In Part 1, Dana shared her upbringing and learning experiences that led to the founding of World Savvy as well as how that work unfolded from the early days to include a broad range of work with people across cultures. 

In this second part of the conversation, Dana updates us on World Savvy’s growing influence and includes a reflection of her hopes for education as the world recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing at the time of this conversation.











From World Savvy’s beginnings in 2002 as a direct response to 9/11, the goal was to work deeply with students and teachers to find out what was needed to bring global competency work into schools with all of the challenges and complexities at play.  A lot of their early work was about listening and “generating demand”. 
By saying to anyone and everyone who would listen, “The world is changing. The way that we’re teaching young people isn’t preparing them for one job, a 40 year career at an automobile plant anymore… We’re preparing them for a new reality in the workforce.”
If you’re teaching in a classroom, you are much, much more likely to have this rich and wonderful expanse of diversity in terms of linguistic and cultural and ethnic diversity.
The work wasn’t about developing more content or curricula.  There was plenty of that.  What was absent was an “implementation gap” where educators were “confined in this old system.  You might go to a wonderful human rights conference and come back with three week units and have zero capability to figure out how to make time for that.”
The expectation was unrealistic. What was needed was a way to think differently.  How can this work become a “baked in part of pedagogy?  Maybe it’s less about fitting in more content and more about the approach to teaching and learning.”
This thinking led World Savvy toward their current “case study pedagogy,  inquiry based methodology and project based learning” approaches. 
With these approaches, they were committed to helping teachers “dislodge this notion that they had to be an expert. “
I have a degree in international affairs… It taught me to think in a certain way, but you could read enough this week to be more up to speed on a lot of the issues that I studied now 20 years ago. It’s not to say I don’t value that degree, but it’s to say that I don’t think any of us – with a world that’s changing this rapidly and is this complex and interdependent –  can be expected to have subject matter expertise across every arena. So the job of an educator becomes… how do you facilitate learning in this changing world in this complex phase where there’s so much to know?
The half life of knowledge is shrinking every second and now kids can get more knowledge on the internet. How can I possibly be expected to know (everything)? And the answer is you can’t!
They kept asking. 
What does it look like to build a practice that centers this?
As an institution, World Savvy has made great progress in helping educators feel confident in their answers to that question.  
Five years into the work they began to feel ready to think about expansion by building partnerships. By reaching out and looking for like-minded educators interested in this way of thinking and working, they discovered there were others with “the same philosophically aligned ideas.”
Dana celebrates being brave enough to “swim in the deep end”  and take advantage of opportunities that have come her way to work with  other changemakers and thinkers who challenge her and make sure she’s pushing herself to...