School, What Is It Good For?

How might we transform schools to create engaged and informed citizens?

For the final project of this year we embarked on a learning journey to discover and answer a question; what is school for?

To begin this project we identified three parts of Canadian civics; 

1. What trends are shaping Canada?
2. What makes Canada diverse?
3. What is globalization

I took notes on our investigation into this and followed closely, as I knew this information was crucial to the final product, and how it developed.

 Notes

We started off with interviews, discussing with a variety of people their opinions on school and the system in general. I interviewed a group in a more conversational style of discussion, which lead to some very interesting points, and then I wrote a short paragraph about how I interpreted the conversation and what ideas I could pull from it.

Interview:

Paragraph:

What is school for? Reflection

The idea that I pulled and pitched from this discussion was one about university preparation in schools, and how that can be developed.

As I understood it, helping students find the right path after high school is extremely important, as the direction they go could determine their overall level of happiness in everyday life. A happy citizen is one that is more likely to be in engaged and informed within their communities.

I pitched a two step plan for this; 

• The first step would be to create or update the current system we have, in order to promote and normalize all post secondary pathways. I designed a mock website in order to simulate that, with the idea being that it would be advertised to students, and they would be able to use it to easily plan and discover aspects of their future. 
• The second step would be to make changes to the actual school system, provincially, by updating the careers course to be more useful in post secondary planning. Additionally a mandatory one on one career counselling session for all students in senior grades would be highly beneficial, so that students can start actively thinking and get guided help towards making a plan, rather then panicking in grade 12, trying to make a decision.

Website: Post secondary website (quick note: this PowerPoint is in a different format than the original, all buttons were clickable and the pages they linked to are just further in the document, the point still comes across just the same)

Pamphlet:

We presented these ideas at the exhibition, and it went quite well! I handed out pamphlets of the previous document, attempting to gain interest from parents, friends, and community members on my topic.

Overall, this project was really a great deep dive into how we can better our community, and how we can improve society via changing schools to be more effective.

Thanks for reading my blog post! Feel free to comment!