Global+Kids

Global Kids' mission is to educate and inspire urban youth to become sucessful students, global citizens and community leaders by engaging them in academical learning experiences. Originally started in 1993, Global Kids focus is on under-resourced schools and neighborhoods in New York City that are socioeconomically disadvantaged and have ethic backgrounds that are underrepresented in higher education. The staff working with these students have backgrounds in international affairs and education practices, and aim to create an awareness of global affairs through media. By using innovative digital media production, they hope to promote international education and civic engagement. Their globally-minded programs and education endeavors extend beyond their in-house programs to online and high school classrooms.

Their flagship program is the Power of Citizenry Leadership Program, that teaches leadership skills and global issues in a peer-driven environment. Through a variety of programs ranging from workship to performances, Global Kid youth leaders work to educate over 5,000 of their peers.

A recent production of Global Kids was a Public Education piece on Haiti Relief Efforts. During the short film, students traveled into the a public park in NYC in an attempt to convince citizens to give back and help Haiti Relief funds through Unicef. While they did not ask for money, they tried to encourage participation in the global relief efforts, by generating website traffic to Unicef and offered relief possibilities. Throughout the film, the students dealt with varied levels of opennes and rejection, but still remained optimistic and overall felt empowered by their work.

Our instructional process theories were assumed to involve a collaboration between the students on a global issue that they were passionate about. It was obvious that all members of the team felt that Haiti deserved the attention, by what was shown in the film. They could have brainstormed how to encourage and engage people in volunteering and donation processes. This was achieved by causually interacting with people on the street, passing out flyers, and offering up valuable information for citizens to access. The group filmed a variety of interactions and participants reactions to show how the people of NYC, in their direct community, were helping with a global issue.

Goodman addresses this social change initative in this passage (page 3): "Taking a video camera into the community as a regular method for teaching and learning gives kids a critical lens through which they can explore the world around them. It helps them to defamiliarize the family taken-for-granted conditions of life. This approach to critical literacy links media analysis to production; learning about the world is directly linked to the possibility of changing it. Command of literacy in this sense is not only a matter of preforming well on standardized tests; it is a prerequisite for self-representation and autonomous citizenship."

Overall, the main goal of Global Kids is to motiviate students to have their voices heard, express their ideas, and develop a passion for global issues. Through the short clip that was viewed, it was obvious that not only are their motivation tactics working, that they can actually achieve an impact.

-Colleen Quinn & Mia Spadoni