Hong Kong’s first blog for SDG education news and announcements
Winky Wang joined the YCI Member programme at ITS in March 2021. Like most new members, she already had a clear passion – SDG4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. But how exactly to address this? The mentoring process allowed her to direct her research in a number of areas and saw her initial ideas around supporting local school students generally in some DSE subjects develop into a specific idea to support young Non-Cantonese Speakers with a beginners Cantonese course teaching everyday language so that they can begin to feel more at home in their city, especially if they are in local schools where much of the classroom and all of the playground is conducted in Cantonese. Winky wants to go into education management or curriculum development and could see the value of seeing what the whole process looks like from recognizing a learning need in the community, to developing a course, to making specific lesson plan . . .
One of the important things we do at ITS Education Asia is help students take IGCSE, IAL and other exams they cannot get at their mainstream school. We are non-selective and we measure our success by answering the question: did the student get a grade that allowed them access to the next stage of their life? SDG4 and SDG10 should complement each other. BUT, that doesn't mean we don't celebrate high achievers as well. This is not a zero sum game. Covid has delayed so many things so it was a pleasure this week to present (a year late) a very happy Marco Algozer with his Pearson award for Highest Mark in the World - yes WORLD - in his IGCSE Italian. Well done Marco! . . .
UNESCO estimates that schools were either fully or partially closed for more than 30 weeks between March 2020 and May 2021 in half the countries of the world. In late June, 19 countries still had full school closures, affecting nearly 157 million learners. And 768 million more learners were affected by partial school closures. World Youth Skills Day 2021 paid tribute to the resilience and creativity of youth through the crisis. Participants focused on how technical and vocational education and training systems have adapted to the pandemic and recession, think of how those systems can participate in the recovery, and imagine priorities they should adopt for the post-COVID-19-world. ITS hosted a conference workshop run by ISSIA. Great work. . . .
Pleased to recently host workshops for HelpingOurPlanetEarth - HOPE - which is a youth-led peer-to-peer mental health initiative. Music and art play a big part in their work and allow those without the resources to access clinical care to find some respite and support in busy HK. They are always looking for support. HOPE home page: https://www.helpingourplanetearth.org/ . . .
The Hong Kong Sustainable Development Solutions Network (ITS is a Youth Member Organization) will run a shoreline clean-up day tomorrow, 17th July at Lung Kwu Tan. Come and help out!! . . .
Jason Qiu spoke at Asia-Pacific Climate Week 2021 last week on the back of his ongoing Young Changemaker Incubator project called Carbon Neutral. As highlighted on this page before, Jason is building out a volunteer programme for tree planting at his school and hopes to provide a template for other schools around the world by doing so. . . .
Alexander Zhang, member of Drop in the Ocean (DITO) at CIS here in Hong Kong, spoke at the Asia-Pacific Climate Week conference last week. ITS was very happy to mentor him developing his presentation and host his session. Alex has developed an excellent approach to how we think about action on climate for the future – PACE. P stands for pinpoint. We first need to pinpoint areas to target our involvement. DITO has pinpointed multiple sectors at school by partnering with Metanoia, a sustainability consultancy group and conducting a sustainability audit through the metric of carbon footprint. A is for acting upon pinpointed sectors. E.g. CIS banned all plastic drink packaging from cafeterias, installed solar panels, and set up a community farm to promote urban farming. C stands for communication which is crucial as it allows for greater awareness of sustainability. As such, DITO is now directing a community dialogue video series featuring different stakeholders. E stands . . .
Students with an interest in SDGs 3, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13 should all take note of policy plans and initiatives addressing air pollution, emissions and any related cause or effect. The Hong Kong government has just released its Clean Air Plan 2035 which sets out current ideas in the city. This is very useful info for all students. You can also ask yourself – what are the real policy actions that will achieve these goals? . . .
