Schools Across Borders

Two weeks ago, we had a talk with Darren Irvine, the founder of "Schools Across Borders" about the work he does with students in areas of conflict. Darren has worked with students all over the world. He helps young people to connect with their peers, both locally and internationally,to help work for a more just, equal and peaceful world. 

We are taking part in a project they are running called Global Citizens Network 2013-2014. This is a network of schools in Ireland and it also includes other schools around the world. There are two main stages to this program the Research Stage and the Campaign Stage.  We will be learning from each other and discussing different key themes in the world. 

Our class has started the Research Stage. During this each school group shall research, reflect and debate key local-global themes. We have been coming up with a theme that we will be researching. First of all we put our ideas forward and we wrote the top 7 ideas on sheets of paper. We got into groups and went around the classroom writing down what we know and what we would like to know about each theme. In the end everyone agreed with the overarching question that we came up. It is: "Is the world child friendly?".

We will be getting into groups and researching the life of children all over the world from different points of view like education, gender, conflict, etc.. In the end we will answer the question from all these aspects of a child's life, discovering where in our world is the most child friendly.  When we have finished this we plan on developing a “mini-NGO” type campaign.

You can find out more at http://www.schoolsacrossborders.org/