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

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Veronica Boix Mansilla ◽  
Devon Wilson

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.

2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.


2012 ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Uzun

The article deals with the features of the Russian policy of agriculture support in comparison with the EU and the US policies. Comparative analysis is held considering the scales and levels of collective agriculture support, sources of supporting means, levels and mechanisms of support of agricultural production manufacturers, its consumers, agrarian infrastructure establishments, manufacturers and consumers of each of the principal types of agriculture production. The author makes an attempt to estimate the consequences of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization based on a hypothesis that this will result in unification of the manufacturers and consumers’ protection levels in Russia with the countries that have long been WTO members.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arathy Puthillam

That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavioral scientists propose solutions, we ask who is conducting research and on what samples. Forty papers on COVID-19 published in PsyArxiV were analyzed; the nationalities of the authors and the samples they recruited were assessed. Findings suggest that an overwhelming majority of the samples recruited were from the US and the authors were based in US and German institutions. Next, men constituted a large proportion of primary and sole authors. The implications of these findings are discussed.


Author(s):  
Masoud Keighobadi ◽  
Maryam Nakhaei ◽  
Ali Sharifpour ◽  
Ali Akbar Khasseh ◽  
Sepideh Safanavaei ◽  
...  

Background: This study was designed to analyze the global research on Lophomonas spp. using bibliometric techniques. Methods: A bibliometric research was carried out using the Scopus database. The analysis unit was the research articles conducted on Lophomonas spp. Results: Totally, 56 articles about Lophomonas spp. were indexed in the Scopus throughout 1933-2019 ( 87 years ) with the following information: (A) The first article was published in 1933; (B) 21 different countries contributed in studies related to Lophomonas spp.; (C) China ranked first with 16 publications about Lophomonas spp.; and (D) “Brugerolle, G” and “Beams, H.W.” from France and the US participated in 4 articles respectively, as the highest number of publications in the Lophomonas spp. network. Discussion: After 87 years, Lophomonas still remains unknown for many researchers and physicians around the world. Further studies with high quality and international collaboration are urgently needed to determine different epidemiological aspects and the real burden of the mysterious parasite worldwide.


Author(s):  
Avinash Paliwal

The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha in March 2001 outraged India (and the world). It killed any scope for conciliation with the Taliban. In this context, the US decision to take military action in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks was welcomed by many in India. However, Washington’s decision to undertake such action without UN approval (which came only in December 2001) sparked another round of debate between the partisans and the conciliators. As this chapter shows, the former were enthusiastic about supporting the US in its global war on terror, but the latter advocated caution given Washington’s willingness to partner with Islamabad. Despite the global trend to ‘fight terrorism’, the conciliators were successful in steering India away from getting involved in Afghanistan militarily.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Falkenrath

This chapter examines strategy and deterrence and traces the shift from deterrence by ‘punishment’ to deterrence by ‘denial’ in Washington’s conduct of the Global War on Terror. The former rested on an assumption that the consequences of an action would serve as deterrents. The latter may carry messages of possible consequences, but these are delivered by taking action that removes the capabilities available to opponents – in the given context, the Islamist terrorists challenging the US. Both approaches rest on credibility, but are more complex in the realm of counter-terrorism, where the US authorities have no obvious ‘return to sender’ address and threats to punish have questionable credibility. In this context, denial offers a more realistic way of preventing terrorist attacks. Yet, the advanced means available to the US are deeply ethically problematic in liberal democratic societies. However, there would likely be even bigger questions if governments failed to act.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter examines evidence principally from the US that the Great Influenza provoked profiteering by landlords, undertakers, vendors of fruit, pharmacists, and doctors, but shows that such complaints were rare and confined mostly to large cities on the East Coast. It then investigates anti-social advice and repressive decrees on the part of municipalities, backed by advice from the US Surgeon General and prominent physicians attacking ‘spitters, coughers, and sneezers’, which included state and municipal ordinances against kissing and even ‘big talkers’. It then surveys legislation on compulsory and recommended mask wearing. Yet this chapter finds no protest or collective violence against the diseased victims or any other ‘others’ suspected of disseminating the virus. Despite physicians’ and lawmakers’ encouragement of anti-social behaviour, mass volunteerism and abnegation instead unfolded to an extent never before witnessed in the world history of disease.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


Recycling ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Godfrey

With changing consumption patterns, growing populations and increased urbanisation, developing countries face significant challenges with regards to waste management. Waste plastic is a particularly problematic one, with single-use plastic leaking into the environment, including the marine environment, at an unprecedented rate. Around the world, countries are taking action to minimise these impacts, including banning single-use plastics; changing petroleum-based plastics to alternative bio-benign products such as paper, glass or biodegradable plastics; and improving waste collection systems to ensure that all waste is appropriately collected and reprocessed or safely disposed. However, these “solutions” are often met with resistance, from business, government or civil society, due to the intended and unintended consequences, leaving many questioning the most appropriate solution to reducing the leakage. This paper argues that there is no one single solution to addressing the leakage of plastic into the environment, but that the solution is likely to be a combination of the three approaches, based on local considerations.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 534
Author(s):  
Pedro Revilla ◽  
Calli M. Anibas ◽  
William F. Tracy

Modern sweet corn is distinguished from other vegetable corns by the presence of one or more recessive alleles within the maize endosperm starch synthesis pathway. This results in reduced starch content and increased sugar concentration when consumed fresh. Fresh sweet corn originated in the USA and has since been introduced in countries around the World with increasing popularity as a favored vegetable choice. Several reviews have been published recently on endosperm genetics, breeding, and physiology that focus on the basic biology and uses in the US. However, new questions concerning sustainability, environmental care, and climate change, along with the introduction of sweet corn in other countries have produced a variety of new uses and research activities. This review is a summary of the sweet corn research published during the five years preceding 2021.


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