Through learning about the Sustainable Development Goals, her P7 classes are helping to smooth the transition from primary to secondary school.

To help inspire the young people at the beginning of this learning journey, the school reached out to Scotdec, who were excited to collaborate and assist with this important work, providing an introductory workshop for the pupils.

“Scotdec has been a huge source of support for developing the unique offer of Global Citizenship that we have in our learning community -from CPD to teaching resources and on this occasion the support of Sarah-Jane to deliver this workshop to all of our P7s.”

– Jehan, transition teacher, Edinburgh Council

Workshops

The workshop aimed to increase the pupils’ familiarity with the SDGs, understanding the motivation behind their creation as well as their interdependence. Participatory methodologies were utilised to engage the learners in conversations around what human beings need to both survive and thrive in the world we live in, followed by a discussion on the problems, risks and dangers that the world faces. This contextualised the SDGs as an important initiative to address the world’s problems. The young people were then asked to draw on their imagination to envisage a world where these problems were addressed as a ‘preferred future’, considering the ways in which the SDGs might link to this ‘preferred future’.

Reflecting on this activity Jehan said:

“It’s so important that young people are not just aware of the challenges the world is facing, but are able to imagine and visualise a world in which we have also solved these problems. This is ultimately what will inspire and motivate today’s young people to play an active part in making a better world our reality.”

SDG connections

The final part of the workshop involved outdoor learning (yes in January), where the pupils formed a circle showcasing the SDGS symbols and relevant images demonstrating the SDGs. They then engaged in a fun activity using a ball of string to evaluate how the SDGS could be linked to each other. Whilst a challenging exercise, the pupils engaged well with this task and were able to embrace the cold and wind whilst drawing these links.

Jehan described the workshop as:

“… an immersive and engaging way to ‘launch’ the course, and the pupils were subsequently excited to continue their learning with me in over the next term.”

Next Steps

The pupils will now engage in this unit of work until the end of April using the key global citizenship themes to explore the SDGs. They will begin looking at social justice and equity, demonstrating how these themes often link to several goals – further illustrating how they are all connected. The pupils will revisit the core GCE concepts in S1 but look at different contexts – for example, the pupils will explore racism under the theme of social justice in P7, and in S1 will focus on gender inequality under this theme:

“My hope is that this will support that building blocks approach and broaden knowledge of the concepts as we revisit them in different contexts”

Thankfully some P7 pupils made it known that they would like Scotdec to come back to their school and continue to engage in their learning. Scotdec hopes to return to each of the schools at the end of their unit of work to help pupils reflect and evaluate the impact of this important work. We’re looking forward to it and the prospect of further outdoor learning but perhaps with warmer weather.