Opportunities for Global-Competence Education in Secondary Extracurricular Programs

Abstract

Globalization has formed a complex world of challenge and promise for countries, communities, and individuals. Global-competence education seeks to train students in the skills and understandings they will need to relate to other ideas, people, and ways of life in this 21st-Century reality. To date, the university has been the primary setting for global-competence efforts in education, but recent trends have encouraged its translation to K-12 education. This study proposes that secondary extracurricular programs offer an additional, complementary opportunity for students to bolster their global competence before graduating from high school. Outlining the process of including global competence in the existing framework of an extracurricular character- and leadership-development program makes apparent the limitations of secondary extracurricular programs in global-competence education but, more importantly, the great opportunities they present students, educators, and society at large.