UNESCO Global Youth Civic Case Competition
In Summer 2017 I learned about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that were adopted at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly (2015), in great detail through UC Berkeley’s online summer course - “Education in a Global World”. The course focused particularly on the 4th and 5th SDG of “Quality Education” and “Gender Equality” respectively. Through the coursework, I learned about some of the cultural, socio-economic and geographic challenges, that hinder the education and consequential empowerment of girls in developing countries, while exploring potential solutions. Drawing inspiration from movies like “He Named Me Malala” and “Girl Rising” and also from Camfed’s innovative education programs in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi, my teammates and I designed policy solutions and empowering curriculums aimed at promoting gender equality and quality education in developing nations. The solutions ranged from mentorship programs for girls, that would help them develop as independent individuals in the global economy, to policy suggestions like involving more female police officers to ensure the safety of these students against socio-cultural factors that oppose their independence and development. A combination of such solutions composed our project proposal for UNESCO’s Global Youth Civic Case Competition. Our latest draft of the project proposal:
While working on this proposal in class, I also got to explore and understand the phenomena of globalization and justice globalism in great detail. This helped me comprehend some of the most compelling implications of globalization for education and think about what role might education play in shaping alternative worldviews and/or discouraging materialism/ consumerism. Finally, I tried to utilize this knowledge to think about ways to incorporate these ideas in the concrete delivery of educational content that can be empowering for students across the world. Here’s a summary of my ideas, which discusses 3 such methods - “Learning by Teaching”, “4 Competencies of Empowerment” and “Virtually Connected Classrooms”: