Our approach to inspiring global mindedness
Every international school will say that one of their aims is to develop global citizenship for their students, but few define the way they nurture the knowledge, skills and understanding to make this happen, or the opportunities they give to students to be active in this respect, making global citizenship a way of life in the immediate, and not just the future.
At Nord Anglia Education it is different, and through our curriculum, our extended programme and the work of our own Foundation, we actively provide these opportunities to our students. These include one-of-a-kind experiences such as expeditions in Tanzania and Les Martinets as well as collaborations with The Juilliard School, MIT, and UNICEF. Our Global Campus brings together our 51,000 students virtually and actually, encouraging a sense of belonging to the world community, particularly through topics covering environmental factors and humanitarian issues.
The challenge for our schools is to ensure these learning experiences have a long-lasting impact on students and their school communities. At the same time, we want to provide a structured approach to global citizenship that ensures they can develop the skills and knowledge needed to be successful and fulfilled in our modern world.
All good international schools not only promote respect for national identities, but actively celebrate them. These schools include in their annual calendars international days and national festivals, especially of course those of their host countries. Our curricula also encourage global-mindedness. For example, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme has an explicit commitment to international aspects through thematic units of study. The International Early Years, Primary and Middle Years curricula all have international learning goals which are unique to our curriculum and help young children begin the move towards an increasingly sophisticated national, international and intercultural perspective. Each thematic unit includes an international aspect to help develop a sense of ‘international mindedness’.
But at NAE we have the ability and desire to go much further through our Global Campus and our leadership and social enterprise programmes. For example, our Global Library is a carefully curated collection of books which we believe every child should read, and some of the authors tell us their stories of why they wrote such impactful books, including Debra Ellis who wrote ‘The Breadwinner’. Our creative writing competitions (open to all our students) feature themes based around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which we promote through a unique collaboration with UNICEF. Students return from our Expeditions with a true sense of what it means to change the lives of others and have their own lives transformed as a result.