Tom Penny, Assistant Principal at the International School of Stuttgart thoughtfully draws on his approach to develop a sense of identity and local context against a backdrop of globalisation.
How can we give a sense of time, space and place to our students who are from here and those who are only here for a few years?
Our global world is changing. Globalisation is shifting into a new way of working with regional blocks and regional identities forming that reflect key changes for the future. At the International School of Stuttgart, we discussed the needs of our students and teachers in teaching global understandings in a local context. We took advantage of local requirements for our humanities, PSHE and languages curriculum to review our approach to teaching and learning about our local context and developed a new approach.
Many of the topics we now had to explore were already on our curriculum as they represent significant ideas about our area, Germany, and wider European topics. However, several were brand new ones for us or required us to formalize our approach across our multinational teams. Holy Roman Empire, the emergence of Christianity and Islam and their contributions to European identity, the Welfare State, European Union politics, the unification of Germany, migration in the media and perspectives about so many topics all made us individually reflect and collectively discuss what we wanted to do expose the students to. First off, we had to discuss what we knew about these topics, what we thought and found important about them and how we could resource them for our inquiry and concept-based curriculum.
We identified a whole process of curriculum change to ensure this was developed in a meaningful and impactful way for our international student body. We acknowledge our position in the centre of Europe and our highly mobile and mostly non-European student and even teaching body. How can we give a sense of time, space and place to our students who are from here and those who are only here for a few years? How can we also do this as a school for our students? We found this a challenging opportunity to weave German and European development into our globally focused curriculum and school experience.
We ensured that colleagues from different subjects attended together for fruitful conversations when back in school
We needed to focus on motivating the heart to encourage staff to get involved. How can we give them the knowledge and the tools to help students explore these essential topics of a European identity which is united in diversity, multi-lingualistics, and is currently experiencing significant flux? We worked with our Erasmus+ agency in Germany to develop a budget for training, job shadowing for teachers, and student exchange. We have spent the past year with training opportunities where pairs of teachers have visited training centres throughout Europe to learn more. From courses on teaching languages using myths and legends, teaching in diverse classrooms, equity and justice in a European context, understanding the European Union, using local history for learning in museums and walks through cities, the development of Human Rights law from Nuremberg to the Hague process, teaching languages and cultures, capturing culture through making videos and so much more. We have tried to cater for teacher choice in their learning pathway to have an impact back in the classroom.
We identified impactful events back at school that could be reviewed and refreshed based on their learning to create critical mass. We identified colleagues who would have the most impact in their own classrooms and wider teams. We ensured that colleagues from different subjects attended together for fruitful conversations when back in school. All colleagues have presented their learning in school newsletters to share with parents and students what we are up to. We organised two learning festivals where teachers ran workshops back at school for the whole school. This was like an Extended Essay or Personal Project fair where colleagues got together from kindergarten to grade 12 across all subjects to learn from and with colleagues. The energy was electric and led to more interest in the project for future years.
We have also sought out a partner school in another European context for us to learn with them and visit with one of our year groups. We have selected this in a different type of curriculum focus to explore teaching and learning in new contexts. We will work with a national school system that teaches in English. We visited it in October to plan a joint field trip with our grade 9 in May. Local visits, surfing, sailing, workshops, and bowling will give our international students from our school and the national students from the partner school a window into another world and contacts that will further strengthen our sense of place. Teachers are also working together and seeing learning in new lights between the state local system school and the independent international school. We learn with and from one another with many positive spin-offs for future work. We also welcome more schools to visit us through the Erasmus+ network and look forward to future exchanges.
Our assembly programme has been reviewed to deliberately seek out opportunities for students to learn about global topics in a local setting, We marked Europe Day last May and learnt so much together. We have developed World Languages Day where the community puts on workshops about the topics of languages, arts, and culture to give a global view with a local flavour. We have developed new units, learning experiences and trips under this wider umbrella.
What will our new cohorts arriving need to understand the locality they now inhabit? What deliberate opportunities can we develop in our curriculum, school events and school experiences? What might occur naturally between teachers to develop this? What time and space do we as school leaders need to carve out? How will we know when we are having an impact? We still have much to do to promote this internationally-minded outlook and ensure that we are continuously reflective and responsive to changes in our student body and the world around us.
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