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=Global Perspectives=


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=Global Perspectives (Cambridge IGCSE Course)=

"Our students can be very ‘provincial’ about global issues, believing that are totally self-contained, selfsufficient and that their lives will be just the same as their parents. We tell them that they will be working all over the world and that the real world goes across country boundaries.Students also need to fi nd out what is important to them about being from their own country. I think the Global Perspectives syllabus will help get the messages across."

Mike Ball, Director, Britannica International School Belgrade, Serbia


 * Young people in countries across the world face unprecedented challenges in the 21st century not least in how they will come to terms with accelerating changes in that world, that will impact on their life chances and life choices.The rationale behind this syllabus is to provide opportunities for enquiry into, and reflection on, those changes. A prime emphasis will be on developing the sorts of skills and dispositions of thinking that active citizens of the future will need. This rationale accords not only with the international ethos that underpins all of the IGCSE syllabuses but also with the thinking expressed by UNESCO in its seminal reports on education:

Education must include activities and processes that encourage awareness of, and commitment to, the solutions of global problems. This should be done in such ways that people learn solutions are possible through cooperation at all levels – at the levels of individuals, organisations and nations.

UNESCO (cited by Walker, 2002)

It should be particularly noted that developing awareness of this sort is not a question of how to get everybody to think identically. On the contrary, it is a matter of opening minds to the great complexity of the world and of human thought, and opening hearts to the diversity of human experience and feeling.

Students undertaking this course must consider the themes and issues from local, national and global angles whilst developing their own personal perspective.

Through this approach, it is hoped that young people will develop independent minds, at the same time as developing their sense of community, from local to global. Perhaps, indeed, the syllabus goes a step further in reflecting that: ‘The global is personal, and the personal is global’. ||