Worldmates
Connecting hearts and minds.
Introduction
At work, at home and in the community, people will need a broad understanding of how others live, in different cultures and traditions, and how others think, whether as scientists or as artists. The foundations for this don’t all come naturally. We are all born with “bonding social capital”, a sense of belonging to our family or other people with shared experiences, achievements or goals. But it requires deliberate and continuous efforts to create the kind of “bridging social capital” through which we can share understandings, ideas and innovation, and increase our radius of trust to strangers and institutions.
Problem
The interconnected world children grow in requires a set of skills and dispositions that are rarely prioritized in traditional education settings. When the global landscape is considered, whether through teaching content or exchange opportunities, the understanding of different nations, contexts and cultures is most often framed with a degree of stereotype priming. This hinders a true interpersonal understanding that guides genuine dialogues and un-biased curiosity.
Opportunity
Theory of change: if the first exchange between two individuals keeps the cultural and national identities anonymous, then stereotypes and biases are avoided and cannot lead to an interpretation of the dialogue, so that the focus is put on personal identities and commonalities across communities.
Targeted constructs: the educational experience targets three constructs, essential to the development of global competence and cross-cultural sentivity.
- Active open-mindedness: willingness to actively seek out evidence that contradicts one's existing beliefs, and to fairly consider and weigh this evidence.
- Social perspective taking: capacity to make sense of others’ thoughts and feelings.
- Cognitive empathy: the ability to understand another person’s predicament as they understand it.
Curriculum design: During four consecutive weeks, students ask each other and answer questions from a list with an incremental degree of introspection and vulnerability.At the end of the anonymous data exchange, the identities are revealed and individuals participate to specific activities that aim to build open-mindedness, perspective taking and empathy.