Connecting across continents

Year 9 RS students at Pipers thoroughly enjoyed an opportunity to connect with their peers in the USA and the Ukraine this week, when they participated in a video conference, thanks to Generation Global.

The Generation Global programme is 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.

Dialogue is at the heart of the programme and a trained facilitator assists the students to engage with each other around issues of culture, identity, gender, beliefs, values, and attitudes.

Through the session the students discovered that they shared both similarities and differences, but were able to talk honestly and share their opinions and perspectives.

Prior to the day the girls had prepared for the conference by working through techniques of how to use dialogue effectively. 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.

It was a hugely beneficial experience for the students, demonstrating that although outwardly it may seem that we are completely different to people from other countries, there are in fact many common opinions and experiences that we all share.