By appearance, Ellen Gilbert could be a school secretary, a Sunday school teacher or an unreconstructed child of the ’60s. But it’s the latter: She was a student at Kent State in 1970, close to the bloody confrontation between students and National Guardsmen, and she’s since devoted her life to ensuring that the hard-won lessons of the ’60s aren’t forgotten. In her role as founder and executive director of the Global Education Center, she’s been teaching local schoolchildren since 1996 to look past skin color and cultural differences to see commonalities. The earlier children learn it, the better they remember.

Through classroom visits, performances, community outreach and the dissemination of teaching methods and materials, her organization reached an estimated 88,000 students last school year.

Located in renovated Richland Hall, on Charlotte Avenue across from Richland Park, the Global Education Center teaches kids about the various cultures in America, highlighting differences while stressing our ultimate sameness. Its main program is Passport to Understanding, in which Gilbert and assistant director Shannon Holland make monthly visits to preschools, elementary schools and middle schools across the city offering presentations built around interactive materials.

But Gilbert doesn’t use such tired phrases as “celebrating ethnic heritage” or even “diversity”—a buzzword diluted by overuse. She explores native cultures to teach children about them, shows why people may have left a certain place, then explains how they live once they arrive here.

At a period of unprecedented growth for Nashville’s immigrant and refugee populations, the Global Education Center isn’t simply a quaint idea. It’s a primer for both American-born children and their newly arrived classmates to understand each other—and their city—better.

Raised in Ohio, Gilbert transferred from Kent State to Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College in 1970 for an elementary education degree. After a short stint of teaching, she became administrator of the day care at Temple Preschool. As her own children came along and entered school, she saw the awkward and hurtful ways children acted when faced with different skin shades and accents. So she started conducting short classes in her son’s school. She drew on her own experiences, applying anti-bias education methods to demystify strange customs and different-looking people.

At the urging of her son’s teachers, she took her program on the road, charging small fees for visiting Nashville classrooms. She began sharing her methods with other teachers. A few years ago, in discussion with teachers she was helping in New York City, Gilbert decided she needed a central headquarters. So the Global Education Center was born.

Gilbert’s job is demanding. As executive director, she keeps the program true to her vision, interpreting her philosophy and teaching methods to educators both in and outside of the center. She manages the creative temperaments of her artistic collaborators, recruits outside talent, oversees funding, writes grants, supervises programs and conducts sessions herself.

The center operates on two concepts: anti-bias education and Gilbert’s own philosophy of the arts as a bridge connecting children to “the various cultural and spiritual elements indigenous to artistic expression.”

Passport to Understanding sessions are typified by a recent visit she made to Westminster Weekly Kindergarten, a private preschool affiliated with Westminster Presbyterian Church. A thin woman in black leggings and fuzzy sweater, Gilbert stands before a dozen 3-year-olds, her bronze-streaked hair clipped in an efficient pageboy. She introduces the group to “Isabella,” who is coming to America from England bringing only five items: a hooded cloak, a favorite doll, a Christmas book, string to play with and a special blanket. Her brother brings marbles made of clay and wood. Gilbert tells how, as he plays on a ship’s deck, the vessel’s rising and falling cause him to lose his marbles. The 3-year-olds are too young to catch the wordplay, but older kids do; it’s a perfect example of the way she routinely engages her young audience.

Soon Gilbert turns the children loose on stations around the room. They beat on the bodhran, an Irish drum, and race a galloping horse pull-toy around the room. Two girls try on aprons and a tricornered hat while a friend stirs busily with a wooden bowl and spoon.

Meg Risser, an early childhood creative arts specialist who serves on Global Education Center’s advisory board, notes Gilbert’s attention to ensuring that material is age-appropriate. Three-year-olds don’t have a sense of time and place, she says. They need to know about children now, not the history of a people.

Even with older students, the hands-on approach doesn’t change much. The artifacts are more sophisticated: more complex games and jewelry, textiles, larger musical instruments. There’s more dialogue and reflection in sessions, stimulating students to arrive at their own insights. Gilbert and Holland can reach 900 K-5 students in a school day, taking them in groups of 80 through eight stations at a time.

Passport to Understanding operates on a timeline. It begins with indigenous cultures and what happens when another culture moves in. Topics cover people brought here against their wills: African slaves, Chinese railroad laborers and the many refugees forced here by circumstance. Final sessions are about people who emigrate by choice.

Westminster’s principal, Erika Gerth, says she appreciates Gilbert’s style: In classroom sessions, she personalizes events with stories, relating information about everyday life, not just ceremonial garb and holidays. She deals with concepts children understand—cross-cultural use of gourds as containers and utensils, for example.

For larger presentations, Gilbert includes native performers who explain their art. Concerts are usually for schoolwide audiences and run by performers Gilbert enlists in her mission, such as NanaNom Dance Ensemble and Batimbo Drummers, Djembefole and Hula Hulan Mana’o E Hawaii. Most include drummers and dancing.

“We use all the different cultures that are in America,” she explains. “We use the basic tenets of that culture and the arts to show how we’re really alike. Every culture across time at some point has used the drum. They’re a very, very important form of empowerment and communication.”

The Global Education Center covers nearly every part of the world. Its advisory board reflects 30 different cultures. Meanwhile, performing groups from as many as 18 cultures have been recruited for various center programs or concerts.

For a variety of locally based ethnic performers, the Global Education Center provides an artistic home and an opportunity to reach Nashvillians they would otherwise never meet. Many artists conduct classes for both adults and children at the center’s studios. Offerings are as diverse as the various instructors’ backgrounds, including African dance and drumming; tap dance; Spanish, Egyptian, Hawaiian and other dance forms; tae kwon do and other martial arts and creative movement classes. Affordable class fees mean that almost anyone can participate.

Global Education Center also holds daylong workshops for music, physical education and social studies teachers. Each session targets a distinct cultural heritage. Last November’s topic, the Irish-Scots-African-Tennessee connection, featured musician Aashid Himons speaking about his Irish African background, while Mary Moran of Nashville Irish Step Dancers and Wendy Windsor-Hashiguchi of Scott-Ellis School of Irish Dance taught Irish and Scottish dance. Upcoming in-services include sessions on the Middle East and Asia. These provide teachers with valuable insights they couldn’t get from textbooks or colleagues.

Tony Burks, principal at Crockett Elementary and affiliated with the center for several years, says the center’s programs don’t aim to discount the effect of ethnic and cultural differences, but rather raise awareness about them. “For someone to say they are color-blind and don’t recognize that I’m a black male, that troubles me,” he says. The reality is that differences exist, but people want to draw together.

Erika Gerth from Westminster agrees. The continual exposure to the center’s programming has a cumulative effect that stays with the children as they grow. But the sincerity of the center’s teachers is what makes it work. “They believe this so deeply,” Gerth says. “They live it. There is an authenticity there that’s wonderful. And the more we teachers are exposed to what Ellen talks about—our stereotypes get broken down.”

Which reflects what Gilbert preaches to teachers. If you’re going to teach this, you have to believe it yourself. “Kids smell insincerity a mile away,” she says.

Fees, memberships, donations, fundraisers and grants bankroll the Global Education Center. Right now, funds are directed toward operations and existing programs. But there are capital improvement needs, and the center needs to expand its infrastructure. Among goals are salaries for Gilbert and a full-time fundraiser.

The Native American phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“we are all related”), is the center’s motto. But not all children can be convinced of that. “It doesn’t work with all kids,” Gilbert admits. “You can kind of tell by the way their perspective changes and the way, each time you go in, if you’re speaking a different language, they no longer laugh or they no longer act silly and goofy when they put on traditional clothes.”