Headlines
The 2008 Delegation of ELLE has been chosen.
“The world is being flattened. You didn’t
start it and you can’t stop it ... But we can manage it ... You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation.”
- Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat
Design Team
Steve Baum
Xiu Cravens
Priscilla Garcia
Pedro E. Garcia
Ellen Goldring
James W. Guthrie
Pearl Sims
Marcy Singer-Gabella
Teresa Suarez
Jianguo Wang
Hong Wang
Tom Ward
"Right Imagination"
The education of our children is the most
important work a community, a city, or a
country
will undertake.
The world is changing.
And those changes are affecting
the work educators do. While public education exists to form a learned citizenry, no longer are the boundaries of that citizenship confined to national borders. The effects of globalization have tied the world together in ever more intricate and complex ways. What happens in the eastern hemisphere of the world has consequences United States, in Tennessee, in Nashville.
So it was with “right imagination” that the
idea of ELLE was formed. ELLE,
the Educational Leadership Learning Exchange, is a cooperative endeavor between two universities, Vanderbilt University of Nashville and South China
Normal University of Guangzhou, China.
The goals of ELLE are :
1. All educators need to have a global perspective on the how best to educate children. The
world is small and the work is important.
2. The sharing of ideas by practitioners is one of the most powerful ways to create new learning and a fresh perspective.
3. Depth of understanding grows when information and knowledge are in the appropriate context.
4. Collaboration around a common educational object enables learners to build synergetic models of instructional delivery, curriculum development, and the potential for new views of leadership and leadership training.
The Partnership
This partnership began in the fall of 2005, after a university delegation from Vanderbilt visited China in the spring. After the visit,
an exploratory conversation between the two schools and the school districts led to a
reciprocal visit in fall 2005 by the Chinese university delegation. After additional discussions, a formal operating agreement was signed
ELLE is scheduled to run for three years. In that time it is hoped that the exchange will create a mutually beneficial collaboration around creative and courageous leadership, innovative and dynamic curriculum, and a worldview of mutual interdependency. Remembering that the world’s children are the future, this partnership will build lasting relationships which help all involved to understand the similarities and closeness of the world in which we live.