The Educate Magis Mapa Mundi – helping our students become true Global Citizens

If these printed maps hanging on the walls of schools all over the world could tell their story, they would speak of all kinds of events, conversations, laughter, friendships between school folk, such as students, parents, principals, alumni, visitors and more. Some of these moments have been captured and shared in the map photo album and through the St. Francis Xavier global photo competition run on Instagram in December 2016. These photos touch our hearts and imagination and make us aware of the richness and diversity of the Jesuit network, our global family.

Map of Jesuit SchoolsThe map not only helps us to remember places we have been or dream about the ones we would love to visit, it also serves to learn about others, prompts us to seek out new connections, inspires us to create new experiences and thus become global citizens. How can we, as an education community, deepen this connection between Global Citizenship and the Map?

Why not use the Map as a resource for creative lesson plans? How can we use the map as a tool to help teach students of our Jesuit and Ignatian schools to become true global citizens? We would like to invite schools to build lesson plans and create an experience for our students that is different.

The Map highlights the vastness of our network and makes us think about the differences and similarities of the schools within it. These lesson plans could highlight the differences in schools and create new student experiences in areas such as history, geography, cultural studies, languages. They could also focus on what unites our schools, the shared context of our 450-year-old tradition of Jesuit education, Ignatian spirituality, ecology, social justice themes. These lesson plans would be great examples of cross-curricular collaboration and could be used to connect classes across the globe from East Timor to Alaska. We are looking forward to working with your school in developing and sharing such lesson plans. This way the map could make its way from the corridors, libraries and halls into our curriculum and teach our students to become citizens of the world. Please let us know if you or your colleagues would be interested in contributing such a lesson plan (maps@educatemagis.org).

Updating the Printable Map

We are working to continuously update the Educate Magis Map and produce a printable map (2017 version). As it is fast becoming the official directory of Jesuit schools we would like to have it as complete and up-to-date as possible. We invite you to check your school details on the online map and the printable map and send your school updates to maps@educatemagis.org 

And of course, if you already have the Map in your school, do send us a photo!