For years I’ve been asked to start a blog and it never felt right for me. With so many other voices out there in the blogosphere, it never seemed important enough to carve out time to create our own platform or that more words would add meaningfully to the conversation. But times have changed. Significantly.
Only two weeks into the new Trump administration it’s clear that the “America First” brand will have serious implications for our place in the world, and for how we Americans, as a culturally diverse, globally connected society, see ourselves and our neighbors. The work of global education has never seemed more relevant or more urgent.
At the same time, we have changes at the local level – with a new DCPS Chancellor and new elected officials in the DC Council and State Board of Education. We want to be sure, especially in the face of inevitable changes to federal education policy under a new Secretary of Education, that the role of global education and world language learning does not get marginalized or reversed. We still have so far to go.
So let’s begin a conversation. I can only do this with your help. We’ll invite guest bloggers to join us – educators, students, partners, parents, experts, policymakers, and other members of our community.
I tell our student bloggers in Globalize DC’s Japanese Plus Program that posts need to be informative, insightful, and idiosyncratic, and we’ll apply the same standard to ourselves. More than that, we’ll be grounded in the real world. We don’t want to add to the generalized blah blah blah. I envision this blog as a platform for sharing specific experiences, insights, lessons learned, challenges, and tangible suggestions growing out of our collective work right here in DC.
So thank you, as always, for your support. And let the conversation begin.
Looking forward,
Sally Schwartz
Globalize DC