International-Mindedness

[Julia Beck]

What are some of the ways in which we can promote, encourage, develop and build Internationalism and International-mindedness? While the three Fs of flags, festivals and food is not the answer, most schools rely solely on them.

[Pat Ropchan]

Our school has become a Round Square School and a group of our high school students just returned from a Round Square conference in India. Our elementary school has a "club" called HOP (Humanitarian Outreach Program) and the action component of the PYP and the global scope of the units all contribute to internationalism. My role is to support curriculum with resources that also reflect a global perspective.

[R Scroggi]

Off the top of my head: In the LMC - signage/bulletin boards (sometimes but not always subtle), our website has links to international papers (a couple of the teachers require articles from other countries), worldschoolandI.com sends weekly articles from around the world that I forward to my staff but haven't figured the best way to get to my students yet.
When I'm doing book talks, I talk about the popular books that have been translated. Sometimes when I get e-mails from relatives overseas, I post those for the students to read. I'm sure I do other things as well but I can't think of them right now. Some of the things I've seen the teachers do were a fund-raising, letter-writing project on (I believe it was Darfur), international biographies within their discipline, vignettes about math are in a book called Agnesi to Zeno by Sanderson Smith that at least one math teacher uses, etc. We have a lot of international posters or murals painted on walls. Sorry this is splotchy; I keep getting interrupted.