What is Global Competence, and What Might it Look Like in Chinese Schools?

Abstract

What exactly does it mean to be globally competent in a Chinese context in the early 21st century? In this article, we propose a culturally informed re-interpretation of ‘global competence’ rooted in Eastern and Western traditions. We draw on a longitudinal empirical action-research study of Chinese and foreign teachers working to foster global competence in four Chinese cities. Throughout this work we endeavoured to contextualize a view of global competence commonly used in the US and around the world (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2012; OECD-PISA, 2017) in ways that could inform Chinese educational practice, honor practitioners’ cultural repertoires in a changing national educational landscape, and be informed by state-of-the-art scholarship on Chinese foundational values in education. The formulation proposed foregrounds global competence as a cultivation of self and search to understand and improve the world. It highlights the development of four ‘virtuous dispositions’ – at once cognitive and moral capacities – deemed essential to navigate a more interconnected world: (a) dedicating oneself to understanding the world within and beyond one’s immediate environments, (b) seeking to understand perspectives and relate to others harmoniously, (c) communicating across difference interacting mindfully, and (d) taking action with others harmoniously to help build better societies. Global competence is here viewed as a life-long process of the making of a moral person ‘zuo ren’ through daily interactions with the world. This research stands, humbly, as invitation to advance nuanced and adaptive visions of global competence. At their best such visions might offer a common platform for transnational dialog about the capacities needed to navigate an interdependent world, while honoring the cultural contributions and historical contingencies that can enrich common aspirations for our future generations. It is by capitalizing on the opportunity of context-informed re-interpretations that today’s global educational frameworks might prepare our youth for a world in which hybridity, mix, and complexity are the new norm. The deliberately culturally hybrid view of global competence we propose is informed by a longitudinal record of participating Chinese and foreign teachers’ ideas about global competence education, its meaning, significance, practice and demands, including in-depth interviews, targeted performance tasks, classroom observations, analysis of student work and participatory coding exercises whereby teachers were invited to comment on and inform emerging conceptualizations of global competence for clarity and cultural familiarity.