By Olivia Howes | December 6, 2018
The different speakers and sessions at the World View symposia always expose me to ideas and perspectives I didn’t know about or fully understand, and I leave wanting my classroom to do the same for students.
Jack Hudson is an upper school English teacher who teaches at Providence Day School, a co-ed independent school in Charlotte that promotes global awareness and connections to the world and local community. Although a fair amount of Jack’s students come from high socioeconomic backgrounds, he’s proud to say his classes are full of students with diverse racial, cultural and international backgrounds as well. To him, this diversity is an asset to his classroom and has allowed him to foster an atmosphere of global learning that makes him a greatly appreciated partner of World View.
Jack began his work with World View by attending the 2015 Global Education Symposium, and then came to the 2018 Global Education Symposium. Jack says that “the different speakers and sessions at the World View symposia always expose me to ideas and perspectives I didn’t know about or fully understand, and I leave wanting my classroom to do the same for students. I also leave World View events with tools or materials that I can put to immediate use.” He also participated in the 2018 World View Fellows Program, which required K-12 and community college educators to create study guides with resources that could be used with the Population Institute’s OVERBook. For Jack, “the World View Fellows Program, in particular, furnished content for at least a week’s worth of new lesson plans, and it also helped me revise my teaching of dystopian literature to incorporate cross-curricular content and connections to current issues.”
Jack said that for him, “one of my biggest takeaways from World View programming is the power of authentic, first-person voices in helping us understand society, particularly those parts that seem ‘foreign’ or ’other.’ I’ve made a conscious effort to incorporate such voices into my lessons, and I plan to do so even more in the future.” He also values the connections he can make with colleagues within his school and with other educators from independent schools in Charlotte. The things that Jack has learned by attending various World View programs, specifically the 2015 Global Education Symposium, has allowed him to collaborate with the colleagues from his school to create a meaningful sustainability mission and programming at Providence Day School. “I leave inspired by the serious and talented teachers I meet and with reaffirmation of how meaningful our work is to society.” World View is excited to see the meaningful work that Jack continues to do for his school and his classroom.