What Can You Do?
Students and teachers at MCIC’s Generating Momentum for Our World: Water for All Conference in Brandon learn about global poverty and how they can become active global citizens. Photo: Dustin Leader.
Our individual actions have an impact on our classrooms, our communities and our world. As teachers, you can help model Global Citizenship by doing the following things:
Promote Ethical Consumerism
- Make your school Fair Trade. Use Fair Trade coffee and tea in your staff room, talk to your physical education department about ordering Fair Trade sports equipment and your home economics department about using fair trade sugar, cocoa and other baking supplies.
- Get your students asking questions about how products are made and where they come from. Get them to research the clothes they’re wearing!
Be Sustainable
- Make your classroom bottled water-free! Promote sustainability and the right to water by having students use reusable water bottles and tap water. You can even look into getting your school to ban bottled water altogether.
- Organize a fashion show with clothes made from recycled materials.
Open Doors to Learning About the World
- Bring your students to a Generating Momentum for Our World youth conference to help them develop leadership skills and learn about world issues.
- Invite MCIC or one of our members to do a presentation in your classroom.
- Play “Are You More Concerned About a Better World than a 7th Grader” with your middle years students to get them thinking and talking about global topics like the Millennium Development Goals, Water or Fair Trade
- Invite the Move Your World theatre project to your school
- Subscribe to the Global Citizens, Global Students newsletter to stay up-to-date on social justice opportunities for educators and students
- When you fundraise, sell fair trade products to support producers in the developing world, while informing parents and students about the benefits of fair trade
- Get students to engage in dialogue with leaders and political officials about long-term changes that would reduce the need for charity. Invite politicians to your classroom or get students to write letters.
Encourage Youth to Speak Out!
- Help your students make a video about a global issue to submit to the Kaleidoscope Video Contest
- Get student to contact the media when they take action on global issues. It might inspire other to do the same.
Recognize Global Citizens!
- High school teachers can nominate one of their Grade 12 students for the Global Citizen Award
- Send us information on what your students are doing so we can post it on our website.
