Going Global

Introduction: Generation Global

Generation Global is a pioneering global education programme for 12- to 17-year-olds, providing them with the skills and experience they need to navigate difference in a peaceful way. By providing global learning and dialogue opportunities, the programme helps young people to be resolute in the face of narratives that may feed the development of extremist ideologies.

Generation Global has worked with over 450,000 students across 40 different countries and has trained over 14 000 teachers.

The programme

Within the UK, Generation Global has been used by teachers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland since 2009. The programme compliments multiple areas of the curriculum across the four home nations including:

  • British values
  • SMSC (social, moral, cultural and spiritual aspects of learning)
  • Citizenship and global citizenship
  • Religious (& moral) education
  • Humanities
  • Sustainability
  • Learning for life and work

Students from the UK have connected with their peers all over the world through facilitated videoconferences and online dialogue, helping them to understand the shared challenges of growing up in our globalized world, and learning how different their lives, cultures, and beliefs can be.

Devised by an international group of educational experts, advisers and religious leaders, the programme provides opportunities for students to put critical thinking skills into practice through facilitated dialogue. Students learn about one another and explore the roots of openness and diversity in their own cultural and religious traditions.

Ethics and values

Going Global stems from the interest and concern of the largely absent discussion of ethics in teacher education (Maxwell et all., 2016). While there are many different methods and strategies in which pre- and in-service teachers are encouraged to develop professional judgements, these leave little room to discuss ethics, values, and morality in teacher education (Orchard et al., 2016).

Moreover, when pre- and in-service teachers are given an opportunity to reflect about ethics and values, these tend to be rooted in Anglo-American perspectives of the world.

Going Global, using the Generation Global model of online dialogic pedagogy (more on this in Origins), looks to facilitate online intercultural exchanges between practitioners, theorists, and pre-service teachers.

The dialogic approach of Going Global seeks to promote deeper reflection and understanding around questions of morality and ethics in teacher education. Moreover, Going Global seeks to cultivate understandings of dialogue so that different ways of thinking, being and acting are afforded recognition and reflection.

In addition, Going Global utilises visual methodologies to analyse reflection to create ‘spaces’ for reflection and reorganising ideas of personal experiences, knowledge, and feelings.

Man at desk addressing fellow students with microphone
Screenshot of video conference: Going Global dialogue session

Going Global 1 – 2019

Theme: [Inclusive] Education

  • training
  • online dialogues

Data collection methods

  • Pre- and post-test
  • Focus group interviews with visual methods (post-it memos, collective mind map, personal drawing, collaborative drawing)

Going Global 2 – 2020

Theme: Meanings of Education

Data collection methods:

  • Focus group interviews with visual methods (personal drawing)

Going Global 3 – 2022

Theme: Climate Change Education

  • 3 pre-online dialogue tasks on Padlet (optional)
  • 2 post-online dialogue tasks on Padlet (optional)
  • 2 (ZOOM) online dialogues with Padlet and videos

Data collection methods:

  • Focus groups interviews with visual methods using Padlet & Google Jamboard (personal drawing + collaborative drawing + collective mind map)