We talked about how human beings interact with nature and about the impact on the environment.

Teaching young people how to live in harmony with their surroundings will help them to become more eco-awared and informed about sustainability.

It also contributes to an appreciation and understanding of other cultures.

I think it is important to encourage young people to become responsable, global citizens. 

As a common mantra associated with global citizenship is: " think globally, act locally".

Having read today's material 'A global outlook' I must admit that I feel a bit conflicted. On the one hand the Sustainable Development Project has made me more aware of my carbon footprint and yet here I am in Guadeloupe on a course for which I have had to fly for over ten hours. How's that for a carbon footprint? Has my insatiable appetite for new educational insights gone too far? Is Guadeloupe genuinely the best place to contemplate how best to integrate international/global aims into our school's curriculum? I feel incredibly lucky to be able to experience a completely new culture and scenery but I am sort of wracked with guilt knowing that in my eagerness for new experiences I have forgotten to consider the planet. Goals I had after the sustainable development project seemed to have flown out of the window as soon as an interesting opportunity arose. If we all do what we like without ever properly considering the effect our actions have on the environment and our planet, then what is to become of this world? And these are just examples of tangible actions! What to think of the questions posed on page 31 of this course's booklet? If I were part of a global village consisting of  100 people, in what way would  ... their priorities be different from mine?', and how '... would my priorities look to them?' I can also infer the following question from page 31: does my work matter in the bigger scheme of things? Not only do I feel conflicted, I feel overwhelmed! (With guilt? Shame?) Luckily this feeling does not last long as I might have stumbled upon the point of this course: if anything we should go home feeling that us teachers are on an important mission. I should try to answer the questions from page 31 and once I've sufficiently pondered over them I should impose my students to answer the same questions. Hopefully we will soon be a step closer to thinking and acting like global citizens.

Today we went to Guadeloupe National Park and visited the Chutes du Carbet waterfalls. Unfortunately, there was a lot of rain, but of course it is also called a tropical rainforest. Our session today focused on what it means to be a global citizen. To understand other people, you must first understand how the world looks from different national and cultural perspectives. Later in the day we visited rum distillation. I take part in a Fairtrade project in our school, which deals with the work and living conditions of farmers in developing countries. Now Guadeloupe is not a developing country, but if I look at the differences between the Netherlands and Guadeloupe then you are scared of what a factory looks like here, where farmers live, how a supervisor keeps an eye on everything, the difference between where farmers keep a break and the huge house of the owner on top of the hill. These are things that you don’t come across in the Netherlands so quickly and that you realize how well we are in our country. Employees at such a company sometimes work in the heat for days while we complain that the air conditioning is not cold enough. 

Today we’ve been learning about what it means to be a global citizen and it’s basically all about (Oxfam, 1997) being aware that there is wider global community outside your own country and culture and that you have a responsibility towards this wider global community. Also according to him a global citizen has a basic understanding of how this world works, when it comes to economy, politics etc. So that is where our responsibility lies as a teacher.

I also really liked the idea of the global village is a way to show more easily this global community and who is in it. I would really like to be able to find an application to this concept to my teaching of physics in the classroom. That is something that I will try to do when I get home.

My final thoughts wandered towards the role technology (and thus science) has played in the creation of this global community. It is because of the technology of today that we find ourselves all connected to each other. Ironically it’s this same technology and science that has created some of the most difficult challenges to this global community, which is the large scale use of energy and the damage to the environment that’s the result of that. But I honestly believe that the answer also lies in the application of science and the adoption of new, better technologies, so that’s how I want to play my part in the global community, set students on a course of studying science and having them become the people that will give us the solutions in the future.

Our course reader provides a variety of global citizenship themes and skills images which will be interesting to enlarge and hang in classrooms just like posters. These handy reminders can be a good first step of introducing students to the idea of becoming a global citizen.