Inspiration for the journey
“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver, from the poem, “The Summer Day”
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
- attributed to Goethe
Beginnings
We’ve begun. Today is the second meeting of a global education workgroup at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Efland, NC.
Our first meeting on March 4, 2009, was designed to assess the level of interest in global education. In attendance was my principal, two language teachers (Spanish and French), a 7th grade social studies teacher and myself. Our district technology director has expressed an interest, but was not able to make the first meeting.
Our goal was to share our initial ideas on global education and brainstormed for the next steps. To get us started we looked at the following:
- An example of a mature international schools program: International School Partnerships Program from the Center for International Understanding at UNC.
- An example of a global service learning project: The Global Run Project
A question arose: How shall we begin? The writings of Cool Cat Teacher on her experience starting the Flat Classroom Project with Julie Lindsay provided some initial guidance. We believe it is important to identify, make contact and establish a long-term connection with another teacher or school first, before we connect our students.
Our initial answer to establish a sustainable connection is to use the shotgun approach, which in our case would be to collect emails to as many potential contacts as possible. We’ll be compiling our potential contacts in a google spreadsheet.
The intention of this blog series
I’ll be recording the progress of our group after every group meeting by reflecting on our process in this series of blog articles.
