When the pandemic hit in Lebanon, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change adapted its Wahda
programme curriculum to the digital environment. This USAID-funded intervention built on existing
learning from a decade of delivering Generation Global, the Institute’s flagship global citizenship
programme. While the programme sought to increase tolerance and understanding amongst young men and
women (aged 13 - 24) across ethnic and religious divides in Lebanon, it was young women that
demonstrated greater participation, engagement, and therefore benefit within the programme.
The first edition of the Generation Global Newsletter for 2022 is here! This quarter, we published
two new resources to support practitioners and educators introduce Global Citizenship and dialogue
into the classroom: the Youth Dialogue Handbook and ‘Essentials of Dialogue’ in Spanish. We also
hosted two online events in the first quarter for educators as well as young people to connect,
learn, and share. It was great to see teachers from all over the world joining our first ever
Teacher Webinar to learn from best practices and understand how to effectively use Generation Global
resources in their classrooms. The Fireside Chat was the first of its kind to bring young people
together around a topic that matters to all of us.
A globalized world like ours requires citizens with a respectful vision of multicultural diversity,
informed and empathetic people, willing to get involved in searching for solutions, professionally
competent, and simultaneously sensitive to cultural diversity. Therefore, multicultural teachers are
challenged to have the appropriate tools to achieve the objectives of multicultural education.
Notably, in Prepa Tec, a multicultural teacher links the contents of the subject they instruct to
local, national, or international aspects of cultural diversity.
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Generation Global Newsletter for 2021!
We have many
reasons to celebrate this past quarter, starting with our 10-year programme anniversary in Indonesia
to our first anniversary of launching our student platform, the Ultimate Dialogue Adventure. And the
cherry on top is being selected as one of the top 100 education innovations to watch in 2022 by
HundrED. This is a proud moment for all of us at Generation Global. Thank you for believing in us
and supporting us along the way.
Welcome to the third edition of the Generation Global Newsletter!
This edition will bring you
up to speed with everything that’s been unfolding over the past quarter – many exciting developments
to the teacher portal, new partnerships, and new team members!
We are working very hard to
expand our reach to enable the next generation of young people to develop global citizenship and
dialogue skills. In the next three years, we have a goal to empower 100,000 young people to become
active and open minded global citizens through the programme.
Welcome to our second edition of the Generation Global Newsletter, packed full of updates on our
activities, impact stories and resources.
One of the themes for the programme this
quarter has been about building peaceful and sustainable societies and how to equip young people
with the skills and attitudes to take action in achieving this in their communities.
The
#restoreourearth photo contest in May amplified the actions taken by young people, that are
participating in Generation Global, to achieve a sustainable future.
Welcome to our first ever Generation Global issue! We are very excited to launch this newsletter to
share with you exciting updates about new developments, events, news, and impact stories from the
Generation Global community.
We started 2021 with many firsts - conducting our
first workshop with educators in Indonesia on curriculum integration, launching a brand new
topic on civic participation, and setting up our first cohort of student and teacher advisory
groups. You can read about all this and other exciting things in this quarter's edition.
The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust teachers and students into the largest educational experiment the
world has ever seen. The lockdowns have compelled teachers to embrace technology and challenged
students to learn via Zoom, mobile phones, radio and television. Over 750 million girls and young
women have been part of this global experiment and there is emerging evidence to suggest that this
shift to online learning could be having a positive impact on girls' education.
The year 2020 will not be forgotten any time soon. For years to come, people around the world, of
every age and from all walks of life, will remember the series of life-altering events that took
place during these 12 months. For many, these incidents unfolded online and on social media: From
our homes we have watched devastating wildfires in Australia and the Black Lives Matter movement
that took the world by storm following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.”
Pupils around the world have been impacted by lockdown – so offering a global platform for them to
come together and learn could be key to helping them adapt. Almost 9 million children in England
returned to schools this week. They join hundreds of millions of students globally who have either
already returned to school or hope to soon. The priorities for schools will be markedly different
this year owing to Covid-19 – regular handwashing, staggered lesson times, social distancing and
restrictions on extracurricular activities will be the new norm.
COVID-19 is an educational crisis of a global nature never seen before. In just one month, 90% of all
learners worldwide (more than 1.5 billion young people) saw their school or university close. As
Medha, a Generation Global teacher in India, told us: “Because the lockdown was sudden, many
students don’t have stationery and no books. They are panicking. I feel the school buildings are
closed but the staff is working more than ever to continue the teaching-learning process. After the
shutdown, we were not equipped.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has surfaced many social inequalities that we knew existed in our societies.
For the education sector, these include deep disparities in environments conducive to effective
at-home learning and inequities in access to technology. An OECD report released yesterday, which
surveyed 59 countries’ responses to Covid-related school closures, reveals that only half of
students have been able to access all or most of the curriculum through remote learning materials
during lockdown.
At the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, we are redirecting our efforts globally to support the
fight against Coronavirus.
Our education programme, Generation Global, is offering existing students a safe space to interact
with their global peers using our resources and online student dialogue forum. At the same time, we
are hosting virtual dialogue circles for teachers across all the regions we operate in.
To help build young people’s resilience to hate speech, our dialogue education programme, Generation
Global, works with experts to produce briefing notes to help teachers understand narratives of hate.
We have just launched two new ones – on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim Hate. Knowing the themes that
underpin these narratives means that teachers are better prepared to recognise them amongst
students, when supporting them remotely and in school, and can feel confident to challenge them.
At the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, we are redirecting our efforts globally to support the
fight against Coronavirus.
Our education programme, Generation Global, is offering existing students a safe space to interact
with their global peers using our resources and online student dialogue forum. At the same time, we
are hosting virtual dialogue circles for teachers across all the regions we operate in.
The world is divided in many dimensions today. Rich and poor. East and West. North and South.
Divisions of culture, identity and faith. Some people are frightened of globalisation. Others
welcome it. Some see diversity of population and society as a strength, while others see it as a
threat to traditional ways of life and thinking. Yet one thing stands out. The future belongs to the
open-minded. Globalisation is driven by people –through technology, through travel, through the
possibility of migration.
In the twenty-five years since World Teachers’ Day was launched, violent extremism has gone from a
fringe problem to one of the most pressing challenges facing the world today. Security measures will
always be vital but defeating this threat requires a generational struggle against the ideas that
underpin the violence. A comprehensive, multifaceted strategy is needed with Education at the heart
of it. That’s why on World Teachers’ Day this year, we’re calling on governments and the global
education community to root out religious prejudice and promote tolerance throughout their education
systems.
The study of the effectiveness of the programme by academics at the Graduate School of Education at
the University of Exeter, published this week, found that in many schools the results were
“spectacular.” In its lifetime, the programme has run in 40 countries, including Pakistan,
Palestine, India, Israel, Italy, the UK, and the USA, and has connected 230,000 students aged 12-17
in over 2,500 schools around the world.
