Focus on linking between local and global
Exploring and finding solutions to very localised problems provides one starting point for investigating complex issues on a global scale. The activity on the right provides an auditing tool to help you consider how classroom and school-based issues can be linked to issues in the wider world. Look at this activity now.
Making a policy
You may like to work on your own, as a member of a working group or as part of an INSET day, to revisit the audits, discussions and action points you compiled when you reflected on how you want the global dimension to be addressed in your school. Use these to formulate:
- a policy for how you want the global dimension to operate in your school;
- an action plan of issues that need to be addressed in order to make the policy effective.
Click on the link below for more information on making a policy in Developing a Global Dimension in the School Curriculum (DfES, 2005, p. 18).
Developing the Global Dimension in the School Curriculum
Activity Resources:
- Images
- Interactive
- Sound
- Text
- Video
Activity
This activity is suitable for groups to use during INSET. It aims to bring global issues to a local (personal and classroom) level.
- Click on the Text icon and print out the 'Global/classroom issues table' from Global Citizenship: the handbook for primary teaching (from Young and Commins, 2002, p. 16).
- Give one copy of the table to each group.
- In each group agree an understanding of each term used.
- Link the global and classroom issues. (Note that the order of the entries under each heading is not intentionally matched and that each issue is intended to have more than one link.)
- Note some real examples of each of the classroom issues.
- Decide on one issue which you feel would present particular difficulties in the classroom. Together, formulate possible strategies for dealing with this situation.
- Share these strategies with the whole group and discuss whether existing school policies and practices incorporate them already, or should incorporate them.
- Action points: compile some strategies to improve the way that classroom issues are linked to global issues which you can feed into your whole-school policy.
(Adapted from Young and Commins, 2002, p.15, based on an original activity in Brownlie, 1995, p. 13)
