Dear Participants of the 2011 Global Education Forum,

Greetings from the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives. We hope that the school year is going well and that you are all having success with work, teaching, and other projects. As promised, we would like to take a few moments to re-cap our successful first Global Education Forum last April and to update you on some exciting plans for the near future.

For those of us on the organizing end of things, the 2011 Forum was a wonderful experience. It was a pleasure to meet and learn from so many new people, and to hear lots of exciting and developing ideas in the field of Global Education.

The feedback from all of you was also very positive. Specifically, people reported that they really enjoyed learning about other schools and hearing what they were doing with Global Education, as well as getting a chance to exchange ideas and information in a small, intimate environment. We learned that going forward, we should strive to incorporate more student involvement and more participation by international schools to achieve greater diversity. Per your suggestions, we might even ask an accomplished international school to present their methods and outcomes.

At the same time, many of you praised the personal, intimate feeling of the Forum, so while we might increase the attendance a little bit to gain a wider range of perspectives, it would be important not to jeopardize this sense of community that was able to develop at the first Forum.

With all of this in mind, we plan on holding the 2nd Global Education Forum in early 2013 – approximately 15 months from now. We have tentatively targeted February 2013 as a possible meeting time, although that date is flexible until we get a sense of what might work best for the largest amount of people. We thought the 2011 Forum was a significant step toward advancing global education in our secondary schools, and we believe that the 2013 meeting can be even more productive.

We hope to have an invitation out with final dates sometime this winter so that people can mark their calendars, but in the meantime we are eager to reconnect and to help people continue to think and read about Global Education. To that end, we will be introducing a page on the CSBGL (Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives) website dedicated to Global Education and the Forum, and we will also be sending out a monthly email with interesting and relevant information and links to Global Education articles, websites, and ideas.

Hopefully, all of you are as excited about the next steps as we are, and are eager to keep learning about and incorporating Global Education into your practice. Please keep in touch, and we will contact you soon with more news on dates, the website, and other updates.

Thanks, and talk soon,

Jeremy Cutler Program Director, Global Education Forum

Dan Gordon Board of Directors, The American Friends of Winchester College

Michael Reichert Executive Director, CSBGL