Your Name and Title: Julia Coburn, Executive Director
School or Organization Name: WorldVuze Education and PRINCIPLED Learning Strategies
Co-Presenter Name(s): Jennifer Klein
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Canada and USA
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): K-12 Teachers
Short Session Description (one line):
How do you make learning about complex local and global topics engaging and relatable for students, bringing humanity and empowering the individual, while not losing sight of the big picture and the collective?
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
Young people have a great responsibility to address many global challenges in their lifetime. Yet these complex and multi-layered challenges - the environment, politics, economy, food, energy, health - can be overwhelming for any one individual to grasp, are often over simplified, and are easy to feel disconnected to.
Students (and most people) are able to learn about these topics at school mostly through books and the media, making it difficult to relate to on a human level. Rarely do students have the chance to learn from someone their own age. Also, when you learn information from a small number of sources, as unbiased as they may try to be, it may only be telling one side of the story, a “single story”. We all come at a challenge carrying our unique world view. This is formed through our own life experiences and can be very similar or vary widely from others, not only internationally, but within our own communities, work environments, and classrooms. This world view effects nearly every decision that we make.
If students learn about their world through a narrow world view, it is easy to overgeneralize a problem, by operating on assumptions or their “single stories”, and come up with solutions that have missed the mark. Now more than ever, we need together to foster a generation of problem solvers that are able to address these complex, global challenges effectively and collaboratively.
How do you make learning about complex local and global topics engaging and relatable for students, bringing humanity and empowering the individual, while not losing sight of the big picture and the collective?
Find out what happens when over 500 students learn through the multiple perspectives of their peers in 8 different countries using an inquiry based learning approach.
Themes discussed in this presentation include: uncovering bias; student centred learning, student voice, equitable global dialogue, and inquiry based learning.
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