Shaping Global Classrooms

Students glare at one another across the room, pound on desks, point their fingers, and grab from other students—hardly the classroom scene that most teachers hope for during the first week of school. Yet we have begun many school years and programs this way. As they play the card game Barnga, our students switch between groups during a tournament in which no verbal communication is allowed, only to discover that each group initially learned different rules to the game (Steinwachs & Thiagarajan, 1990).

In the midst of the conflict and chaos, we catch glimpses of student behavior that prove more constructive: One student overrules the selfish impulses of another and gives cards to a third student. Two students form a mutual understanding and work together. Enterprising students forge an alternative, new “counterculture.” Newly curious students study directions that they had breezed through earlier.