Lower School pupils in Form 1 enjoyed an enlightening day off timetable to celebrate IB MYP Community Day. Their focus was ‘Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Embodying the IB Learner Profile’.
IB MYP Community Day is a part of the IB MYP Community Project, which gives students an opportunity to develop awareness of needs in their various communities and address those needs through service learning. The IB Learner Profile is a series of 10 attributes that are central to all IB programmes and which aim to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.
“A community is the stories that it tells,” says Darryl Toerien, Head of Library, whose team co-organised this year’s IBMYP Community Day. “Our stories are deeply personal and precious, but they also weave together to form a tapestry that is breath-taking in its complexity and marvellous to behold. Our stories are shaped by events, but our stories also shape events. For better or worse, we are living through an extraordinary event – a global pandemic that is shaping the story of every person on our shared planet. This event, in turn, demands a response, both personal and communal. Over the course of the day, pupils shared their own stories about lockdown which, unsurprisingly, intertwined with features of each other’s stories. From the perspective of this emerging communal story, pupils then inquired into the lockdown stories of children from communities very different to their own by using an interdisciplinary approach.”
Darryl concludes: “Meaningful learning is never confined to the classroom, and this is especially so with the MYP Community Day/ Project, so now pupils will go on to explore ways in which to embody the IB learner profile in their various communities through active service and reflect on those activities throughout the year as part of their Tutorial programme.”
Meanwhile Form 2 spent the day developing their MYP skills through a focus on Environmental and Sustainability issues.
Head of Lower School, Mr Adrian Morris, said, “After watching Sir David Attenborough’s most thought-provoking witness statement about ‘A Life on Our Planet’ (I could not recommend this more highly if you have not yet seen it), the pupils spent the rest of the morning in a ‘Philosothon’. This allowed them to debate and argue within a variety of groups about how the planet can survive through three different angles – one involving religious perspectives, another on the responsibilities of humans and another on whether veganism can save the planet, all set within a competition. Interesting thoughts were heard and, above all, awareness of the need to change was heightened.”
Adrian continues, “Having reflected over lunch on what they had seen and discussed, students came back together in small groups to create their own environmental campaigns, highlighting specific issues and focussing on what we can do to save the environment from destruction. I was extremely impressed by the engagement the pupils showed and the creative ways that they approached the various issues”
