Teaching Global Issues, particularly complex topics, places high demands on today's educators. Teachers are required to have a vast knowledge from different areas; from the causes and effects of global migration and climate change, over the terrorism, war zones and unstable regions, power and inequality, North-South divide to the for example global reach of health issues that the most of the world currently experiences at first-hand. The fast changing situation in the global society requires that teachers continuously observe latest updates while providing as much as unbiased picture of the world in the context, in the most interesting, interactive and comprehensible way to their students and at the same time enhancing youths' global competences. Global issues could be very sensitive and potentially controversial, evoking strong and different emotions and opinions, often even dividing communities and societies in halves. They are bound with one's core values and beliefs, very contextual, usually of long-term nature and mostly with no instant and straightforward answer or solutions. Educators' mission is therefore undoubtedly challenging, yet also very rewarding and powerful as they are having a substantial share in how a teenage person looks at the world around, how is able to navigate oneself in the immense quantity of resources, to detect fake news and biases, to work with the information and to use it for effective decisions within personal and civil life. Educators are guiding young people on how to resolve issues peacefully in democratic way, how to hold fruitful debates, to look at the issues from multiple angles, acknowledging diverse convictions and beliefs within society and importance of this diversity for the cultivation of the debate, for moving the knowledge forward, for doing the better policy, for being the effective global citizen with sense of responsibility, and finally for creating more “healthy” society by making it more coherent and inclusive. Recognizing the teachers' key importance in the setting and sustaining the democratic course of the society and seeing the challenges of global and local teachers' community, arising from a shortage of reliable and comprehensive resources or deficient guidance on the teaching about contemporary global society issues, Online Encyclopedia of Migration (OEM) and the partners, Subjective Values Foundation (SVF) and Milan Simecka Foundation (MSF), are presenting the project that will facilitate the teaching of Global Issues - with an unbiased content, created by the scientists from European universities or NGOs in a digestible and innovative way. By providing the initial methodology and teaching materials (containing in total approx. 60 articles/entries accompanied by interactive elements, infographics, podcasts etc.) for teaching the Global Issues and already established online atlas-like tool, the project will facilitate the teaching of lectures of Social Geography, Citizenship education, Modern History or Social Studies for 15 high school teachers altogether from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia - to support their mission of enhancing students global competencies and tackling disinformation and radicalization among young people within Central Europe. It will support their lessons by structured, unbiased, popularized, reviewed academic content and actively involve teachers into the methodology development while providing the platform for the international exchange (3 offsite workshops with focus groups, 3 virtual feedback meetings, recurring feedback surveys, online discussion platform) during period from Sep 2020 till Aug 2023. There will be 6 comprehensive education modules in a form of online teaching packages on Global Issues shaped and developed within the project and disseminated to the broader educators' community (via schools, non-profit organizations, EU institutions platforms, educators' associations etc.) and eventually even to the broader public via news media or PR activities within participant countries and beyond borders of the Central Europe. The core asset of the project is an innovative mode of collaboration when academic authors with a support of the editor create the popularized content, further diffused to the general public. This cooperation model ensures high-quality outputs and accomplishes the "third mission" of the tertiary educational institutions - to disseminate the scientific knowledge outside of academia to the benefit of the social, cultural, economic and environmental development.
Following the findings of the involved teachers' group, which further specified our requirements, our objective was to create an online tool which would give teachers easy access to a comprehensive portrait of the aforementioned global issues, introduced by respected scholars (academics or experts from relevant NGOs) and to research existing third-party resources, which would enable teachers to select creative resources which can be used directly in their classroom. Thus, we wanted to strengthen those teachers, who are willing to teach highly sensitive current issues, equipping them with the knowledge of internationally recognized experts and with extensive databases of mostly audiovisual contents, which can make their own introductions attractive, interactive and multi-genres. Whilst designing the online tool, our own objective was to design the tool in such a way that it can also serve interested people from the general public, as well as other more professional target groups like journalists, NGO workers or teachers in the broader sense (university teachers, teachers at last years of the primary schools or non-formal educators).
Our primary aim was to support high school teachers who wish to teach current global issues such as migration, climate change, poverty and inequality, human rights, war zones and regions in humanitarian need or globalisation. Teaching these issues, especially when not only looking at them theoretically but also as realistic reflections of their nature in today's world, especially on a global scale, demands very complex and time-consuming preparation, as these topics are connected with extensive misinterpretations, high emotions and polarised debates, as well as with a lack of trustworthy, unbiased and in-depth resources. Moreover, including these topics in lessons might require very demanding flexibility and creativity from teachers, as school curricula are often quite fixed and rigid. The involved teachers' focus group helped us target this need more specifically: appreciating various high-quality lesson plans or teaching modules developed currently by nonprofit organisations, teachers still need resources which would enable them to gain full expertise in these topics whilst at the same time guiding them through existing resources to compose their lessons creatively.