistan, assisted a female immigrant from Burundi, Africa, as she made her home in Chattanooga, and sent clothing and funds to groups that run orphanages in Nepal and China. Several students traveled abroad in summer, 2008 to Japan and Pakistan to begin building partnerships between girls' schools in those countries and GPS.

Another aspect of the initiative is to develop students who have a deeper understanding of the environmental issues affecting the world today. A student-led Going Green club researched a year's worth of statistics on the school's utility usage, which led to the school's decision to replace all incandescent lighting, install low-flow shower heads, and dig a well to supply landscape water needs, among many other actions.

The establishment of a Global Education Speakers Series for 2008-09 will bring to campus Maurice Sonnenberg, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations; Chan Heng Chee, Ambassador of the Republic of Singapore to the United States; and Pulitzer Prize winner and syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts from the Miami Herald.