Generation Global

Year 9 RS students at Pipers enjoyed a fantastic opportunity to connect with the wider world when they took part in a video conference with students from Ganga International School in New Delhi. The aim of the activity was to build a dialogue by speaking and listening to each other.

The conference was run through the Generation Global programme, an initiative that complements multiple areas of the curriculum, including religious education, citizenship, and British values. Through the programme students from the UK have the opportunity to connect with their peers in countries all over the world, sharing in facilitated video conferences which help them to understand the shared challenges of growing up in our globalised world, and discovering how different their lives, cultures, and beliefs can be.

Prior to the day the girls had prepared for the conference by working through techniques of how to use dialogue effectively and exploring a case study of inter-faith dialogue in Nigeria. They also spent time in RS thinking about a number of topics and preparing for how they might discuss the issues via the video conference.

Areas the discussion covered included:

Values – there was a discussion of what personal values the students had in each country and who they looked to for guidance in how they shape their beliefs. Both sets of students talked about the importance of kindness and honesty.

Festivals – the participants shared details of festivals that were important to them and how things are celebrated differently in different countries.

Education – the two groups shared stories about their schools, touching on the subjects they learnt, what their teachers were like and how their school communities were both similar and different.

Food - Pipers girls talked of Sunday Roasts and the students from Ganga talked about the use of spice in their dishes.

Faith and Belief – a selection of members from the two groups shared some personal experiences about the role faith plays in their lives.

Head of RS, Mr McKain, said “It has been hugely beneficial for our girls to have had the chance to connect with students who come from a different country, who have been brought up in a different culture and who have different beliefs. The conference showed them that whilst it is important to learn about religion, what is also important is to learn the skill of dialogue - the ability to confidently and articulately question people about their beliefs and to listen to them respectfully. My hope is that these video conferences will become integral to the RS curriculum at Pipers in the coming years.”