The educational work of the program .1 Educational Purpose

Global Connections was interpreted as being directed to more than just educational purposes by Plan. Global Connections was also fulfilling organisational purposes with regard to Plan’s

commitment to youth participation. This was particularly evident in the way that Plan utilised young people as facilitators and attempted to meet their expectations. The facilitator roles in the schools were a significant objective of the program for Plan. However, the facilitators were essentially incidental from the schools’ perspective except to the extent that the facilitators might affect the

‘real’ school student-centred purposes of the program. Finally, the program also served a purpose by contributing to strategic thinking about the way that Plan was engaging the Australian community.

One of the original stated objectives of Global Connections was framed in terms of Plan’s organisational learning (see section 3.2).

With regard to the educational purpose of the program activity, Plan considered that the connection to Indonesia and the communication pieces were just a vehicle for the program’s real purpose of empowering the school students to be active citizens:

The Global Connections program is a vessel or it’s a vehicle for them to be able to reflect, enter into dialogue, think about and gather tools to be able to deal with issues of interest and concern and engage so that they feel empowered to do that.

The supervisor recognised that the statement above represented a shift in the program objectives from those that were stated in the initial program development documents (see section 3.2) which emphasised the global connection:

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Well ultimately how it was set up, it was about those global connections...now it’s more about citizenship, that’s the stronger emphasis is the way I see it...and that’s coming out in the stakeholder groups too.

However, the evidence of the teachers suggested that Plan had not communicated the change in emphasis to the schools as a stakeholder group because they were strongly interpreting the program in terms of the connections.

The program objectives had also shifted with regard to the students’ outcomes. Evaluations conducted in previous years suggested that the students were getting outcomes beyond those initially anticipated. In particular, the school students appeared to be getting outcomes that were very personally oriented including a sense of increased self esteem, and personal worth which related to a feeling of ‘I can do it’. This unanticipated but welcomed outcome was being written into new statements about the program’s purposes which were being developed at the time of the interview. Once again however, there was no evidence that this purpose had been communicated to the schools.

6.3.1.2 Educational Content

A consequence of wider interpretation of the program’s purpose and objectives and also Plan’s determination to maximise the youth-led nature of the program was that the supervisor was completely at ease with the possibility that students might choose to develop issues in a way that had no global element or connection to Indonesia:

For me the Global Connections program, even if in Australian schools the kids chose local issues and chose a local focus the whole way through, that’s perfectly fine, because the tools and the skills and the knowledge that they build within that program then leads to them being able to use that on a global scale.

From the outset therefore, Plan was looking at the content of the 2008 program as being primarily directed to the issues and empowerment to act component of the program and was anticipating that the issues could be local issues. The Indonesians were envisaged to be working concurrently on their own issues and then an exchange of communication pieces would take place. The communication pieces were therefore just the mechanism by which the work that one group was doing could be shared with their peers in the other country:

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They do them (the communication pieces) at the same time, and then they swap them, and they then talk about them and learn about the issues.

In this way, the communication pieces were not in themselves the main objective of the program which was instead related to the thinking, processes and work that was done to develop the content of the communications.

With regard to the educational content of schools, the supervisor was familiar with the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) and specifically said that the program was pitched to the schools as fitting within the citizenship focus of the VELS. However, the supervisor was not confident about how schools already dealt with this focus and suspected that it was probably new to most teachers:

I think the concept of citizenship is quite...new, so even with young and old teachers I suppose, so they are asked to incorporate something within their curriculum that they don’t necessarily have, they haven’t had a chance to reflect on, or internalise the issue themselves, so don’t then necessarily know how to apply it or integrate it within their school curriculum.

In this way, there seemed to be a definite view that the program was transformative with regard to its actual content and beyond what teachers normally did in class.

6.3.1.3 Educational Methods: Pedagogy

The commitment to Global Connections being youth-led was one of the strongest foundations of Plan’s commitment at all levels of the organisation to the program. From the outset, Plan was interpreting the youth-led nature of the program in the schools as involving both the facilitators and the students. Once again however, there appeared to be an impression held by Plan (not just the supervisor) that teachers were not generally familiar with and/or did not practise the student-led pedagogies which were the basis of Global Connections:

It (student-led learning) still doesn’t happen a lot or all the time...many teachers don’t use it because they find it, I imagine they find it, people don’t like change and they don’t

necessarily like difference. So it’s important for us to articulate it because otherwise you’re faced with teachers who are deciding, yes, they say, they tell the kids that they’re going to do the program, and then they tell the kids how, even how they’re going to communicate.

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My field note reflections after this interview questioned whether the assumptions made about ‘many teachers’ were likely to apply to the teachers involved in 2008. The situation described did not seem to reflect my first interview with the teachers and their descriptions of the work they were doing in the Learning Centres in particular. As an experienced classroom teacher, I was impressed with the Learning Centre methods and felt that they would be considerably more sophisticated with regard to supporting student-centred learning than what the inexperienced facilitators would achieve. My field note ended with ‘watch this space’.