Empowering Global Citizens

integrating what works best for the local circumstances and specific needs,
which challenges the expectation of fidelity of implementation, or the carrying
out of a program’s designs as intended: “The real challenge of implementa—
tion, then, is to figure out how to thoughtfully accommodate local contexts
while remaining true to the core ideas to ensure improvements in practice that
carry the warrant of effectiveness” (Le Mahieu 2011 8C Bryk et al., 2015).
Because we are more interested in integrity of implementation than in fidel—
ity of implementation, we explicate the goals and principles that guided the
design of our curriculum in the rest of this chapter so that those who need to
make adaptations can do so in ways that preserve the integrity of our design.

As explained earlier, the overarching goal of our curriculum is to support the
development of global citizenship, which is understood to be the result of
competencies in understanding, caring about, and having the capacity to in—
fluence global affairs and to advance human rights. We built on a concep—
tualization of global competency that included knowledge, affect, and skills
(Reimers, 2009, 2010.) Central to our conception of global competency is
the notion of human agency—of empowerment—and we therefore sought
to cultivate the mind—set that individuals can make a difference, the desire to
take initiative, the ability to act in leadership roles, and an understanding of
responsibility.

The principles that guided our curriculum design were defining clear
outcomes for knowledge, affect, and action and focusing on interdisci—
plinary units that would be aligned with coherent themes in each grade as
well as with an overall scope and sequence. Finally we audited the entire
curriculum to ascertain whether there were adequate opportunities for
developing the intended capabilities throughout. We balanced such cur-
riculum mapping with. various features designed to support personaliza—
tion, i.e. providing students opportunities to develop their own interests,
to discover their passions, and to learn deeply about issues that were of
interest to them. In particular, we depended on project based learning,
student collaboration, engagement of parents and community members,