Global Awareness in Teacher Education (GATE) Fellows

CIM Associate Director and CIM Senior Fellow Receive $5,000 Grant as "Global Awareness in Teacher Education" (GATE) Fellows

The CIM salutes Professor Jing Lin, CIM Associate Director, and Professor Rebecca Oxford, CIM Senior Fellow for Second Language Education, who jointly received a $5,000 grant from the University of Maryland's Global Awareness in Teacher Education (GATE) Fellows Program. The program's purpose is to promote global and international dimensions in teacher education at the University of Maryland.

Professors Oxford and Lin, along with five other GATE Fellows, were selected competitively from the College of Education faculty to receive GATE funding, which is provided by the Longwood Foundation. Professors Lin and Oxford state, "We are delighted to be named GATE Fellows. Our GATE plans embody the Longwood Foundation's policy: 'At the dawn of the 21st century, knowledge of other peoples, economies, languages and international affairs has become a necessity. . .' We will work as a team to create new international courses, program options, and field experiences and to work toward global peace. Since some of our planned GATE effort deals with China, we will coordinate closely with the work of the CIM."

As GATE Fellows, Professors Oxford and Lin will develop a course entitled Great Thinkers East and West: Dialogues of Civilization in Education, to be co-taught by the two professors for the first time in fall, 2008. According to Dean of Education Donna Wiseman, the forthcoming course will be taught in the University Honors Program and will thereby benefit the university at large, as well as teacher education students. The new course will introduce philosophers and practitioners from East and West into teacher education and will demonstrate how they have influenced educational policies, curriculum, and instruction. As Professors Lin and Oxford explain, Globalization implies interaction of diverse ideas and perspectives on education from different regions of the world. We intend to compare and contrast, but more importantly, we seek to build dialogues and mutual learning. Students who have an in-depth understanding of international educational values, beliefs, and practices will be better equipped to deal with an increasingly diverse student body and better prepared to help the younger generation to become citizens of the world.

A second planned initiative is to help develop a five-course Peace Education Graduate Certificate Program. To this end, Professors Lin and Oxford will work with Professor Steve Klees of the College of Education and will gather advice from Professor John Grayzel, the University of Maryland's Bahá'í Chair for Peace, and from members of the University's Initiative on Education for Cooperation, Development, and Peace. The Peace Education Graduate Certificate could be earned along with degrees in teacher education or related fields (for instance, education policy, languages, conflict resolution, and international development). The certificate program will show how conflict, competition, and war and their opposites, harmony, cooperation, and peace, are currently addressed by U.S. educational institutions. It will also explore ways to deal more effectively with conflict, promote understanding among people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and demonstrate how teachers' values about conflict and cooperation affect students' values.

A third initiative is development of a book edited by Professor Oxford and entitled, Language of War, Language of Peace around the World: How Peace Language Can Promote Cooperation and Diminish Global Conflict. This book, to which Professor Lin and other University of Maryland scholars around the campus are contributing, is in a series on Peace Education (Series Editors Jing Lin, Edward J. Brantmeier, and Ian Harris) for Information Age Publishing.

Professors Lin and Oxford's fourth initiative is opening up opportunities in China to teacher educators. The CIM has close collaborations with Nankai University and Beijing Normal University, which have a great support system to host University of Maryland teacher education students. Professors Oxford and Lin state, Through the CIM, we will arrange for teacher education tours of China. A teacher education tour could begin in China with an overview of key aspects of Chinese language, culture, and educational systems (with preliminary readings and brief meetings in Maryland before the tour). It could continue with visits to major cultural and historic institutions in several Chinese cities and could include visits to Chinese K-12 schools, in which our teacher education students would be paired with Chinese teachers and might be invited co-teach English classes of Chinese students or assist in other ways.