A personalised skills based curriculum is more sustainable for our future

I was teaching one of my students, Deema, in Saudi Arabia, when out of nowhere she screamed: “Miss, can you hear it!”.

For the first time in a year, thunder threatened rain on the dusty city of Jeddah. Those rains were of course cause for excitement, but also trepidation: the last time heavy rain fell in Jeddah there were deadly floods. Today, more than any other time in history, the weather is front page news – as climate change turns our planet upside down. Thankfully, our young people are incredibly environmentally aware and it is never far from how they view the world.

Deema, for example, dreams of being a fashion designer and in this week’s geography lessons she has been exploring the effects of the fashion industry on chemicals and micro plastics in the ocean.

This is one of the great advantages of learning in the kind of personalised environment we deliver at Gaia Learning . We can take topics that the children are passionate about, like Deema’s fashion aspirations, her social conscience and core geography content and fuse them together in a lesson that makes our students far more engaged and ultimately learn more efficiently.

Gaia students like Deema can choose traditional school subjects like Geography, History, Biology, Maths and more where there is an exam they can take if they choose to, when the time is right for them. Under the guidance and supervision of subject experts and qualified teachers,?how?they engage in the curriculum is made relevant to their strengths and interests and to the world around them so they are prepared to be knowledgeable, compassionate and active 21st century citizens.

The power of online learning

Deema, for example, summarised the research she did for her environmental fashion projects using to plot out a social media campaign to raise awareness among her friends. Between our sessions she’s been gathering a colourful array of plastic bags, cups and bottle tops to design outfits in her favourite vintage, retro and aesthetic styles with complementary accessories. Today when I suggested writing an editorial she preferred instead to showcase her ideas on a website that she effortlessly knocked up using to “sell” her fashion products, where she embedded a in English and Arabic for good measure to connect with her peer audience, which she confidently scripted, recorded and edited using !?

Are traditional subjects relevant anymore?

Deema has just turned 12. Her parents recognised over a year ago that her local school wasn’t meeting the needs of their neurodivergent, creative child. She giggles boastfully at all the new fashion terms she’s educating me with in exchange for climate change terminology I trade her, while the lines blur between educator and student, cultures and borders. Ironically the geography lesson is at once all important and totally irrelevant.

It’s clearer than ever that the future of education and the solutions we so urgently seek to climate change need to come from a new place where teacher is taught and learner guides, subjects merge and passion and purpose lead.

In a couple of years Deema will sit iGCSE exams in the subjects she and her parents choose at the British Council in Jeddah to hold certificates that will certainly not go any way to showing evidence of her creativity, compassion, energy or tech-whizziness.

A personalised skills based curriculum is more sustainable for our future

Infinitely more valuable for her fashion internship will be the skills she’s developing through being allowed to love learning in a space personalised just for her with the right balance of challenge and support and inspiration to push her to reach her potential.

A Climate Action School

This year we are also taking part in Take Action Global Climate Action Project. As part of the Climate Action Schools program, our community of teachers and students will be engaging in a year-long plan of action joining with schools from around the world and leaders in sustainable development, including WWF, the UN, NASA, Earth Day Organization, and LEGO Build the Change.?

As a registered Cambridge International School online, we strive for our learning community to think, communicate and take action globally as well as in their local communities.?

Our goal for our online learning ecosystem this year is to embed Green Life Skills and skills for Green Jobs into and across our curriculum. These skills include environmental knowledge and awareness, entrepreneurship, innovation, research, finance and digital skills. We aim to equip learners with tools for collaborative thinking, empathy, leadership, negotiation, open-mindedness, and how to cope with emotions and uncertainty with a growth mindset and resilience.

We want our learners to have the ability to analyse unequal systems of power, have interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking, political agency and activism, trans-cultural, trans-spatial and trans-temporal mindsets, to be able to work within complexity, solidarity as well as systems thinking.

If you'd like to join the next cohort of Gaia Certified Educators, please get in touch !

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