We are delighted to share a blog written by team EFC (English For Community) from The Columbus School, who are delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
It was an amazing experience were we have not just taught but we have learned.
Project Overview
We have identified a need for education, one that prioritizes the future changes in the job market rather than the current or old. We decided to specialize in the language development of young minds. Our country’s poverty and the illiteracy rate is dangerously high, and we think that starting a new movement of educating the less fortunate with new, never aging skill sets, like English, a dominant language all throughout the first world, will drastically improve their lives and those of their future children.
In our personal lives, we have been fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity of being bilingual at an early age, and be able to afford it. We have been able to recognize the immense impact this has had on our everyday lives and its future promises. We have the ability to study abroad, to a wider library of resources, a multicultural understanding of the world, different political climates for observation, a wider range of literature, history, and the arts, and a general influx of more opportunities for success.
We are planning to use our advanced English levels, and our knowledge of how a second language is taught and learned, to help a community of young boys from poor economic situations, learn English, and hopefully be welcomed to all the opportunities it has given us. Through this, we hope that they will be able to get stable, profitable jobs, and get their families out of the vicious cycle of illiteracy and poverty.
Social Media Links
Our Journey
We have learned very important and valuable skills during our time participating in the Global Social Leaders Competition. One of the skills we have all learned during this project is being able to teach others in various different ways, this is very important because in the future this might be a very helpful skill. We have learned new ways to communicate our knowledge with others through methods that are easier to understand for children, who are just starting to learn.
The biggest challenge that we face right now is having to go constantly to the foundation where we are implementing the project. Most of our team has extracurricular activities inside and outside of the school, which makes it hard to coordinate a day for the whole team to be together and go to the foundation. Also, the school that we are helping is far from the city where we live, and the foundation is even farther away, so it is very complicated to manage the time and be there every week.
The Next Chapter
Next week we are going to do a quiz to the children of the foundation to test what they already know, see what they need help on and what we should focus on. The quizzes will also test their learning methods so that we know what activities to use to teach them. Eventually, we will analyze the children’s quiz answers and come up with solutions for them to become very good at English. We will get an idea of their level of English and will make it much better
We would totally recommend for other people of our age to get in similar projects to make this work/project become a worldwide project faster. This is also important for people to get in all of this because it’s caring about our future society and the future of our and their country. Also, it means to the world sharing the privilege of learning another language with others. My call for action towards these people is to find the communities that really need this, and most importantly the ones who need a distraction to their daily life which might be negative in some kind of way.
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
