Global Dimension Blog

The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) have just published a new curriculum planning guide on community cohesion for schools in England. Community Cohesion in Action follows on from two previous documents in the series, The Global Dimension in Action and Sustainable Development in Action. It shows how the curriculum can play a key part in promoting community cohesion within a school, its local community and the wider world. 

You can download it free as a PDF from QCDA's National Curriculum website or order hard copies via the QCDA Orderline quoting ref QCDA/10/4642. The National Curriculum website also has sections focusing on community cohesion in the new primary curriculum and in the secondary curriculum.

The Jewel of Muscat is a faithful reconstruction of a 9th century Arabian trading ship that sailed the Maritime Silk Road. It is based on a number of historical sources,  including the 1998 discoveries of the Belitung Wreck off Indonesia, which uncovered a huge ship's cargo of Tang Dynasty Chinese porcelain. The ship is sailing from Oman to Singapore, using traditional methods from Islam's great age of science and discovery. Its reconstruction and voyage will be featured on the National Geographic Channel later this year, and it will eventually be permanently housed in Singapore's Maritime Silk Road Museum.

A website following the ship's progress has been launched by the governments of Oman and Singapore. The education section of the site has free lesson plans and class activities for History, Geography, Science/Technology, Social studies, Classics and RE/RS for students aged 6-16.  The website also has video clips of the ship's construction process, daily logs and photos from the ship as it sails, a real-time GPS route map, interactive games and a user-generated content section. Find out more at: www.jewelofmuscat.tv.

Amnesty International has teamed up with Learnnewsdesk, the Guardian's e-learning news website, to launch a contest offering Key Stage 2 and 3 pupils the chance to win a prize for articles based broadly on human rights. The deadline is 1st April 2010. You can find out more, and read how Villiers High School in west London is working on human rights issues, from this article on the Guardian website.

In Scotland, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education has just published  ‘Learning Together: International education: responsible, global citizens’, a new guide which aims to help teachers reflect on and improve their practice in international education. It includes examples of good practice to stimulate professional discussion and thinking about how to prepare young people for life in a globalised society through a  Curriculum for Excellence. You can download the new guide free as a PDF from the HMIE website.

Roman rule brought a fascinating mix of races and cultures to the north of England - the soldiers who guarded the frontier came from all around the Empire. This new teaching pack attempts to explore this multicultural aspect of Roman Britain and the resultant benefits of this to British society as we know it today.

The pack has been written by Durham county council's Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Service based  on  the  Archaeology of race exhibition at Durham University. It links with the Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 History and Citizenship curriculum, is already being used in schools in Durham and has been approved by Durham Community Cohesion inspector for schools in Geography and History, Ron Rooney. For further information, and to download the pack, visit: www.dur.ac.uk/geography/race/.

In this week's issue of SecEd, the weekly magazine for secondary schools, Kate Brown, DEA's Schools Programme Manager, looks at the benefits of embedding global learning across all subjects. You can read the digital edition online; Kate's article is on page 9. 

Do you ever stand there in the supermarket dithering about whether buying those green beans from Kenya is a 'good thing' (supporting Kenyan farmers) or 'bad thing' (think of the carbon emissions caused by all those food miles!)? Is it always better to 'buy locally'? And what do your students think? This new little book from Oxfam and the International Institute for Environment and Development delves into the realities of the produce trade between Africa and the UK, examining both sides of the equation to help your search for an 'ethically balanced' diet - it talks in terms of 'fair miles' rather than 'food miles'. Whilst not targetted at schools, it is very clearly written and colourfully laid-out, with easy-to-understand charts and diagrams. An excellent resource for Geography or Citizenship, for example, at secondary or post-16 level. And best of all, you can download a PDF free from the Oxfam website.