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The first of many staff training days to be organised for the
Global Dimension in Education Project took place on Tuesday 13th
September 2005 in the College. It was attended by 30 members of
staff and was deemed to be an excellent introduction to the project
by explaining the concept of the global dimension in education.
The day began with Dr Margaret Reynolds
welcoming everyone to the event and introducing the project, followed
by Stephen McCloskey from the Centre for Global Education who
introduced the speakers and outlined what the day would involve.
The first speaker was Professor Sally Inman
from London South Bank University who gave a keynote talk on the
global dimension in initial teacher education. Professor Inman’s
talk was very inspiring and generated much conversation during
the morning coffee-break.
After coffee, Stella Murray, the Global
Dimension Co-ordinator in the College, introduced the global dimension
as a concept and asked staff to consider the relevance of the
global dimension in their role as educators. Following Stella
was Wendy Young from the Centre for Global Education who talked
about the global dimension in practice and carried out the ‘Diamond
Ranking’ exercise using a series of key skills that are
central to practicing the global dimension in formal education.
Again this generated much discussion on the subject during lunch.
Following lunch, Wendy introduced the staff
to the ‘Big Pic’ website and demonstrated its use
as a resource tool related to embedding the global dimension into
teaching. After the website demonstration the staff were introduced
to Barbara Gill and Barbara O’Toole from the Development
& InterCultural Education (DICE) Project which is a winner
of the ‘World Aware Education Award’ for 2005. The
‘two Barbaras’, as they are fondly referred to, talked
about a sample of their activities in the DICE project in the
South of Ireland.
The day was then drawn to a close by Stephen
who thanked each of the speakers for their wonderful presentations
and concluded by reflecting on the day with members of staff asking
them to write about the positives of the day, what they would
do differently, and what they felt was necessary for future staff
training.
Here are some examples of the comments
received:
- Important to hear ideas;
- Great examples of good practice;
- Excellent range and variety of speakers;
- Inspirational presentations and high quality information on
the global dimension;
- Plenty of food for thought for overall course planning;
- The course was excellent with a great range of activities.
Presentations were of a very high standard and I was inspired
by Sally Inman’s presentation;
- Information was clear and reassured me that this is not a
whole 'new' curricular area to be fit into the teaching load.
 
 
 
 
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