On this International Day of Education, JRS Europe celebrates schools, teachers, and students around the world, and we want to highlight the CHANGE programme’s approach towards education:
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- Promoting nuanced critical thinking in a world where facts are distorted for political purposes. 80% of the teachers who have implemented CHANGE agreed it fostered critical thinking among students.
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- Supporting the development of charitable, proactive values and attitudes; something backed up by 85% of queried teachers.
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- Confronting prejudice, stereotypes, and prior beliefs with surprising, powerful information. Teachers have described the “emotional” reactions of students, who changed their preconceptions thanks to CHANGE.
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- Providing interpersonal encounters with forced migrants, grounding their stories in reality. One teacher mentioned “rarely having met someone as engaging for young people,” and another talked about how the meeting truly challenged students’ preconceived notions of refugees.
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- Fostering an environment wherein the students educate themselves, guided and accompanied by teachers, rather than the typical top-down teaching process. One educator praised the programme’s “open, dynamic activities.”
Education is a fundamental human right, a basis for personal dignity on all levels of society. It is imperative not only to ensure high-quality schooling for newcomers, but also to properly educate residents of host countries to shape a society in which everyone is welcome and can participate and coexist.
To find out more about how to bring CHANGE in your own schools, follow this link for the teachers’ page on our website at https://desarrollo.socialco.es/jrs/jrschange/respaldo2021/i-am-a-teacher/