"Our common world - global education of children"

This is the third year of the project "Our common world - global education of children", so it is a good time to start summarizing it.

Why did we decide to implement this project and implement such a difficult and extensive field as global education since kindergarten?

Establishing cooperation in the field of global education with kindergartens and primary schools is an expression of hope that by working here and now with kindergarten and early childhood teachers - and indirectly with the children and their families they care for - we can have a real impact on reality, we can shape a future in which the rights of each person and community will be realized, the personal dignity of a person regardless of nationality, religion, skin colour, gender, place of birth or ethnic origin will be respected.

We believe that the children who grow up before our very eyes will be able to find themselves better than us in a complex, dynamically changing world, both in their small regional homeland and in the world of the global village. They will be able to consciously and responsibly co-decide and act for a more sustainable development of the near and far world.

Since 2018, a total of 27 school and preschool establishments from Świdnica, the rural municipality of Świdnica and the surrounding Lower Silesian municipalities, as well as several from Mazovia, have already participated in the project. Each of the 72 teachers took part in four 18-hour workshops on global education ethics, horizontal issues and building attitudes of responsibility, respect, openness and personal commitment, global education methodology, as well as participated in a task workshop where they polished their own global education methods.

Thus, we have at least 72 teachers in the region trained and inspired to introduce new quality of educational work in their institutions. In addition, we have managed to include global education as a subject for the credit of pedagogy students from the University of Warsaw, hoping that they, as future teachers, will introduce global education in their work with children from the beginning. As part of the project, a dozen or so new scenarios for working with pre-school and early-school children have already been developed, and more are being developed. All scenarios can be found on the project website: http://edukacjaglobalna.krzyzowa.org.pl/scenariusze-zajec.

During the previous years, many institutions have also held the Global Education Week (https://teg.edu.pl/), in which parents and the whole environment were also involved. In order to make the work in kindergartens and schools more varied, we make sure that this education is carried out using educational materials of good quality and high ethical value, and that we use toys, tools and books (http://edukacjaglobalna.krzyzowa.org.pl/czytelnia) that broaden the vision of the world we supply our partner institutions with.

No obstacles stood in our way - we conducted classes during the teachers' strike in 2019 and during the closure of schools due to the pandemic in 2020. We managed to quickly and efficiently transfer the planned modules to the virtual world, expanding our own competences, but also showing new opportunities to work online with children.

By the end of the year, we still have 2 more advanced training courses to extend the knowledge gained so far for teachers from existing institutions, but also for other interested people who have already had contact with global education.

Can we hope that our children will find it easier to move around in the complex reality in which they grow up, to accept diversity naturally, to take socially responsible actions with greater awareness? The experience of this project shows that together with dozens of great teachers we are taking an important step in this direction.

Coordination: Anna Kudarewska (head of the IYMC), Adelajda Lebioda (deputy head of the IYMC).

Sample photo galleries from selected workshops in 2019-2020.