National Blog Notes K-16 Global Ed Here

A blog on the national Education Week website details how the Long Beach Unified School District’s partnerships with its hometown, higher education institutions are providing greater opportunities for students to pursue global studies in high school and beyond.

Cal State Long Beach’s Richard Marcus, a professor and director of The Global Studies Institute and the International Studies Program, and Tim Keirn, a full-time lecturer in history and education, director of the Yadunandan Center for India Studies, and coordinator of the university single subject credential program at CSULB, authored the guest blog exploring how the university has merged the nationally recognized Long Beach College Promise initiative with efforts to develop global competence in its students.  The piece is titled Building a K-16 International Education Pipeline: ‘The Long Beach Promise.’  To find the full blog at edweek.org, search by title.

CSULB has the largest secondary (middle and high school) history-social science teacher credentialing program in California and one of the largest in the nation.  Virtually all history teachers recently hired by LBUSD have come through this program, the blog states, and university faculty regularly provide in-service professional development, or training, for all world history teachers in the district. 

The number of LBUSD students coming to CSULB with Advanced Placement World History credit (and global historical understanding) has increased, as has the number of students arriving at the university with AP credit in our courses with international content, including comparative government, human geography, Spanish literature, Spanish language and culture, Chinese language and culture, and Japanese language and culture.

The blog also discusses dual enrollment opportunities, LBUSD’s new Sato Academy of Mathematics and Science – including Sato’s Chinese language classes held in partnership with the university – and the popular new Ethnic Studies courses that local high schoolers are taking for university credit.  There are also international pathways for students at several local high schools, and efforts are under way to create complementary programming where foreign language acquisition is central to the pathway.