IICD and Anne Frank House partner in Global Teenager Project

The main area of cooperation identified in the partnership is the project ‘Understanding Diversity’, which involves linking schools who learn from and with each other about the topic of migration. At a signing ceremony on March 21st in Amsterdam, the partnership was formalised. The partnership enables both partners to benefit from each other’s expertise in the field of education for secondary school students. They will also be able to tap into each other’s networks and learn from each other. Both the Anne Frank House (AFH) and IICD will make human capacity and means available to ensure the success of the pilot project.

IICD and AFH stress the importance of intercultural collaboration and understanding. Above all, they are convinced that:

• AFH and IICD through the Global Teenager Project seek to promote democratic values among young people through educational programmes. The promotion of democratic values includes the furthering of respect for one another and for each other’s culture in order to reach a world where differences are no longer threats but opportunities. Cross-cultural collaboration can be an important tool to reach this.

• Education plays an inalienable role in development (as is also laid down in the UN millennium goals) and in the upbringing of children and that many of the norms and values are reflected here.

• In the current world ICTs offer enormous potential to speed up development processes, facilitate learning and create global communities.

• The so-called ‘Information Society’ is a concept that will rapidly spread all over the world and demands of us to provide ‘ICT literacy’ to our children.
  
  Understanding Diversity

This ‘Understanding Diversity’ project is a joint effort of the Global Teenager Project (GTP) and the Anne Frank House, in collaboration with various participants in the Global Teenager network. The pilot project focuses on the experience of international migration in its many forms. Two schools in different countries will be connected and form a school couple for the duration of the project. The activities are demanding and challenging, and will require collaboration among students within classrooms and across national borders.

The project aims for the students to:

• Gain an understanding of issues relating to migration

• Share individual, regional, and cultural perspectives

• Foster problem-solving and critical thinking skills

• Enhance communication skills and develop co-operative and collaborative work strategies

• Learn to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)

• Learn how to organise and process information
  
  The pilot project is taking place in six countries to assess whether the types of activities that students will engage in are useful and help them develop new knowledge, attitudes and skills. The countries couples are: Austria and Romania, Ghana and the Netherlands, and Uganda and the USA. GTP country coordinators from Ghana, the Netherlands, Romania and Uganda are heavily involved in the organisation of the pilot. They will also play an important role in evaluating the project. If the pilot project is successful, a larger project will be developed in more countries.
  
  Give students initiatives in their learning

Global Teenager is known for its Learning Circle approach. Learning Circles are highly interactive, project-based virtual exchange programs among a small number of schools located throughout the world. In this project, the strengths of this approach are taken and added other interactive student-based methodologies to create a dynamic project that makes use of the many types of capabilities that students have, giving them the initiative in their learning. The activities are demanding and challenging, and will require collaboration among students within classrooms and across national borders. A difference in this project with the traditional learning circle approach is that students will be asked to go into their communities, conduct actual interviews, give presentations in class and create an online exhibition.

E-mail and the internet is playing a major role in the project. Students will communicate with each other to conduct research and to develop materials themselves. In effect, this means that students from the coupled countries are dependent on each other for the supply of information. In this way, they will help each other in gaining a better understanding of aspects of migration. All activities will lead to a final product, which is an online exhibition in the form of website pages about migration experiences, created by the students from the various countries. This online exhibition will be published on GTP’s Virtual Campus, the online meeting place of the project.

About Anne Frank House

The Anne Frank House is a non-profit, politically unaffiliated organisation aimed at the preservation of Anne Frank’s hiding place and to propagate her ideals, not only in relationship to the times in which she lived, but also in terms of their current significance. The Anne Frank House tries to achieve its objectives particularly by means of education. In the Anne Frank House educational programmes are offered to (school) groups. Moreover, the Anne Frank House develops teaching material about the Frank family, with the aim to prepare students for their life in a multicultural society with people from diverse origin.