Food and Freedom: developing thinking skills for global citizenship in schools

Programme Objectives
In collaboration with Sapere (The Society for Advancing Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education), this project is providing accredited training in 'Philosophy for Children' (P4C) to around 100 teachers in England and 35 in Ghana. The methods of P4C promoted by Sapere involves techniques of encouraging children to take a more active leading role in the learning process. The emphasis is more on understanding rather than just knowing. It seeks to develop children's ability to be curious, inquisitive and to question what they are taught. These strategies are utilised as an approach to raising development awareness.

The Food and Freedom project is funded until April 2007 by the Department for International Development’s (DfID) Development Awareness Fund.

Programme Activities
P4C Training
The P4C training for teacher in UK and Ghana ran from April 2004 to March 2006, and worked with teachers, pupils and advisors within six LEAs in England - Redbridge, Cumbria, Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Oxford, and Aberdeenshire in Scotland, as well as with schools in Ghana’s Western Region. More than 100 teachers in approximately 50 schools have received SAPERE Level 1 training (12 hours, certificated) and more than 30 were funded further to Level 2.

The training has been extremely well received by the teachers who continue to give very positive feedback on the courses they participated in, many of which have specified benefits regarding pupil communication and thinking skills, their teaching approaches, and dealing with Global Citizenship (GC) issues.

In their evaluation, a Level 2 course participant wrote;

‘Ultimately the whole experience has been life/work changing, I only hope I can do it properly and do P4C justice’

Fair Trade Website

Living Earth is currently developing an information portal website, for students and teachers, highlighting development issues affecting Africa, in particular fairtrade. The information for this website will be sourced directly from Africa, through LEF partners, thus ensuring that information on the site is directly related to the issues affecting Africa at the grass roots level rather than being sourced - perhaps with value-laden perspectives - from Europe.

If you are a student or teacher or anyone interested in learning more about development issues in Africa, Living Earth would like to hear from you on what you would like to see on the site and what would be most useful for your needs. This will help us to develop the most effective, useful and user-friendly website we can.

Please send your comments to Katherine May.

This website will be launched later this year and will be publicised here so keep your eyes peeled....

For more information about this project please contact;
Katherine May - Programme Co-ordinator - Living Earth UK

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Food and Freedom

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