The Me to We book, written by Craig and Marc Kielburger, motivated me to join Free The Children. As a teacher, I believe that the Me to We philosophy—that we can all build a better life and our ideal world through reaching out to others—enables us to see the connections we make working with students as key steps toward change. It reminds us that teachers are in a powerful place to affect change in the world.
When we act locally to help young people find their courage, leadership ability and passion, we help promote the global goal of education, instill in them a global perspective and prepare them to do great things. The next natural step is to send them out into the community to experience “giving back” rather than “taking.” These experiences may be the most relevant, timely and powerful learning opportunities we create for young people.
Free The Children projects educate, engage and empower youth. If you choose to incorporate the Adopt a Village campaign into your classroom, students will gain in-depth knowledge of social issues while developing research, organizational and leadership skills to be empowered global citizens. This is a way to make social studies education relevant, timely and exciting for your students.
Help Us – Help You
We understand that active and enriched social studies programs require time, resources and on-going support. To help you, we will provide regular articles written especially for teachers as well as provide units and lesson plans to demonstrate how the Adopt a Village campaign can be incorporated into your classroom programs and into your school. We are also proud to offer a teacher resource book written for grades six to 12 that will be available as our gift to teachers with every purchase of Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World.
To honour our partnership with teachers, we welcome your questions as well as requests for article topics, additional support materials or professional development opportunities.
Welcome to the We Generation of teachers.
Catherine McCauley, M.Ed
Director of Teacher Development
educators@freethechildren.com
