Publications by Author: Reimers, Fernando M

Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students offers a wide-ranging comparative account of how innovative professional development programs in a number of countries guide and support teachers in their efforts to promote cognitive and socio-emotional growth in their students. The book focuses on holistic educational outcomes in an effort to better serve students in the twenty-first century and examines seven programs in all—in Chile, China, Colombia, India, Mexico, the United States, and Singapore. 

Fernando M. Reimers, Connie K. Chung, and their contributors focus on a pair of issues of great significance to educators throughout the world: the need to identify and promote a full range of competencies in students as they prepare for work and life in the twenty-first century, and the need to create and enhance professional development programs for teachers that will help them cultivate these competencies in their students. Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students offers a unique and helpful contribution to our understanding of fundamental educational goals and the professional development programs for teachers that aim to further those goals.

How do we help students work effectively with others from diverse cultural backgrounds? How do we help them understand the world? How do we prepare them for work and life in an era of globalization, volatility, and uncertainty? Empowering Global Citizens offers educators and parents compelling answers to those questions.

This book presents The World Course, a curriculum on global citizenship education designed to equip students with the competencies they need to thrive and contribute to sustainable development in an era of globalization. Drawing on curriculum mapping this book offers a coherent and rigorous set of instructional units to support deep learning of twenty-first-century competencies that develop agency, imagination, confidence, and the skills to navigate the complexity of our times.

Drawing on a rich conceptual framework of global education, The World Course scaffolds the development of global competency drawing on project-based learning and other pedagogies that support personalization. The course expands children’s horizons, helping them understand the world in which they live in all its complexity from kindergarten to high school. This is done through learning activities at the zone for proximal development for each age group, with activities that foster student agency and a growth mindset.

That a group of young people in Iraq recently beheaded Nick Berg, a young American who was in that country working as an independent contractor rebuilding infrastructure, in front of a video camera while proclaiming ?God is Great? should give pause to all of us interested in global peace and civility. Not too long ago, the world was shocked by pictures of American guards treating Iraqi prisoners in the most degrading imaginable forms, in ways clearly counter to basic American and human norms of civility and counter to international conventions about the treatment of prisoners of war.

So that we do not dismiss the horror of these acts as ?casualties of war? we should remember that a few years ago Daniel Pearl, another young American, a journalist working in Pakistan, was beheaded in front of a video camera, as his captors also claimed ?God is Great?. It was the same claim about God?s Greatness that those who hijacked several airplanes made on September 11, 2001, as they slashed the throats of pilots and passengers, and crashed those airplanes against civilian and military targets taking the lives of the largest number of civilians not engaged in combat to die in a single act in recent American history.

These crimes against humanity are not limited to recent acts against Americans or Iraqis, they are the routine form of coercion used by those who choose to pursue their political goals at the margin of national and international legal frameworks, and they are also the forms of coercion used by States against their own citizens, and often against the citizens of other nations. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, the ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the religious wars in Yelwa Nigeria, and fifty years ago the Holocaust are too recent examples, in the scale of human history, of the capacity of humans to lose their humanity in consciously acting to physically take the lives of those whom they perceived as different.

Should we resign ourselves to accept that members of a species that has survived innumerable evolutionary challenges should come from time to time to seek to destroy each other because they came to share norms and values that made this acceptable? Human history offers abundant evidence of the capacity of our species to engage in massive efforts of destruction of human life. Our times are not the first in history in which groups sharing a set of cultural values killed other humans ?in the name of God?.