Using the 21st Century Framework for a Global Education: What Educators Working With Special Education Students Need to Know

Introduction

Classrooms in many parts of the world have an increasingly diverse student population. International migration patterns have significantly changed the cultural make-up of many industrialized societies and, by extension, school-aged populations of children including students with disabilities (SWD). Such changes are particularly prevalent in countries like Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. (Wiek, et al 2013). In this increasingly globalized landscape, schools face significant challenges, particularly in the area of special education where disability meets with culture and language barriers. Researchers have documented lower educational outcomes like student achievement and graduation rates for immigrant and other marginalized students in most countries around the world (Volante, DeLuca, & Klinger, 2019). In order to address these issues, institutes of higher education (IHEs) must refocus the curriculum in teacher preparation programs to embrace the 21^st Century Framework for a Global Education. This includes special education teacher preparation programs and it can be done while addressing the demands of accreditation.

IHEs often describe themselves in the literature as “in a critical stage and transition period” (Thelin, 2019, p, 1). Thelin (2019) pointed out that these same terms were used to describe IHEs in 1910 by Edwin Slogan in the anthology, Great American Universities. There is a constant tension between a professor’s expertise and an evolving world. The notion of the “life-long learner” must apply to educators working in teacher preparation programs. Even when IHEs attract innovative students, the current pedagogical culture of many programs presents a barrier to encouraging creativity and change in the curriculum. Too often, the goal of IHEs is to get students to master a relatively narrow set of knowledge and skills that focus on outdated practices. This viewpoint tends to minimize new and different roles in education unless mandated by policy.

This narrowness is inadvertently encouraged by our current method of programmatic evaluation and accreditation processes. The increasingly prescriptive approach of program accreditation focuses on ensuring that all colleges and schools meet minimal yet detailed standards of competency. This approach discourages experimentation and innovation in education, which, in turn, stifles student creativity. Teacher preparation programs seem to encourage concentration on meeting a prescribed list of competencies rather than experiment with new and novel ways to educate students. This can be of special concern considering that a growing number of new programs use a check-box rubric design as the sole assessment platform for program designs (OCED, 2016; Svensson et al., 2012).

For example, this was true when adopting a course entitled “Cultural and Technological Awareness in the Context of Global Education,” which was needed as part of an accreditation for the teacher preparation program I teach in. This course was meant to address a gap in the coursework for the areas of diversity and education technology. Though the accreditation looms large, the adoption of this course provided an important opportunity for teaching candidates and the instructor to be innovation and creativity using the 21^st Century Framework for Global Education (Partnership for 21^st Century Learning, 2017). This course is offered to future administrators, curriculum specialist, literacy coaches, school counselors, special education teachers, and technology specialists. This course has as the objective to increase knowledge and skills in the areas of culturally responsive instruction and digital/interactive technology in the classroom through the lens of global education.