Taking a Global Approach to ITE - March 2008

The ITE Steering Group are delighted to update you on some of the activity that has been happening under the ‘Taking a Global Approach to Initial Teacher Education’ initiative.

We have had meetings with many key contacts within teacher education across Scotland in the past few months, and we are delighted to update you all on the project activity and let you know what the proposed ‘next steps’ are to be. We would also like to take this opportunity to extend an invitation to become involved with this project, or to find out more information if you are interested. Please contact ITEProject@ideas-forum.org.uk for more details!

Partnerships with universities
Initial discussions regarding the project have been taking place within initial teacher education institutions and these have tentatively scoped out how we might collaboratively take project activity forward over the next couple of years. All of this has led to very interesting discussions relating to both the opportunities and the challenges facing initial teacher education and also the remit of the project to build on some of the excellent and innovative work that is already going on within teacher education across Scotland with regards to Education for Global Citizenship/Sustainable Development.

Evaluator on board
As you may already know, Ian Barr is now on board with the Taking a Global Approach to Initial Teacher Education project as Project Evaluator and Critical Friend. Ian will be working with the project over the next two-three years in order to help us undertake the baseline survey, develop our monitoring and evaluation frameworks, provide external evaluation reports on an annual and final report basis and will also be working closely with the project to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and generally help to ensure that project activity is worthwhile, cost-effective and successful in achieving the project objectives! Ian has extensive experience within this field and, most notably for this project, was the external evaluator for the overall DFID-funded ‘Embedding the Global Dimension in Initial Teacher Education’ initiative across the UK.

Key Players
Additionally, meetings have been held/are scheduled with representatives from Learning Teaching Scotland, Scottish Government, HMIe, and GTCS in order to inform key stakeholders about the project and to invite them to join a ‘National Advisory Group’. This group will be kept informed of project activity and will be invited to feed into project development (through days such as the proposed event in September, more details below).

Next steps:
The next key priority for the project is to undertake a baseline survey which will act as a scoping exercise to determine where/if the skills/values/knowledge relating to effective Education for Global Citizenship/Sustainable Development are currently located within ITE provision across Scotland - this exercise will enable us to determine where we are. To kick start this, we’re getting representatives from the universities together to meet each other and to talk through the collaborative project objectives and discuss the baseline survey – this will be happening in early April. After this event, we will be holding local action planning days with each university in order to clarify local objectives and areas of activity and work together to establish how best to go about developing these activities over the remaining two years of the project.

Once we have had this meeting the baseline questionnaires (which have been developed initially by Ian, but can be adapted to ensure relevancy to each university) will be ready to disseminate and collate at each university.

We are then proposing to hold a project event in September, the purpose of which will be to present the findings from the baseline, and to provide a platform for discussion with key stakeholders which will help to develop the project activity. After this September event, the local action plans will again be revisited.

Can we still get involved?
Of course you can! If you are interested in getting involved in this initiative, or to discuss any aspect of the project, please don’t hesitate to contact ITEProject@ideas-forum.org.uk