Educate Magis: Global Networking for Global Citizenship

The Mission

The Mission of Educate Magis is to create and nurture a vibrant online community that will connect educators from our Jesuit and Ignatian schools around the world. This global community is intended to transcend boundaries and borders, opening a new way of proceeding for our schools in service of the Jesuit mission: companions of reconciliation and justice – with God, within humanity and with creation (GC 36 Decree #1). Educate Magis is dedicated to answering the call of the Society of Jesus to become a “universal body with a universal mission”, enabling educators in our global school network to collaborate in solidarity as a global community.

What have we learned?

“If we build it, they will come”, said Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams about his idea of building a baseball diamond in his corn fields. Spoiler alert! … eventually the Chicago White Sox did come! At the beginning we had the same idea, if we build this platform, people will come and share, collaborate, etc. But it did not materialize as we expected!

One of the main learnings from our experience is that which we build ends up building us, and not the other way around “If we build it, they will come”. We can illustrate this (with this one of many) examples.

1. We listen for a need. Global Citizenship Staff Formation is a good example of a need we heard, and this has since become the genesis of what has become one of our main lines of work.
2. We ask for collaboration. We look for volunteers and collaborators to help us respond to the needs we identify. In this case, we had six people volunteer to help, one from each region of the world.
3. We facilitate the build. We did not build the course ourselves, but rather we encouraged, coordinated, managed and facilitated the building process.
4. In the process of executing the previous steps, real friendships and deep connections are forged and then global companions in community are formed.

There are many other examples of this at play, e.g. all of the resources for Global Citizenship Staff Formation (Courses, Lesson Plans, etc.) have been created by members of the community for the community. Other good examples include: New international school exchanges (e.g. between Spain and India); Conversations helping to define Global Citizenship; Jesuit school journey to Global Citizenship with shared global community resources; and Global Stories. We facilitate and curate, but they are “built” (and brought to life) by the members of the global community.

That which we build, ends up building us