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Your context
Sustainability education often links to school’s guiding documents. Where in your school/context might it connect well?
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6 Replies
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Here are my school’s guiding mission and core values:
Mission
We inspire innovation and compassionate action
Core Values
Respect, acceptance, integrity, responsibility … with a commitment to act.
Perhaps a bit cynical, but both our mission and core values are broad enough to be able to apply to many different concepts. There is a definite alignment to sustainability education but not a comprehensive or explicit alignment has been made as of yet.
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Kevin, I feel similarly regarding my school’s statements. The school values can certainly be applied to both ESD and SL but nothing in here explicitly links to building a sustainable future. Also the more I look at them for these assignments the more egocentric the vision statement starts to feel with the use of the pronoun “their” but maybe I’m overthinking at this point.
Vision: Inspiring students to create their unique future.
Mission: Together, we cultivate a culture of optimism, excellence, and empowerment for everyone by developing the mind-set and skills to thrive in a complex world.
Values:
- Integrity
- Courage
- Ingenuity
- Compassion
- Co
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School Vision: From the Classroom to the World.
<strong style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>
<strong style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>School Mission: To provide a comprehensive educational program for high-potential students in grades 1-12, preparing students for global citizenship while valuing Chinese history and tradition.
Grassroots Initiative: Global Awareness and Sustainability Project (GASP).
GASP’s Mission: GASP helps our students maintain their Chinese identity whilst developing a global citizen’s perspective through diverse learning opportunities. GASP is purposeful, student-led, and passion driven. It aims to build empathy and confidence, while empowering each student to take action and impact their local communities.
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In general sense, our school has some positive values to be incorporated including some sustainability aspects. However, the statements might not be straightforwardly aligned with SL or ESD.
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“With Chinese origins and global originality, we cultivate life-long learners to meet the global challenges of the twenty-first century.”
The inherent understanding behind this mission statement is that with staying rooted in the community or one’s culture accompanied by an international mindset, our students will receive an enduring education that would help them apply the knowledge gained to local and global contexts, thus helping to solve the problems of the future.
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I literally just joined a new school two days ago. It is a new international primary school catering to Thai students of a lower-economic bracket typical of the larger international schools. I accepted this job mostly because of the man who is the acting Director. He comes from a prestigious Bangkok international school where he served as Head for over 14 years. He left that position for the same reasons I keep changing schools. His values align with mine. I could sense in our conversations that he is passionate about making learning relevant while focusing on the skill sets and applying content rather than just regurgitating it. With it being a new school, we can set the tone from Day 1, while making sure we educate the parents with realistic expectations (i.e. plant the seed – you’ll see magic in due time—not this week on the paper-pencil test).
The school’s mission/vision statement is too embarrassing to write here. However, there is a Community Learning curriculum piece (very raw – but I get to work on it!). the school aims to put “Thainess” at its center – as it should be – we’re in Thailand after all. The categories that exist in it now are:
Global Awareness
Civic Literacy
Social and Cross Cultural Skills
Communication and Collaboration
Sanitation
City and Nature Explore
Self Service
Here’s where I suppose it gets tricky for me though – as my technical title is “Head of Science”. I have Science blocks on my schedule. But I’m putting my trust in my new Head, when he says I have the freedom to implement my ideas. As usual, time will only tell!