Going Global assists secondary schools in developing students’ international knowledge and skills. The guidebook is rich with examples from schools, many of them finalists in the annual Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education

 

Schools for a Global Age features school profiles and lessons learned on best practices in international education from The Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize program.


 

The 2008 Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for
Excellence in International Education

Prize Finale: Celebrating Six Years of Excellence

Asia Society proudly presents the 2008 winners of The Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education. The national competition recognizes and celebrates outstanding achievement in the field that promotes cultural awareness, world history, and a global curriculum as essentials in the development of the next generation of young Americans. This year’s Prizes will be awarded in the categories of State, School and Media/Technology to exemplars whose innovative approaches to teaching and learning create replicable models that can support both students and educators in a meaningful way.

“Today students need a new set of skills to succeed—they need to be internationally fluent, connected, and comprehensive. These award recipients are equipping the next generation of leaders with the critical international knowledge and skills they will need to lead successfully in our global society,” said Stephanie Bell-Rose, President of The Goldman Sachs Foundation.

This year’s winners, who will each receive $25,000 (with the exception of the co-winners of the Media/Technology prize who will each receive $12,500) are:

Elementary/Middle School Prize: Independence Charter School
Independence Charter School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is an urban public charter school serving a diverse student population of more than 700 K-8 students. Founded in 2001, the school combines two second language acquisition programs with an interdisciplinary curriculum integrating world cultures, traditions, literature, geography, economics, and history. Currently, 60% of students are enrolled in the Foreign Language in Elementary Schools Spanish program where instruction is in English with a daily 30 to 40 minute immersion session in Spanish, while the other 40% of students are based in a total Spanish immersion program in which instruction is completely in Spanish. Sixth graders receive lessons in Japanese, and seventh graders receive Arabic lessons while maintaining Spanish lessons. In addition to studying American History, each year students study important world regions for example: China and Mexico in kindergarten and France and the Dominican Republic in first grade. In a collaboration with iEARN (International Education and Research Network), 4th and 5th grade teachers are piloting online collaborative projects linking students to peers in other countries to research, produce, and share content on global citizenship. The school has partnerships with the Greater Philadelphia International Visitor Council, the Painted Bride Arts Center, GLOBE, and the Embassy of Spain to provide additional content, international speakers, and to support the training of its teachers. The school also has a relationship with two schools in Uruguay through ongoing teacher exchanges.

High School Prize: Bergen County Academies
Bergen County Academies in New Jersey is a public, county-wide magnet technical school serving approximately 1022 students in grades 9-12. Students may major in Science and Technology; Business and Finance; Culinary Arts and Hotel Administration; Engineering and Design; Medical Science Technology; Telecommunications and Computer Science; or Visual and Performing Arts while taking three or more years of a world language – either French, Spanish, Latin, or Mandarin. The school’s innovative Global Leadership Exchange program utilizes web-based technology to connect students to the global community and has included projects varying from video conference forums in philosophy and literature conducted with French Canadian students in French and English to a joint research project with Japan investigating the differences between the DNA of the Japanese Giant Salamander and the Eastern Hellbender to solving bio-ethics problems. The school recently launched a new three week-long US based 2009 summer “Global Experience” program for international and BCA students combining language immersion, cultural exploration and scientific and engineering research through its partnership with San-Hsin High School of Commerce for Home Economics in Kaohsiung city Taiwan and the Seoul Metropolitan Government.

District/State Prize: New Jersey
In New Jersey, a 2004 International Education Summit served as a launch pad for what has become an ongoing state initiative. A 2005 International Education Taskforce and governor-appointed High School Redesign Committee laid out ways in which the state could “develop a world-class workforce by assisting the state’s students to obtain the skills and education needed in a competitive global economy.” In 2009, the state will attain the primary goal of the international education plan – the revision of the state’s P-12 core curriculum content standards to include international knowledge and skills in all nine content areas. The new standards will be accomplished by in-person and online professional development for teachers and school leaders to ensure that schools support 21st century learning and global education.

Media/Technology Prize: Google Lit Trips
Google Lit Trips uses the technologies of Google Earth, Social Networking, and a website together to bring literature to life through virtual mapping. By placing markers on Google Earth tracking the journeys of characters from literature and populating those place markers with a wide variety of supplemental resources, students can “ride along as virtual passengers” on the same journey the characters are taking. Google Lit Trips provides professional development by allowing teacher access to previously constructed Google Lit Trips, and also provides teachers with the ability to interact and post new trips online.

Media/Technology Prize: Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting promotes in-depth student engagement with emergent crises and other underreported issues as diverse as civil war in eastern Congo, the plight of Iraqi refugees, the human face of HIV/AIDS, and the loss of an indigenous people’s ancestral land to climate change through the creation of interactive educational websites. The Pulitzer Gateway serves as an online interactive educational portal, through which students can interact directly with, for example, journalists from the United States and Kenya who are reporting on water scarcity and access issues in East Africa. A unique feature of Pultizer Gateway is the ability for students to navigate the site in a linear fashion through dynamic geographic browsers providing geographic and regional context and to produce and share their own stories on the issues with students in other countries.

The Prizes program also awards student scholarships.

High School Youth
Five high school students who demonstrate an in-depth understanding of key issues in international affairs and the global economy. Each winner receives $10,000 in scholarship funds.

In previous years, the prizewinners have shown exceptional imagination and commitment to integrating intellectually rigorous international content into schools, fostering effective teaching and learning of world languages and bringing the world to America's youth in exciting ways through the use of media and technology. Prizewinners were honored at a dinner in Washington, D.C. attended by the U.S. Secretary of Education and Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and other dignitaries. The winners have also been announced in The New York Times and The Financial Times and have garnered considerable regional and national media coverage. Top schools from the competition were also featured in Schools for the Global Age: Promising Practices in International Education.

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Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes Finale
The 2009 Prizes mark the end of the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education. The Prizes program was created in 2003 to stimulate awareness, identify models, spread best practices, and award innovation in the field of international education. $750,000 in prize money went to schools, universities, districts, states, and organizations for their pioneering and excellent work.

Asia Society wishes to thank the Goldman Sachs Foundation for their visionary support of this initiative, and also the nearly 13,000 individuals, schools, and institutions that shared their experiences in the past six years.

Impact statement

Join the Movement
The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning is an opportunity to be part of an innovative educational movement. As a membership network, its purpose is to provide leadership and structure to move international education from the margins to the mainstream by connecting stakeholders, issues and policies in order to prepare K-12 students to excel in an interconnected world. Through publications, conferences, workshops, newsletters, policy briefs and online resources, the Partnership for Global Learning provides:

  • effective K-12 strategies for integrating international education content across the curriculum
  • successful approaches to creating world language program
  • ways to “make the case” for global competence
  • policy innovations and funding resources to advance international education
  • approaches to international benchmarking to support innovation
  • preparation for teachers to teach about the world
  • ways to harness technology and create new opportunities for international collaboration
  • an understanding of how international education promotes academic excellence and equity for all students

Learn more

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The Goldman Sachs Foundation
The Goldman Sachs Foundation is a global philanthropic organization funded by The Goldman Sachs Goup, Inc. The Foundation's mission is to promote excellence and innovation in education and to improve the academic performance and lifelong productivity of young people worldwide. It achieves this mission through a combination of strategic partnerships, grants, loans, private sector investments, and the deployment of professional talent from Goldman Sachs. Funded in 1999, the Foundation has awarded grants in excess of $72 million since its inception, providing opportunities for young people in more than 20 countries. Visit the Foundation at www.gs.com/foundation.

Asia Society
Asia Society is the leading global organization working to strengthen relationships and promote understanding among the people, leaders, and institutions of Asia and the United States. We seek to enhance dialogue, encourage creative expression, and generate new ideas across the fields of policy, business, education, arts, and culture. Founded in 1956, Asia Society is a nonpartisan, nonprofit educational institution with offices in Hong Kong, Houston, Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai and Washington, D.C.

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About the 2003 Prizewinners
About the 2004 Prizewinners
About the 2005 Prizewinners

About the 2006 Prizewinners
About the 2007 Prizewinners

 

 

     

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