Visit in the Organisation EPIZ (Central for Global Education in Berlin)
Setting:
We visited the EPIZ, to get to know an organisation in Berlin, which is doing educational work in schools about the topic “global learning”. This includes environmental topics, also about climate change.
Aim:
To get to know about the experiences and methods of an organisation, which also does political, educational work. This knowledge helps us, to improve our own work in political education.
Description:
The director of the EPIZ (Mary Prinzler) did a small introduction about the main goals of the institution and asked us to present ourselves. Afterwards, she did a presentation about the work that is being developed which ended up with a group game, where we had to order sentences about globalization (based on a game, availabe in globaldimension.org website). To finalize, we went to the media library, and saw all the education material available, for teachers, pupils and other people with interest in them.
Introduction of the EPIZ:
The development Educational Information Center EPIZ is an organisation of global learning that is both regional, national and as well as international. EPIZ is financed with the suport of the Berlin senate (State Office for Development Cooperation). The organization has 2 person’s working permanently in the office and 5 person’s working in different pojects. It was founded 27 years ago.The main goal is to support civil society organizations in four main areas:
- Political
- Educational
- Social
- Economical
The main-topics, the EPIZ deals with:
- Fair Trade
- To be fair and responsable towards people around the world
- To be fair to the environment
- Eliminate racism in the classrooms
- Difficulty in being updated
- Visits to schools (Namibia Project)
Methods of the EPIZ:
- Media Library for teachers, to support them for the lessons
- Online Platform
- Material Development (ex. Compasito Manual and about relevant issues like oil)
- E-learning Platform (teachers are still not useed to work with online materials)
- Developmentof interactive methods in political education for school classes.
Practical Method, we tried out:
The director seperated us in small groups. Each group got 5 statements about the topic „Globalisation“. We should arrange these sentences in a hierarchy of our priorities. (Which sentence is the most important for us, which the less?) Afterwards we showed our results and discussed about this in the whole group.
Evaluation:
The aims of the institution are very admirable. But perhaps the teachers in the particular schools should participate more in the methods choices and give their point of view, in order to have a more efficient, engaged and integrated method, that can reach success in the educational process.
The practical method we tried out, was confusing, although the groupexperiences were good. To share different points of view and help each other in understanding the statements. But it was too complicated, the political sentences have been too difficult. It`s not working, to do this with very young pupils. Before the exercise it would have been important, to get some more informations about the topic. For us, the aim of this exercise wasn`t clear.
We have been impressed of the educational material in the library. There was a lot of variety. But the material was mostly in german and it would have been useful to have it also in other languages, at least in english.