The increase in diversity across our country means that students will be working and living with people from different backgrounds. It also means CTE instructors increasingly have diverse populations of students in their classrooms. This lesson digs deeper into the importance of global competence for workforce readiness, specifically focusing on respect and empathy for diversity, both locally and abroad. Instructors will examine how to leverage the diversity in their classrooms and also how to encourage all students to pursue careers in STEM.
It’s no secret that we are living in a time of rapid economic, technological, and social changes, which are creating a world that is ever more interconnected. One in ten Americans is foreign born, and all of our local communities – urban, suburban, and rural – are growing more diverse. To take advantage of global and local market opportunies, companies want to hire workers with global competence—that is, the capacity and disposition to understand act on issues of global significance. In this lesson, we discuss ways to prepare all students for work and civic roles in an environment where success increasingly requires the ability to compete, connect, and cooperate on an international scale.
In CT201: Understanding Global Competence we introduced the Project Management Institute's, Project Management Cycle. In this lesson we will help you take all of those ideas and work through the Project Management Cycle to fully develop your global project and to implement it in your classroom. By doing so, you will learn strategies that can ALSO be helpful to students as they complete their projects.
This overview lesson for faculty will welcome participants to the training sequence. It will include the definition of global competence and provide a faculty self-reflection tool. An overview of the 10 faculty training modules will also be provided. This will provide a guide for faculty and administrators to understand the content and sequence of the modules.
Today’s students will be graduating into a world that is ever more interconnected. One in ten Americans is foreign born, and local communities—urban, suburban, and rural—are growing more diverse. To take advantage of global market opportunities, companies want employees with the knowledge and skills to work across cultures. Therefore, faculty teaching in career and technical education (CTE) pathways need to prepare their students to compete, connect, and cooperate on an international scale in order to find jobs and move along a career trajectory. This module will establish a rationale for incorporating global competence in postsecondary CTE and introduces natural ways to make those connections.
CTE is the most proactive approach to address the mismatch between the skills demanded by employers and the skills of our current workforce. To do so, CTE needs to evolve to better align to these shifting workforce demands and provide students with both specific occupational skills, as well as broader and transferable knowledge, skills, and dispositions that position them as adaptable workers and lifelong learners (Kreamer, 2014). This module provides an overview of learning needs of today’s diverse community college students, ACTE’s High Quality CTE Framework, and tools to connect global competence to career fields.
The competencies needed to meet the needs of the increasingly international workforce should be woven throughout the CTE community and technical college curriculum (National Academy of Sciences, 2017; Suskie, 2018). Building global competence into CTE begins with understanding your students’ diverse experiences through the lens of social justice. This module will utilize the Global Social Justice Framework for educators, provide tools to integrate student experience and learning, and address the foundation of global and technical competence within CTE programs.
