From the Classroom Labyrinth to a Global Learning Commons

ASKing the World began as a classroom practice — a way to help students think deeply, question bravely, and see the world with new eyes.  What started small — a teacher, a group of students, and a shared map of questions — has grown into a larger invitation: to make learning itself a public act of curiosity and care.

At its heart, ASKing the World is about inquiry.  It’s about the art of asking questions that lead us inward and outward at once — toward self-understanding and global connection. Like a labyrinth, we begin with a question, glimpse the center, and then spiral outward again, following the threads of language, story, and imagination.

Inside this labyrinth of learning, we work with words, images, maps, and stories — scaffolds that help us build understanding. We trace how knowledge is produced, whose voices it includes, and what possibilities it opens.  Through this process, students (and all learners) become cartographers of their own thinking, mapping connections between ideas, places, and people.

Over time, this small practice has expanded beyond the walls of one classroom into a global learning commons — a digital and collaborative space where educators, students, and citizens can explore the big questions of our time together.

The same ethos remains: learning as dialogue, as exploration, as the slow and deliberate work of meaning-making.  But the scope has widened — from the geography of a single class to the geography of a shared planet.

Today, ASKing the World serves as an open resource for Global Citizenship Education (GCED) — a place to experiment with frameworks, questions, and practices that help us live more wisely and imaginatively in an interconnected world.

A Project of The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute

ASKing the World is a project of The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI) — an independent educational initiative that views human geography as a vital pathway for advancing Global Citizenship Education (GCED).

The Institute’s work explores how people imagine, map, and narrate the world — and how those imaginations shape identity, belonging, and action.  By linking geography to questions of culture, power, and ecological interdependence, The GIEI positions spatial thinking as a cornerstone of global citizenship.

Since 2015, the Institute has broadcast a radio show and developed learning expeditions, research projects, and educator collaborations that bridge the local and the global.  Its programs invite participants to investigate the places they inhabit, trace the systems that connect them, and cultivate the awareness and empathy needed to act responsibly within the world.

Through ASKing the World, The GIEI extends that mission online — offering open resources, frameworks, and dialogues to help educators and learners everywhere make geography, imagination, and global citizenship part of everyday inquiry.