It's time for global learning to go beyond food, flags and festivals. Our panel of experts share their ideas for taking international mindedness to the next level
For the past week, we've been exploring global awareness in schools and sharing ideas about how our students can become internationally minded and develop as true global citizens.
It's become clear over this week just how vital these skills are if our students are going to thrive as adults - and in an increasingly interconnected world there's really no excuse for students and schools to live in a bubble.
As part of this series we ran a live chat so teaching professionals could come together and share best practice, new thinking and ideas. Thanks to everyone who took part. The live chat uncovered so many fantastic ideas and tips that we have pulled out the best for you here:
Joe Dale, independent consultant and former languages teacher
International perspectives can really make learners reflect on their own as well as others' contexts particularly when schools collaborate on a more personal level. Through eTwinning and social media I have seen at first hand how fantastic friendships can blossom.
Use Flickr to promote intercultural understanding by finding authentic photos taken by people on the ground and using them to create engaging lesson content. I suggest teachers search for Creative Commons licensed images which in many cases they can use freely in and out of the classroom.
Showing students tweets from local residents concerning a lesson topic can bring the learning to life and promote interesting discussion. Using the SAP Twitter template for PowerPoint allows teachers to search and display live tweets.
Nick Falk's and George Glass' various eTwinning projects are a perfect example of how much can be achieved with a small amount of technology in challenging contexts.
Schoolovision orchestrated by Michael Purves from Yester Primary School in Scotland is one of the most inspiring international projects I've seen in recent years. Now in its fourth year, the Eurovision style competition for primary schools around Europe is taken very seriously by its participants some of whom hire professional recording studies to create their entries.
Steven Mark, director of the International Primary Curriculum
To my mind helping kids to get a deepening sense of 'others' is absolutely at the heart of what good international, global learning should be about.
There's a really good phrase that George Walker, the former head of international baccalaureate, came up with to describe international learning that is often seen in schools. He called it the three Fs - food, flags and festivals. Now there's nothing wrong at all with learning about food, flags, festivals, fashion or any other F you want to ad. Learning about those are a great starting point but if we're serious about helping kids and ourselves to develop an international and global mindset, then it needs to go beyond that.
Good international learning is all about experiencing, learning about and from, engaging with, and learning to be at ease and comfortable with 'others'. And my goodness does the world need a generation of young people who have those qualities.
It's all about going deeper. One of my earliest encounters of 'deep' international learning was when I moved to Netherlands in the 1990s. I initially worked in a secondary school and I remember going in one day and seeing the students all dressed up in suits and ties. I found out they were taking part in a Model United Nations. I blown away but not only how seriously the students took it but the eloquence and depth to their arguments. Definitely worth exploring for secondary students but I've also seen it done in primary to. Here's a link to a school I've worked with in Singapore that does MUN.
It drives me nuts seeing international learning as "shoe-boxes to Africa". Beyond that, we need to start from the earliest age possible to help young children begin that journey to being internationally minded and to feel compassionate, connected and curious about others.
Jessie Kirk, UK volunteer programme manager at Development in Action (DiA)
Social media has played an important part on global awareness and citizenship. Young people are constantly influenced by social media - just look at the Kony 2012 campaign that targeted people via Facebook.
We have also found that using youth-peer educators to deliver citizenship workshops has been particularly effective. When youth peer educators can share their experiences and stories of engaging with other cultures/traditions/social contexts, it's a really good way of opening up the conversation. Also, that face to face contact can be more powerful than connecting people via social media.
It can also be really useful to link up with various global dates. For example International Women's Day, Fair Trade Fortnight. Here's a calendar which I find really useful with themed teaching resources alongside.
Blogging is another useful tool for older students.There are a number of really great blog sites set up especially for young people - check out www.developmentinaction.org and www.youthnet.org.
Jo Sale is head of sixth form and international baccalaureate coordinator at Impington International Sixth Form
I think the more our world becomes interconnected through technology, the more we have an obligation to ensure we all have an awareness that we share the world with an incredible, diverse range of people, who, in the words of the IB mission statement "can also be right". Global awareness must target old ingrained prejudices and aim to remove them.
On social networking - my students are staying in contact with their Ethiopian partner school via Facebook - but there are lots of practical limitations.
Work to blow apart prejudices. At Impington some of our IB courses are constructed around the premise of tackling prejudices. Topics such as refugees, asylum seekers and the language of prejudice are explicitly designed to challenge students to confront their preconceived ideas. We often find that in classrooms which contain students from all over the world, this can be an occasionally explosive but often very effective means of simply talking about the prejudices we all have, usually without realising.
Kateojk, participant in the live chat
Working in a very small school I think it is really important to make sure pupils are aware of the wider world. Being globally aware is crucial. It is too easy for schools to think that global awareness is teaching children about a country very different to our own but sometimes it needs to be about looking at what is similar as well.
From a teacher's point of view being globally aware means being able to work with teachers from anywhere in the world. I am amazed by how much I have learnt from the network of teachers I now have from the international work I have done.
When I began eTwinning I thought I was OK at IT but I was wrong. Through some of the professional development courses provided by eTwinning I have been able to learn about web 2.0 and an amazing range of websites that can be used in the classroom or used as a teacher to present things in a more interesting way. I have also recognised the importance of teaching children from a very young age the importance of internet safety and their digital footprint. This has also been important for teachers in my school to recognise. The social network will not be going away so we need to both learn to use it and learn to use it safely.
I have also learnt about different teaching strategies and how literacy difficulties are identified in different countries. It has led to me considering different methods of teaching and why some countries may perform better in reading and writing.
Alison Leonard is a doctoral research student at the Development Education Research Centre at London's Institute of Education. She is also a geography teacher at Westminster School, London and senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University
It is particularly important that opportunities are created to work together as equals, whether we are talking about students in schools, or their teachers. The new British Council's Connecting Classrooms programme, which offers eLearning for teachers has developed online courses to avoid a 3Fs version of global learning/citizenship/global dimension in the curriculum.
This link may be of interest to teachers who would like to develop their own depth of understanding before they bring the global awareness into their teaching.
John McLaverty, Oxfam's campaigns team leader and youth and schools coordinator in London and the south east, before he joined Oxfam in 2008 he taught humanities in London secondary schools
One thing I frequently find myself asking is "what is the intended outcome of international linking or eTwinning?" For some it can become an end in itself while I'd prefer to see it as a vehicle for delivering some other agreed outcome. For example Oxfam collaborated on some incredibly powerful work where young people from schools in the UK and Bangladesh used a schools partnership to work on a project bringing the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh to the attention on UK decision makers.
The International Citizens Service is beginning to have a significant impact. I tend to be a little sceptical about gap year volunteering but some good organisations are signed up as providers and young people returning from placements have highly positive feedback. Yet large numbers of sixth formers aren't yet aware of the opportunity.
Working younger students best begins with exploring issues like justice and fairness within the child's own surroundings and environment, and then moving out towards the global as the child grows older. I also remember reading that young children will tend to identify difference over similarity as part of their cognitive processes. Sp ejrm presenting different cultures and environments, it's important to look for similarity. The common experience of going to school and the importance of school in childrens lives, for example, can be explored in the Send My Friend campaign which is very popular with primary schools.
Oxfam's Guide to Global Citizenship attempts to outline a progressive series of outcomes for children as they progress through the key stages.
Lisibo, live chat participant
Using technology in partnerships can be tricky when one side has it and the other doesn't but it's not insurmountable. For example, in the Comenius Region project I took part in, we had Skype but the partner school couldn't make it work. However, when I visited Els Pins with colleagues, we Skyped back from my laptop to school and the pupils were able to speak and see one another. It was great to see the confidence on both sides grow as children who started the call reluctant to speak wanted to get involved after five or ten minutes and were queuing up to get closer to the webcam!
The experience at Whitehouse Common Primary was that our international links had an effect on everyone from nursery to year 6, among staff, parents and the wider community. Specifically, the younger learners found that they wanted to talk about their heritages more readily than before, wanted to share their home language and recognised that differences were interesting and worth exploring. They were fascinated by photos of our partner school as well as the pupils.
Here are a couple of posts about our project - Barça! barça! Baaaarça! and Challenging perceptions and stereotypes.
iPads add a new dimension to using technology in eTwinning thanks to the fact it's a single device that can do the work that used to be one by several pieces of technology. Its portability makes it really versatile, it's such a creative tool - see school in a box
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