Global learning in Primary Education: moving beyond charity

This paper considers small scale research carried out in three primary schools in Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire between September 2012 and April 2013 as part of a larger three year UK Government Department for International Development (DfID) funded project, ‘The world came to my school today’. The overall purpose of this project was to raise awareness of, and promote informed action to address global inequality and poverty.


Introduction
In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world all citizens should have an awareness and understanding of global issues, poverty and inequalities.Oxfam define a global citizen, amongst other things, as 'willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place' (2005, online).This paper considers small scale research carried out in three primary schools in Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire between September 2012 and April 2013 as part of a larger three year UK Government Department for International Development (DfID) funded project, 'The world came to my school today'.The overall purpose of this project was to raise awareness of, and promote informed action to address global inequality and poverty.
The focus of this research, therefore, is to investigate Key Stage 2 (KS2: 7 to 11 year olds) children's understanding of and responses to poverty and global inequalities by considering the following questions: 1.
Is the world fair?

2.
How can I make the world a better place?

3.
What are countries and organisations already doing to make the world a better place?
This article presents children's responses to these questions and concludes that young children between the ages of 7 and 11 are: 1. interested in and intellectually able to begin to understand the complexities of poverty and global inequalities 2. able to consider a range of individual and collective responses to these inequalities that go beyond notions of a simplistic charitable relationship in order to explore ways in which they can be part of a move towards a more just and sustainable world.Charitable campaigns, such as Red Nose Day, have become an integral part of many primary schools' annual calendar.This feeds into the dominant discourse that charity through benevolence is seen as intrinsically 'good'.In this model the 'best' response to these existing inequalities is to enact change through charitable donations of money and/or time.
When describing the Make Poverty History campaign, Andreotti criticises the fact that 'the use of images, figures and slogans emphasised the need to be charitable, compassionate and 'active' locally (in order to change institutions), based on a moral obligation to a common humanity, rather than on a political responsibility for the causes of poverty ' (2006: 42).
She then summarises Dobson in stating that 'justice is a better ground for thinking as it is political and prompts fairer and more equal relations … being human raises issues of morality; being a citizen raises political issues ' (2006: 42).

Ontology, Epistemology and Methodology
Our research was built on the following ontological principles: Anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed when the teachers collated all the children's responses to give to the two authors to be analysed.Thematic analysis of initial and final session responses was undertaken to tease out the two main themes as exemplified by corresponding children's quotes.

Research findings
Is the world fair?
This was devised as a values statements activity with the class teacher recording the children's attitudes through a dialogue-based session.
The children were shown some statements and asked to put their thumbs up if they agreed with the statement, thumbs down if they disagreed and thumbs sideways if they were neutral or didn't know.The activity began with gentle, comfortable statements such as apples are tastier than bananas and grew in sophistication until, after 6 statements or so the children were asked to judge the statement 'The world is fair'.Children responded by making comments such as 'we need to balance the world, some people have tonnes of things and some have nothing'.

How can I make the world a better place?
This activity was devised to record children's awareness of the steps they could make to 'imagine different futures and the role they can play in creating a fair and sustainable world' (QCA, 2007: 2).
The children were asked how they can make the world a better place and were given a blank sheet of A4 paper and a supply of coloured crayons, pencils or pens to record their ideas.If the children required a prompt they were asked 'if you could change some things in the world to make it Children then revisited all of the questions following input.
In order to analyse the findings the constant comparison method (Thomas 2009) was used to identify two main themes regarding the children's learning in the interpretative research data.These two themes illustrate emerging ways in which the project has found an increase in pupil knowledge and understanding of global development issues and the impact of their own decisions and actions.et al. (2010) found that the conceptualisation of the notion of poverty and global justice issues was understood by children according to their age and cognitive development and was dependent on strategies used by teachers as being age appropriate.Children in this small scale study were found to engage with the language of poverty and wealth, using such terms as rich and poor, at some point beyond the age of 7.

Ruane
Some children in this evaluation were able to engage with issues at a sophisticated level and some children had a conceptual understanding of poverty as the denial, or lack of, basic needs such as food, water and shelter.
When asked whether they thought the world was fair in baseline session 1, the children mainly referred to themselves and their own lives commenting: - -Even though we have things, still in some parts of the UK people have no money or a place to live.This is the same in other countries Two Year 5 pupils recounted in detail the difference between absolute and relative poverty.This demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the complexity of the issues illustrating that 10 year olds can develop a sophisticated understanding of complex global issues.
One participating teacher estimated that all the children in her class had developed their understanding of poverty reduction, sustainability issues and identity and diversity.About half the children in her class became much more self-aware and were able to have 'those big conversations' about global issues.Although the children's 'lives [were] saturated with media images about celebs that have everything, all the things they haven't got' (Participating teacher), the children appeared to have developed a better understanding of their personal relative wealth in a global context.

Moving on from charity
When asked how they could make the world a better place in baseline session 1, the children mainly wrote or drew about things that are personal and close to home.The issues they felt they could improve upon included: -raising money for charity -give money to charity Children in this project between the ages of 7 and 11 were able to engage with the language of poverty and wealth, using terms such as rich, poor, unequal, unfair, injustice and began to demonstrate in their responses a move away from a predominantly charitable understanding towards one that is a spectrum of both charity and social justice.

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Childhood is socially constructed and dependent on time, place and context Children are expert agents who are capable of shaping the social world  Children are already aware of the wider world through parents, peers, the news, marketing, popular culture and increasingly through access to the internet The epistemological approach used children's voices, perceptions and beliefs in collaboration with their class teachers as the strongest basis of knowledge about their situated understanding of these complex issues.This research was seen as participatory action research (PAR) with the teachers having a critical facilitatory role working with children as coresearchers.PAR was seen as the most appropriate methodology as it emphasises engagement and change.Our research began from the premise that children from 7 to 11 are intellectually capable of understanding complex global inequalities and their role as global citizens in enacting future change.Reason and Bradbury claim that within PAR 'communities of inquiry and action evolve and address questions and issues that are significant for those who participate as co-researchers' (2008:1).Tisdall et al develop this point in relation to children being co-researchers by stating that 'researchers should recognize children's agency, their citizenship as human beings now and not just in the future, and involve children as (the central) research participants' (2009: 2).They go on to suggest the value of involving children in that 'research can also be a means of representation, a way to ensure that children's views and experiences are not only listened to but heard by other groups' (2009: 5).Our research methods were designed to engage children respectfully and consisted of teacher-child interaction through dialogue within existing classroom practices.The usual classroom teachers presented materials (stories, video, images and posters) to the children and then collected data by recording the children's engagement with these materials.It was fully recognised that the classroom teachers were better placed to understand the children's learning over time.Research plan While exploring the three main research questions teachers delivered the following five sessions: Session 1: Baseline evaluation -three research questions to measure children's initial understanding of global inequality and poverty (initial baseline data).Session 2: Teacher facilitated activities designed to raise awareness of global inequalities -linked to 'is the world fair?' Session 3: Teacher facilitated activities designed to explore active global citizenship -linked to 'how can I make the world a better place?' Session 4: Teacher facilitated activities designed to introduce the Millennium Development Goals -linked to 'What are countries and organisations already doing to make the world a better place?' Session 5: Revisiting the three research questions to explore if the children's attitudes towards and understanding of these complex issues has changed (final data).
better for you and for other people what things would you do?' The children's responses were plotted on a grid consisting of four sections: Local sustainability / Global sustainability / Local social justice / Global social justice.Children responded by making comments describing actions they might be able to take such as 'make other people who are rasis [sic] stop'.What are countries and organisations already doing to make the world a better place?This activity was devised to measure the children's increased awareness of international efforts to reduce poverty, promote development and honour human rights.The children were asked to write their response to the above question on the reverse side of the paper used for the previous activity.The children were able to name organisations working to make the world a better place, including Comic Relief, Children in Need, Charities, Red Cross, Cancer Research, British Heart Foundation and Poppy Day.Children responded by making comments such as 'stop wars … feed starving people'.

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figured highly, the children demonstrated a good understanding of wider possibilities, including lobbying the powerful, taking a strong stand against wrong-doers, reducing the voting age and having positive, can-do attitudes and values.In session 5 their responses included:

The beginnings of a childhood construction of global social realities -moving beyond charity
Renner et al. summarise Paul Farmer's conception of global inequalities'as falling into one of three categories: charity, development or social justice' (2010: 44).They suggest that charity uses a deficit model where the ''server' operates on the 'served', using a deficit model, i.e. 'they' are seen as intrinsically inferior' (2010: 44).