500 Balloons were rising towards the sky in front of the castle church in Wittenberg. On Jun 23, 2017, hundreds of students, teachers and representatives of education were celebrating Reformation at the “Global schools500reformation Day” in the centre of the very town where it all began (you can find a video of the EKD in German language about this event below).
On this day, the Jubilee project “schools500reformation” was transferred into the network GPENreformation – the “Global Pedagogical Network – Joining in Reformation”. Protestant schools and education institutions remain globally linked and continue the common perspectives that were developed so dynamically within the last years! Together, they gain impulses for high quality education. Together, they develop measures to deal with global challenges and to facilitate learning for Global Citizenship for their students. Young global citizens learn to think critically about cultural differences, commonalities and global challenges, linked to each other beyond borders of countries and continents. The main topic after the Reformation Jubilee will from October, 31 on focus on the motto “Let us bring peace”; therefore, this year’s conference in Kigali, Rwanda, will be held about the topic of peace education and learning for sustainability.
New structures
Like the former project “schools500reformation”, GPENreformation lives by YOUR activities; the activities of participating schools, institutions, churches, friends and other interested parties. The former Steering Committee will be replaced by the GPEN Council which will gather for the first time in November and assemble members of all continents.
The network activities will from now on be created and accompanied by the GPEN Ambassadors who are representing their respective countries and at the same time contact persons for the schools in the network. The ambassadors themselves are linked globally to each other and give ideas to the GPEN Council.
Besides this, the fruitful cooperation between science and educational practice that was already present in schools500reformation will be continued: a Scientific Consortium will accompany the development of the network and support its goals and priorities scientifically.
The administrative office in Germany and other places is as before responsible for organisational matters, contact and communication. As for now, the staff members of the GPENreformation administrative office are the same as the former schools500reformation team.
Practical information – What’s New?
First of all the homepage has moved and presents itself in a new look and with new possibilities: www.gpenreformation.net. There you can already discover the participating schools and institutions on the world map and find some basic information about the network. Nach und nach we will migrate all other content like all news articles about the schools, the didactic material and all other information – at this point, we ask you for some patience, thank you!
The more, the contact address to the team has changed: from now on, you can reach the geschäftsstelle via team@gpenreformation.net. As before, we will support you in any possible way. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for any contribution to the homepage, with questions, ideas, feedback and critics – we are looking forward to hear from you!
Practical information – Your participation
With regard to the participation of your school or institution, nothing changed. All participants of former schools500reformation are now automatically members of the GPENreformation network. If you do not agree with this, please just let us know it via e-mail.
Equally, we took along the subscribers of our newsletter. If you had signed up for the newsletter of schools500reformation, you will now automatically receive the newsletter for GPENreformation. If you disagree or like to unsubscribe, a short note to our team will be sufficient.
We thank you for your engagement that made schools500reformation grow so fast and are looking forward to your contribution to the Global Pedagogical Network – Joining in Reformation!
