NEW MEMBERS for ths YOUTH COUNCIL
The Youth Leadership Team facilitates meaningful learning experiences and collaborative projects between school sites, districts and countries.
The growing global community of young practitioners allows bringing together students from diverse backgrounds and different classrooms to tackle vital global challenges.
School site collaboration offers an opportunity to unfold and understand challenges from different perspectives and the realities of being students. Our team-based, peer-to-peer, project-based learning pedagogy, which extends beyond the formal learning space, enables action on the most pressing SDGs. Different geographical and cultural settings allow rich perspective-taking experiences and adds to the feeling of being connected across the planet.
When working to understand and address complex social challenges, we are all learning regardless of the position from which we operate. Therefore, co-creation is key to our program model and we welcome stakeholders relevant to each project to become involved. The teacher's role is to support the learners' growth when returning to their contexts. Teachers also play a crucial role in supporting the youth members’ projects to become embodied and realized.
EXAMPLES
PLASTIC PROJECT
In 2021, Maglegårdsskolen in Denmark and British School Jakarta collaborated on a specific project using the Compassionate Systems Framework. From both schools, a group of students who already understood the framework met virtually and agreed to explore the issue of plastic pollution – since it turns out that a significant portion of the Danish plastic waste ends up in Indonesia, where it’s poorly managed and is at risk of ending up in the ocean. This project allowed the students to take authentic leadership as they were asked to decide on the topic, host some of the virtual sessions and creatively present their learnings. The project
concluded with an Instagram page and webpage describing what they’ve discovered and learned.
LEADERSHIP PROJECT
With the Plastic Project serving as a prototype of this practice-oriented project, we’ve begun integrating these processes in our training with partner sites to anchor the learning in specific topics. After an online workshop with staff and students from both British School of Jakarta and United World College Changshu China (UWCCSC) in March 2022, we began designing a collaborative program between these two schools focusing on Compassionate Systems and youth leadership. In their online sessions, these students have been learning and reflecting together which has supported different cultural perspectives on leadership to surface and therefore also leads to deeper reflection and understanding. The aim of this program is for the students to bring these leadership capacities into their school sites through the training of other teachers and students.
