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Introducing the Wednesday afternoons ‘Life Long Learning Webinar Series’
Keep your Wednesday’s free for our Life Long Learning opportunity.
During the pandemic we have almost all been drawn into the wonderful world of webinars, video conferencing and online learning. We realised that not everyone has this opportunity and started to think of ways to raise money to support those who don’t. So, here is our story of how we are using webinars to both offer Lifelong Learning and raise money to support others.
Our focus as an organisation is providing access to education for all children everywhere. To do this we need to share knowledge and learning, and raise funds too, and we’ve been developing ways to do both at the same time.
The partners and teachers we work with are doing amazing work across the globe, and we are trialling ways to share some of this learning so it’s available to an ever-widening audience.
Our partners are giving their time to share educational webinars on useful topics for a wide range of people, and offer a percentage of any subsequent course sales to support the project work of the Foundation so that we can achieve Education for All children everywhere.
The webinars are carefully selected to support teaching and learning and they may also support building business skills, creativity and wellbeing.
We need to raise enough funds to provide technology and network connectivity to ensure teachers and students across the world can access the same learning opportunities in a safe way that we may take for granted. We also know that in today’s climate many people can’t offer the support they could before. So, we are offering these useful, educational webinars on a ‘donate what you can’ basis so that all of our supporters gain something, and can help change the world at the same time.
As this story unfolds, we are finding that new people are discovering the Steve Sinnott Foundation through these webinars, and we are raising vital funds through the ‘Suggested Donation Tickets’.
Please have a look at the webinars coming up soon on the link below, they are almost always held on a Wednesday afternoon or evening, so keep your diary free and come and learn something invaluable, whilst helping others around the globe have access to the same opportunities.
You can see some of our past webinars here too:
Trauma Informed Coaching with Will Thomas - Wednesday 9th September 2020
In this webinar Will shared some very useful information about recognising trauma and understanding the grief cycle. We got to understand how this affects learning and the ability to relate to others. Knowing more about trauma helps us to understand the children in our classrooms and their ability to learn. Children affected by adverse childhood events, are at higher risk of trauma. This needs to be treated as there is a higher chance of adverse effects later in life too. To learn more, you can watch the video of the webinar here:
Zoom Basics with Mike Fleetham, Thinking Classrooms – Wednesday 16th September 2020
Mike Fleetham shared some Zoom basics knowhow in this webinar. Even those of us who have been using Zoom for some time learnt about extra features that we didn’t know about. But the session wasn’t just about features. It was a chance to discuss creative ways that Zoom can be used as a teaching tool, with many teachers on the call sharing ideas and ways to make lessons more fun and engaging too. Watch the video here:
The Power of Intuitive Art with Heather Lillieth – Wednesday 30th September 2020
Intuitive Art is a great way into, or back into, art and creative practice both for adults and children. For some reason many of us are are often put off art, thinking that we are not good enough but we can let go of all that in sessions like this. Intuitive art is about letting go of all the worry, and all the stresses of your day. It’s a time for play and having fun, and in so doing it recharges your batteries. For artists its great to loosen up. For others it’s a chance to play. For all of us it’s a chance to reconnect with ourselves.
Storytelling with Impact for Business with B&G – Wednesday 7th October 2020
In this webinar we explored the importance of stories for organisations. Stories have an emotional impact, they create connection and empathy, we remember them and it’s how we learn. They describe stories as “packaged wisdom”, the very definition of a story is that it is about change. They shared many stories about projects they have done to illustrate this idea. Personally, I will remember the story about the Children’s Republic of Shoreditch!
Communicating Through Quiet Mind Poetry – Wednesday 14th October 2020
This interactive webinar created the opportunity to work together to create two poems. Each participant brough a piece of nature to the webinar, where we explored the qualities of each piece and then worked together to combine ideas and create a poem. It was refreshing to break rules, work together and combine different things and ideas together.
Business Impact with Professional Audio – Wednesday 21st October 2020
Sound quality is often overlooked in digital productions. But with more of us now attending all business meetings online in video conferences bad sound quality can make the difference between a bad meeting experience and a great one. During the pandemic many organisations started to look at what they could create online to serve their communities. Podcasts, Webinars, Videos and Zoom workshops sprouted up everywhere, and the sound quality was often overlooked. We invited Pierre-Nicolas Schmitt of Sonata Academy to share his knowledge with us to help us all get better quality sound.
The Steve Sinnott Foundation • Sep 14, 2020
Education has been identified as a key aspect to achieve societal development. This has been highlighted with the 2015 sustainable development goals, with goal 4 being to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education has also shifted to being a means to transmit peace and global tolerance through increasing the understanding of other cultures. This has tied in with the rise of capacity development initiatives in development practice that seek to empower and enable individuals and communities to build upon their preexisting capacities. It is a key strategy to ensure educational development by international organisations, governments, and communities. The main principles of capacity development are participation, locally driven agenda, ongoing learning, long term investment and building upon local capacities. By integrating these principles into educational development, it allows for school communities to become involved in peace building activities. Through following a locally driven agenda schools can become centres for fostering peace and understanding and address local issues that may prevent children from attending or staying in school. This is what the UNESCO Associated Schools network aims to achieve by involving schools and educational institutes at a global level, creating networks of educators and students that share information, knowledge and spread UNESCOs value of peace. It aims to join schools through four pillars of learning: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together to create sustainable learning and teaching environments that involve communities in conservation activities, petitions and cultural events. Schools undertake social and educational projects that allow students to get involved with supporting developmental and humanitarian organisations, through fundraising and field trips. Recently The Steve Sinnott Foundation organised an international trip to Japan for the 70th Anniversary of UNESCO ASPnet for the Arts and Culture for peace exchange, bringing together students from The Gambia, Oman, Singapore, Korea and Coventry. By expanding education to include individuals and communities’ local agendas and addressing international issues, education can provide a platform for ongoing learning and development. It allows for students to develop their ability to think critically and connect with others meaning they can both learn and understand issues that might not be highlighted otherwise. By allowing schools, students, and communities to connect and direct their own development and focusing on developing existing capacities, the meaning and aim of education shifts from traditional roles to being focused upon understanding and peace.
Women’s and Girls’ Full Participation in Society: “Are Palestinian women reaping the benefits of education in similar ways to the rest of the world?” Palestinian women continue to be some of the most educated women in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. While women’s academic participation is indeed measurable, they are not reaping the benefits of education. Palestinian women, especially educated Palestinian women, are overlooked, and under-represented in Palestinian society. Current indicators reveal that access to education has not significantly improved women’s status in Palestinian society. It is therefore imperative to benefit from Palestinian women’s education and skills in society not only as a social right, but as a development necessity. The percentage of educated women in Palestine is remarkable and one of the highest around the world with a 99.6% in 2020 for completion in primary and upper secondary. While Palestinian women have always been visible in the national struggle, they have limited leadership and decision making-opportunities. Their participation in civil society and the formal government has been restricted. In decision making positions, women comprise only 8.3% of all ministers, 0% of ministerial representatives, and 6% of assistants to the ministerial representatives. Within all ministries women comprise 30% of staff. In the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, women are the majority, comprising 68.1%. Education unions leading by example: Education unions have viewed the education of future generations, with a focus on girls, as a form of protest, resistance to the country and Arab region’s ongoing-conflict, displacement, and upheaval. Accordingly, women and girls’ education has thrived in recent years. COVID 19 crisis a catalyst for transforming education unions: Education unions voiced that an appropriate response to COVID -19 in the education sector should consider the rights and best interests of students, teachers and education support personnel and involve education unions in developing the containment and recovery measures. This response accelerated the transformation process of the largest union in Palestine, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT). They want to have a truly representative union and integrate women educators in the union decision making structures. Despite the pandemic, GUPT continued to engage in social dialogue with the government, continued to fight for decent working conditions and welfare for teachers and education personnel and engage in a process of trade union transformation reflecting the realities of the 21st century. The union stepped up during the rapid shift to distance learning, they have developed online programmes, trained teachers on distance learning and supported students to decrease inequality among learners. The union also urged that the transformation should also challenge discrimination and increase women’s involvement in education, in trade unions and in society. This process was a driver to enhance women’s leadership within the union’s structures. From words to action: Mechanisms put in place to enhance women educators’ participation. With the support of international sister organisations, GUPT developed their own strategy to promote women’s participation and leadership within their union and in education. They developed a strategy, and we identified the following objectives: Increase the number of women in key union leadership and decision-making bodies at the regional and national level, through capacity development training on leadership for women. They have also introduced policies such as gender quotas and allocated budgets for their gender equity programmes. Activate the role of their Women’s Committee and prioritise the recruitment of young female teachers. The union is also working to identify and address the barriers to women’s participation in union leadership and decision making. In education the union is working with the Ministry of Education to review school books so that gender discrimination is not inherently written into the curriculum. GUPT is also organising sensitization training for educators so that discriminatory stereotypes are not perpetuated in the classroom. Finally, for the GUPT it is important to secure the right to education for all Palestinian students, especially girls. Teaching and learning must occur in quality, safe environments. Every effort must be made to eradicate the different types of violence that occur all too frequently in and around educational settings.
Early in my work as the president of my local teacher’s union I was invited to a community leader meeting about reforming the teaching profession. Amidst the discussion of harsher teacher evaluations, raising standards for teaching, creating easier entry into the profession, merit pay for “good” teachers, and more, I brought up the fact that working conditions and salaries hadn’t meaningfully changed since the 1960s. “We’re in favor of paying math and science teachers more so they can be compensated closer to what they’d get in the private sector,” a business community representative replied, offering an idea that was not new to me. Full disclosure: my dad was a career math teacher from that era of math and science majors who answered their government’s call to become math and science teachers who would boost the United States of America’s bench in the space race. I could easily picture how a larger salary could have changed our family’s budget. Teachers’ unions like mine (and my dad’s) addressed pay disparities based on gender that were common a generation earlier by fighting for a salary schedule focused on experience and education. So, I offered back, “If we want to differentiate pay related to the most important job in education, then we should seriously consider paying kindergarten and first grade teachers more than anyone because they teach students to read, which is the rocket science of education,” alluding to an influential issue of AFT’s American Educator magazine from 1999. “Well, I’m sure those teachers are fine but I have volunteered in first grade classrooms and their work doesn’t compare to math and science teachers.” Oh. Interesting. We clearly weren’t going to see eye to eye in our differentiated pay conversation. More so, there are decades long gender stereotypes lurking behind that conversation. In addition to the history of gender based pay inequities, elementary school teachers are assumed to be female while more secondary teachers are male. There has long been a disconnect between the importance communities, elected officials, and countries have placed on education. From local funding efforts to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, support for education is nearly universal in most communities. That support for education doesn’t always translate to support for educators and, with a majority of educators worldwide being female, that sets a dangerous precedent. Our teachers deserve professional working conditions because teaching and learning begins with their expertise. Additionally, a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions and so administrators, public officials, or policymakers mistreating, undermining, or disrespecting teachers sends a message to students that teachers do not deserve respect, fair treatment, or professionalization. In addition to a stubborn lack of recognition of teachers as professionals, a vicious cycle exists around salary. Teachers have historically low wages because it is feminized and because it is feminized teacher’s wages are suppressed. The evidence that belonging to a union, with the ability to negotiate collectively, improves teacher compensation is key in disrupting this vicious cycle. Teaching has been a feminized profession for over a century and, despite efforts to diversify the profession, remains a feminized profession. In fact, the OECD reports that the gender gap increased from 2005 to 2019. In order for our students to have the most representative learning conditions, we need the most representative teachers so we must continue to diversify teaching to represent everyone in our communities, including by gender. Efforts like Black Men Teach, active in my home state of Minnesota, can make a meaningful difference. I would posit treating the current majority female teaching population as professionals—with professional wages, recognizing their expertise in teaching and learning rather than infantilizing them, respecting their commitment to education rather than exploiting it—would both model for students the way to treat women (and thereby model for female students how they can expect to be treated in any profession) and create the conditions for everyone to see teaching as a profession worth pursuing.
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