Educating Students to Improve the World
Fernando M. Reimers
Today’s students are inheriting a world shaped by global interdependence and by challenges that no nation can address alone, including climate change, inequality, violence, threats to democracy, pandemics, and rapid technological transformation. Educating Students to Improve the World examines how schools can prepare young people not only to understand these challenges, but also to care about them and develop the capacity to address them collaboratively.
The book presents global education as a contemporary form of civic education. Global competencies include the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions that enable students to understand how their lives and communities are connected to others, engage constructively across differences, and participate in efforts to build more inclusive, peaceful, and sustainable societies. Rather than treating global education as an additional subject in an already crowded curriculum, the book argues that it can provide coherence and purpose to the entire educational experience.
A central concern of the book is the persistent gap between scholarship and practice. Academic discussions often explain why global education matters without providing sufficient guidance for implementation, while practical resources frequently offer activities without a strong theoretical foundation. The book brings these two worlds together, offering educators and school leaders a framework for designing programs that respond to the particular needs of their students, institutions, and communities.
At the heart of the book is a multidimensional model of educational change organized around five complementary perspectives. The cultural perspective considers what societies expect of schools; the psychological perspective examines how students and adults learn; the professional perspective focuses on the expertise and agency of teachers and leaders; the institutional perspective addresses the alignment of curriculum, assessment, professional development, resources, and school organization; and the political perspective considers how different interests can be mobilized around shared educational purposes.
The book’s central message is that educating global citizens requires more than introducing individual lessons, projects, or curricular materials. It demands coherent and sustained change across the culture and organization of education. By integrating these five perspectives, schools can become more relevant, teaching can become more engaging and professional, and students can develop the purpose, understanding, and agency necessary to help shape a better world. Published by Springer in 2020, the book is available open access.
