zaterdag 9 augustus 2014

World Citizenship

Since a few years I'm teaching this subject in the second class at my secondary school besides geography and economics. There's no standardized curriculum and there are no basic (stated as mandatory by the government) goals with this elective subject. That means that me and my colleagues can pick whatever we think that'll fit within the region of this world citizenship thing. 
During the Global SEE Summit in Calgary I prepared the questions for the twitter chat with Rafranz Davis and the topic was Global Awareness and I guess that covers in my opinion the new subject I teach: World Citizenship (mondo as it's called at my school in the Netherlands). These were the main questions that we asked during the twitter chat: 
- How can we create lessons that better prepare kids to be globally prepared?
- What do you think is most important to teach concerning world citizenship?
- How do we maintain global awareness in learning?

During this twitter chat we tried to get ourselves and other teachers to think about these questions and come up with some answers. Even for us as teachers we need to be an example for our students and therefore it's almost mandatory that we add some global awareness to the curriculum. Wouldn't you agree? Especially with the state of the world at this moment, such as the airplane with civilians shot from the air above Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, civil war in Syria, conflict between the Israeli and the Palestine people, Russia and it's foreign policy, Global Warming, Ebola virus in Africa, child and slave labour during sports tournaments such as the Olympics and World Championships, natural disasters in China and so on.
Due to the amount of information and access to this information, students get faced with too many different views. In that case it's importend that a trustworthy and reliable person as the teacher is able to help his students to verify and narrow down these information stream, in order to let the student be able to create an opinion of their own.




Global Awareness: people nowadays need to be aware and know at least something about it, to create an opinion of their own on these matters. Since the internet the world is connected and it's not about our own street, city or community anymore. From this point of view I think that we need to get our students globally connected. I know that I will. Not only during this new subject I teach, but also in my standardized curriculum with geography and economics. I've got a few plans to connect my classroom with school classes in New Brunswick-Canada, Novosibirsk-Russia, Rakovnik-Czech Republic, Orland Park/USA and am trying to connect to Kenya-Africa. With the classes that I teach about global citizenship we'll be joining the Global Teenager Project again and will connect with schools in Surinam, CuraƧao and hopefully many more. 

This week I was asked if digital citizenship should be part of this world citizenship. I think yes, and will blog about that later this week. And would like if you shared your opinion as well. 

Getting connected with Rafranz Davis from Texas, US.

Association for Citizenship Teaching (UK): http://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk
Wereldburgerschap - kennisplatform voor mondiaal onderwijs: http://www.wereldburgerschap.nl
Canon voor wereldburgerschap/Canon for Global Citizenship: http://www.ncdo.nl/artikel/canon-voor-wereldburgerschap (UK & NL)

Geen opmerkingen:

Een reactie posten