KomaKids: Promoting global competence through media creation in elementary school

This research proposes a cross-cultural program in elementary school aiming at fostering global citizenship education in a classroom through media creation in a program called "KomaKids" In this program, the students' global competence is expected to be developed in four main steps: (1) through learning about foreign culture; (2) by reflecting on their own culture through the production of stop-motion animation; (3) by sharing their impressions through "pen-pals" letter; and, (4) through connecting in real-time with peers from foreign cultures. Since March 2015, 23 workshops were periodically conducted at Japanese, Thai, Brazilian and USA elementary schools. However, the focus of this paper will be on the 2017 academic year program with Japanese, Thai, and Brazilian schools. The result according to the observation shows that the implementation of "KomaKids" program produced noticeable changes in students' global competence of their age.