How do you engage elementary school pupils about sustainability issues? And how do you structurally anchor this approach as part of GCE in teacher education? Together with the preschool and primary education teacher training programs at Vives and HoWest, Djapo sought answers to these questions.
Djapo joined forces with students and teachers from the preschool and primary teacher training programmes at Kortrijk Vives, Torhout Vives, Bruges Vives and Bruges HoWest. The aim of this project was to integrate systems thinking into the curriculum and practise of GCE in collaborating colleges.
Themes within sustainability and global citizenship are often too complex to understand at a glance. Systems thinking therefore is a key competence in Global Citizenship Education.
Using methods and lessons based on systems thinking, you can for instance visualise themes such as climate change, fair trade and food waste and chart their causes and consequences. You can also visualise how parts relate to the whole and learn to look from different perspectives. Systems thinking can also allow you to clarify how events in different places in the world affect each other.
Today, we do not know what the solutions will be to tomorrow's challenges. That is why it is important for teachers not to preach solutions to children, but to teach children to think about possible solutions themselves.
Second-year students from all participating colleges were initiated into systems thinking through in-service training and demo classes. A number of students also immersed themselves though research, living labs or as members of the professional learning community, in which a core team of lecturers also participated.
The knowledge and experience was compiled in a Practice Guide to Systems Thinking for Global Citizenship Education, which is freely available to all (future) preschool and primary school teachers. The guide is only available in Dutch.
This project came about with the support of the Province of West Flanders. Join for Water, Studio Globo, Oxfam Wereldwinkels, Kleur Bekennen and Kruit also participated as partners.