Addressing diversity and global issues in the public primary education: Global Storylines approach and its effects on learners and teachers

Current changes in culture and society have been reflected in education where diversity of values, interests, motives is becoming a social norm.  Simultaneously, contemporary people live in a globally interconnected environment and the school education is expected to enable pupils to understand the links between their own lives and those of people throughout the world and to develop the skills, attitudes and values which enable people that enables them control their live and live in a more sustainable world.

Having these challenges in mind, the Global storylines approach, originated in Scotland, offers a promising strategy to address them as it involves a lot of  opportunities to work with the global dimension, to promote global citizenship and to follow the way of inclusion and participation within heterogenous learning environment of public schools. It is a pedagogical approach that uniquely combines traditional methods of Storyline with research, process drama and reflection. Learners “become” characters within a community affected by a particular global issue and they have to work together to tackle various problems they face, e. g. and unknown and strange element interrupting their everyday life; the lack of natural sources affecting community, the demand of help to another community etc. Such approach has a strong potential not only to share the knowledge, but to involve and motivate all learners, nevertheless the level of their performance in other school activities or other traits like disability, ethnic minority status, economic and social background etc.  It is learner-centred and it offers a space for flexibility needed to meeting the needs of children with different type of educational needs.

Finalizing the third year of the projects aimed to implement the Global Stroylines approach in the Czech educational environment, we would like to summarize the effects it has on the pupils and teachers as well. In this 3-years project, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and run by an NGO „NaZemi“, a cohort of teachers is being trained in the Global Storylines and are piloting this approach in their everyday  work.  Within the research part of the project, conducted by the Institute of Research on Inclusive Education at Masaryk University, the continuous observation and data gathering (by researchers, as well as by involved teachers) are realized, focusing on the impact of the approach on the learning environment, the teachers and pupils. The paper will focus on the following questions: What are the main pitfalls and potentials of the Global Storylines, as experienced by the Czech teachers and learners?  To what extent is the Global Storylines an effective tool to promote (1) inclusion in primary schools, (2) participatory learning and critical thinking as the inherent part of everyday school praxis, (3) working with complex and global issues in schools?

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