At their best, partnerships can:
Generate enthusiasm and motivation for learning
Cultivate an openness to new thinking and ideas
Inspire a desire for positive change, locally and globally.
They can help pupils develop:
Self-awareness
Respect for others
Skills of enquiry and critical thinking, and the ability to apply these to local and global issues
The ability to communicate in different ways and settings
An appreciation of diversity
A sense of injustice and a commitment to tackling it
An understanding of how local and global are interconnected, and of the impacts that action have at both levels.
Unfortunately, school partnerships do not automatically lead to the educational benefits listed above. In some circumstances, they can even undermine these goals. There is a risk that they may:
Close minds instead of opening them
Promote pity and sympathy for those in poorer countries, rather than empathy with them
Focus on differences, with too little recognition of a common humanity
Reinforce stereotypes
Cultivate paternalistic attitudes and feelings of superiority
Fail to examine global issues of inequality and injustice.
School linking can be an exciting and valuable educational experience for pupils and teachers, and can add a lot to the development of a [global education] approach in schools. But it is also a demanding, complicated and time-consuming process which doesn’t automatically lead to good [global] education. A bad school link, undertaken without enough thought or preparation, can be a very negative experience for both link partners.
© Oxfam: Teacher Support, School partnerships
Additional activity
How much interest and experience there is among colleagues?
Find out:
Does anyone have contact with, interest in, or experience of any potential partner country?
Who is interested in being involved in a new partnership?
What sorts of partnerships is there interest in?
How might they be involved?
What ideas do they have about how a partnership might work?
What benefits a partnership might bring?
Any doubts about setting up a new partnership?