GatherEd: Learning and Creating Global Teacher Education

What does GatherEd mean to me? For the second time, GatherEd has provided an opportunity to halt the everyday race, always loaded with local worries, administration, tasks and surroundings, to zoom out of routine and into crucial issues from a different perspective. GatherEd means a chance to grapple with the complexity of education in a changing global reality, collaboratively unpacking terms like multiculturalism and multilingualism. GatherEd has given me the space to think about global teacher education, digital responsibility, inclusion, accessibility and democratic competencies alongside dedicated colleagues from Norway, Iceland, Greece, Spain and Israel.

I am grateful for the invitation to attend my second GatherEd workshop at the University of Oslo, Norway. I have written about my experiences in Crete, with many of the same colleagues, in this valuable Erasmus Plus project. This time, we spent three whole days learning, playing, laughing, discussing pedagogy in our unique contexts, and deliberating over issues connected to global citizenship in multilingual and multicultural contexts. We spent an additional morning at the Kuben High School, Kuben Videregaende Skole. The project’s primary outcome will be the creation of a MOOC designed to prepare teachers worldwide to provide optimal instruction for students from diverse backgrounds. I believe in the program and the contribution it has to offer. Our wonderful moments of harmonious learning, sincere dialogue and collaboration have been enriching and inspiring. I hope we manage to share some of that richness with teachers struggling to provide respectful and caring education for their unique heterogeneous student populations.

Some of the sessions at a glance:
On day one, we participated in a workshop by Professor Ingvill Rasmussen on collaboration across borders and using digital tools to promote dialogue and learning. She presented a tool called ‘Talkwall‘, which is similar in many ways to other collaborative tools (Like Nearpod and Padlet) but has unique affordances. Professor Rasmussen stressed the importance of the platform being independently created and operated and data not being stored and utilised by commercial IT companies. She also focused on the crucial role of teacher mediation during and following the written dialogue between the students.

From the European Wergeland Centre, Marianne Haug spoke about educating for democracy and human rights. The background to her talk was the decrease in democracy in European countries according to international ratings and the decline of trust in democracy among young people. The session was deeply relevant to me in light of recent events in Israel. The speaker stressed that the best educational results are achieved when all prominent actors are involved, lecturers, teacher educators, teachers, students, and mentor teachers. The organisation recommends blending democratic values and principles into all areas of initial teacher education – democracy in chemistry, democracy in the arts etc. Resources produced by the centre include a MOOC for educators called “School life online” – it deals with digital citizenship and the relationship between digital and civil competencies. Incredibly, thousands of Ukrainian teachers have completed the MOOC during the ongoing war.

In the afternoon, we focussed on hate speech in an active workshop facilitated by Silje Forland Erdal and Binta-Victoria Jammeh. Considering the centrality of hate speech in our everyday lives in all countries and the damage of violent online discourse, we focused on the challenges facing those who strive to intervene. What criteria assessed the examples of hate speech we encountered in the workshop? The content and the tone of the messages, the intent of the writer/speaker, the target audience, the context of the utterance, and the impact of the message. The facilitators used innovative pedagogical tools in their workshop to spark and maintain dialogue in the small groups – I will undoubtedly adopt several of them.

Professor Halla Holmarsdottir ran another spectacular workshop. She presented us with “Digital Global Citizenship in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts”. She introduced DigiGen, a toolkit for promoting dialogue surrounding digital citizenship and the positives and negatives of digital engagement in our everyday lives in gaming and social media. The packs of conversation cards called ‘Talk!’ appear in Norwegian and in English. Gradually they are being translated into other languages. I will closely follow the research as it develops and enthusiastically use the cards in my techno-pedagogy courses.

Dr Fernando Trujillo from the University of Grenada and the GatherEd team used exciting pedagogical techniques to wake us up and engage us in a session called “Globalisation Inside: How “Global” are Our Classrooms?”. After discovering our pairs and small groups in surprising ways, we brainstormed what teaching and learning mean today. What has changed? In three minutes, we came up with the overflow of information (for better and for worse), awareness of false information, the teacher moving aside to allow students to take the stage, the teacher as facilitator, the centrality of technology, and the overriding necessity for communication and significant relationships. We also wrote about the pressing need for teacher presence and increased discussion about social issues and identity development. We mentioned that school has taken over many of the roles families held in the past. Relevant to this workshop is the diversity of our student (and teacher) populations.
Questions that Fernando asked us to consider were: If we are striving to create active, responsible and engaged citizens: Who are the learners? Who are the teachers? Where do teaching and learning take place? Which are the main objectives? What is the curriculum, and whose curriculum is it? Other concepts connected with the workshop’s theme and the GatherEd program were the positioning of ‘global’ in different ways – attending to the whole child, not just the cognitive aspects, building relationships with all children, and ‘global’ in the international perspective.
A concept new to me was ‘neophobia’ – fear of anything new; this is undoubtedly one of our barriers to responsible and responsive global education and global teacher education. The language we use to talk about teaching and learning in a global digital world is changing – we need to talk about assets and constraints, affordances and possibilities, investment in learning, agency, ownership of the learning process and knowledge, and sense-making through engagement.
Fernando urged the participants to have learners create in the learning process, generate tasks that lead to producing a final product, and emphasise dissemination with self and peer assessment. Finally, he left us with the challenge of not being limited by language/s in the learning process and searching for creative ways to embrace translanguaging and trans-semiotics. The workshop concluded with a section dedicated to new digital artefacts created in learning and the acknowledgement of the developing role of AI in the process. An additional competency waiting to be developed by educators and students is indeed prompt generation.

Dr Clayton David Gouin from the University of Oslo gave the final lecture, “Universal Design for Learning (UDL): How to include all learners”. This paper resonated with me and strengthened my practices while introducing me to new resources and strategies. I greatly appreciated Clayton’s generosity in sharing his well-organised and collated rich treasure of materials.
Clayton presented UDL (which was familiar to me) in a new light in the context of GatherEd. UDL, in this sense, is about changing spaces and practices to remove barriers. UDL here is not just technology or the physical surroundings; it is the adoption of curricula and practices that help learners succeed. This refers to increasing inclusivity – accessibility (can be accessed by all) and inclusion (access to materials with appropriate methods). Clayton brought this point home with a brilliant example. He gave us an origami task, but he gave the different groups different instructions (just written, just diagrams, both written with diagrams and both with a link to a YouTube tutorial video). I failed the task dismally – an essential experience for all teachers.

Apart from barriers of LD, concentration, absenteeism and others, we must consider language barriers and, in some cases, dialects that make comprehension more challenging.
What can we do to make our teaching more inclusive and accessible? We can use more transparent language – both written and oral. We can avoid dialects and limit jargon. We can give clear examples to illustrate meaning. We need to consider the cultural expectations of our learners and how their first language influences their thought processes (see Kaplan, 1966).

Clayton introduced us to the CAST UDL guidelines, which I will explore further soon. The idea is to engage people in many different ways and represent information in as many ways as possible.
Regarding global UDL, educators must plan for intercultural learner variability, embed cultural learning information and formulate clear instructions and teaching materials. It is crucial that educators explore their assumptions and stereotypes, reflect on them, and generate discussion on worldviews as part of regular practice. Clayton recommended the “Connected Teaching and Learning Principles” from Queens University in Belfast. They suggest fostering collaborative learning as a social process, involving students in the design of instruction, encouraging intercultural communities, and designing a curriculum in global citizenship. They suggest using diverse activities and forms of assessment and giving individual feedback. Finally, they emphasise developing skills for digital competence in teachers and students.
All of this is familiar; the theories and concepts discussed during these three days align well with my learning on relational education and pedagogy of care. However, how the concepts were presented and the international, intercultural and multilingual context in which the ideas emerged connected to my prior knowledge and generated new ideas and understandings in exciting ways. My learning and collaboration in Oslo will markedly change my practice.

In the afternoons, we left the university as a group to explore sites in Oslo, which would broaden our outlook, complicate the issues even further, and give us shared knowledge and examples to ground our work in. One of my central understandings from these days together is that difficult conversations with our students and colleagues cannot be avoided – it is our responsibility as educators to initiate and facilitate respectful dialogue on sensitive issues, a crucial world-changing skill we all need to improve.

“Everyone remembers where they were on that day!”. That sentence in Israel always refers to the catastrophe on November 4th 1995, the day Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. In Norway, people recall the events of July 22nd, 2011; the day a terror attack changed their country forever. Our visit to the 22. Juli-senteret educational centre was a revelation for me. Living in a country where terror attacks punctuate our lives, exploring terror elsewhere was fascinating and disturbing. Nine-eleven was life-stopping, but it was distant; here I was discussing the event with those who had experienced it. Hearing about the event’s effect on our colleagues’ lives and learning how the terror attacks and their chilling consequences are presented to Norwegian youth allowed me to step out of the local and think globally. The unanswerable questions, educators’ enormous obligation to honestly discuss the dangers of racism, hate speech and indifference. My internal struggle was not to judge, not to simplify, and most importantly, not to attempt to make the impossible comparisons between terror in different contexts. I understood I was there to learn, empathise, and continue fighting for a better society. The two close-to-home quotes in the centre which caught my attention and have not left me are these:

Another close-to-home visit was to the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition. Unfortunately, the regular display is under renovation, so we could only see the display of the last prize winners. Listening to the excellent guide and exploring the vivid, eye-catching displays, I found myself merging the horrific ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, the current bloodshed in the endless hostility between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel’s recent battle to retain her precious democracy.

Our guided tour through Vigelandsparken and our days in Oslo has left an impression on me about Norwegian culture. The Spanish and Israeli delegations have been shocked by the quiet everywhere – in the streets, the trains, and the university. There is no noise, no beeping cars, no screeching of brakes, no loud and rowdy conversations. Quiet and serenity – it will be hard to return to the cacophony of Israel.
On our last night together, we participated in a cultural evening that the workshop participants had all prepared in advance. Singing, dancing, playing games, tasting foods from other cuisines, and laughing all through, we celebrated our differences while strengthening our solidarity and unity. In Oslo, we learned about global education and teacher education in theory and practice. I am already looking forward to the next stage of the project.

Special heartfelt thanks to Greta Björk Gudmundsdottir, Kristin Vasbø and the team from the University of Oslo for the perfect organisation and hospitality.