Radio Telescope, Puchino, Russia
Puchino School #1 was one of the GTP Schools and participated in student/teacher exchanges
The Global Thinking Project is about how citizen diplomacy among American and Russian educators and psychologists emerged into a youth and teacher activism project. This website attempts to document hundreds of teachers’ and students’ experiences in a cross-cultural collaborative effort that involved environmental science study, Internet activity, and teacher enhancement. During nearly 20 years of work, educators, primarily from Georgia, forged a hands-across the globe program with colleagues and students in Russia, and then partnered with teachers in other countries including Argentina, Australia, Czech Republic, Singapore, and Spain.
Student Research
American and Russian students presenting research report in a Russian classroom.
It all began when an Association for Humanistic Psychology group of 30 North Americans in 1983 without official invitations to the Soviet Union, established relationships with Soviet psychologists and educators, and their institutions that led to formal agreements between American and Soviet universities, research institutes, and schools. Through relentless and consistent reciprocal travel, these early efforts developed in a youth and teacher activism program that used face-to-face and Internet-based collaboration to become involved in cultural, scientific and educational activities.
The Global Thinking Project was the result of these collaborations, a project that established a cross-cultural environmental science curriculum, teacher enhancement institutes, technology applications, and student and teacher exchanges
The Global Thinking Project is not the only organization to develop cross-cultural projects among teachers and students around the world. The GTP archive also includes documents and links to other projects that have contributed to the important field of global collaboration. The GTP Archive is dedicated to serving the education community through this web-based archive.
This site is an archive of the Global Thinking Project, including the goals of the project, the curriculum, images, research papers on the nature and effects of the GTP, and other details of interest.
St. Basil's Cathedral, Red Square
The GTP pedagogy was built upon a humanistic psychology framework, and merged cooperative/collaborative learning, scientific inquiry, and social activism.
The GTP emerged from many exchanges of professional educators (K-12 and the University level, & researchers). It began as a people-to-people program between Americans and Russians, and emerged into a world wide program involving students and educators from many countries. This emergence was enhanced in 1991, when the project established telecommunications connections between American and Russian (Soviet at the time) schools, and expanded to include schools around the world with the advent of the Internet, email, bulletin boards, online conferences, and the Web.
The Global Thinking Project is a "hands across the globe" education project which provides a paradigm for students and teachers to participate in environmental study and to use new technology tools with peers around the world. During the course of the project, students monitored and analyzed important physical and biological aspects of their environment such as the environmental quality of their classroom, the quality of air and water in their community, as well as the study of solid waste, acid rain, tap water, and the creation of local community-based environmental topics. The skills and knowledge that students constructed were then applied as students engaged in collaborative learning projects linking classrooms globally. In so doing, students learned that problems that are typically addressed as science problems, have social, political, economic and ethical aspects, as well.