As it has now come to be an unspoken tradition, the students and staff at the American School of Doha (ASD) fan out across the world on each school holiday to boost the ASD’s aim of empowering its members to become positive, active, global citizens.
The recent Eid al Adha holidays weren’t dealt with any differently as students and teachers set out to learn about global issues affecting our planet and to try and seek solutions to help better our world. The ASD is currently revamping its service learning programme into one of learning service and this is heavily reflecting in its overseas travel programme.
Chi-Yan Shang, IB CAS Co-ordinator, ASD, explained to Community why he feels learning service is a crucial paradigm shift, “Learning service is a fundamental shift from service learning in that the focus is on helping students gain the skills to eventually do meaningful service. All too often in the past, we put students in situations on work sites where they are trained at the last minute and asked to do tasks they aren’t really qualified to perform in the hope of creating a meaningful product without any reflection as to the process they are going through. Naturally, the product is seldom meaningful.”
Shang further elaborated, “A learning service approach forces students to reflect about the issues they are exploring, whether it be environmental conservation or poverty eradication, and to step back and look at the big picture and learn about the myriad connections that envelope that issue. The focus is on studying the issues and the organisations that are working to address it, whether it be NGOs or CSR programmes and identifying and gaining the skill sets needed to function in each.”
In learning service, students are encouraged to step back and learn about a global issue, investigate NGOs and CSR programmes that address these issues, and evaluate their efforts through a critical lens while still being an active participant. The emphasis, therefore, is on the learning as opposed to the “product” of a traditional service trip where students are trained on site and focus on a tangible outcome, whether it be constructing a building or data collection.
It is the philosophy of ASD’s learning service programme that for global citizenship to be truly taught, it has to be an actively reflective experience to maximise learning. Shang said, “Learning service has to go curricular. School service trips are learning opportunities and we need to frame and deliver them as such. School service trips aren’t development organisations, but we can use them as teaching tools to show students how what they learn in their classrooms is being applied by professionals in the real world to solve real-world problems, whether it be environmental conservation, gender equality, access to education or poverty eradication. In that light, all of our learning service trips are aligned to one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”
Fourteen students led by ASD teachers Lisa Bastedo, Merouane Aouinati and Lychelle Bruski worked with biologists from the Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme (MWSRP), a UK NGO that works to monitor the whale shark population in the South Ari Marine Protected Area. Students spent time in the water helping document whale shark markings to help identify individual sharks to help in their census. Students also were given an in-depth look at how a grassroots NGO like the MWSRP works and how it began.
Ten students led by Chi-Yan Shang and Diane Caristo travelled to Laos to learn about elephant conservation at the Elephant Conservation Center (ECC) in Xayaboury. The ECC works to help rehabilitate elephants that were previously used in the logging or tourist industries and works to educate people about the issues facing the management of elephants that are no longer “employed” by these industries.
A sobering fact that ASD students learned was that conservation centres were needed to help humanely train elephants to co-exist with humans as, in Laos, there simply is not enough forest left to re-wild all of the elephants that have been used in industry.
Students were given access to the ECC and learned about their breeding programme to help raise elephant numbers and also learned about best practice in elephant management. One of the cornerstones of the ECC in helping to increase elephant numbers is supporting mahouts, traditional elephant keepers, by giving them a salary and housing when their elephants become pregnant, thus allowing them to carry their elephant calves to term and increasing the population.
Seventeen students led by ASD teachers Linda Hoiseth, Robb Hoiseth and Maria Manacheril worked with the NGO Himalayan Voluntourism, to learn about education in the developing world. In Nepal, these students learned about NGO projects that empower and educate women and girls and spent time working with these projects in local schools. The Nepal trip was sponsored by ASD’s chapter of Girl Up! which is an initiative by the United Nations to help support and further the status of female children in the developing world.
The next round of learning service trips is bound for Tanzania to work at ASD’s adopted school in Tanzania, then Spain to learn about sustainable living and eco-housing, and then again to Laos to learn about sustainable tourism to empower communities.