The value of play and freedom
Most school leaders will fondly remember the experience of running out of the house first thing in the morning to hang out with friends for the entire day. You will recall a sense of ‘play’ that relied purely on imagination, interspersed with trips back to the house for lunch and treats to keep you fueled for activities, before saying goodbye to each other for the day when the streetlights came on.
Not only were experiences like these huge sources of fun, but they also nurtured creativity, imagination, and resilience. ‘Playing’ taught us about developing relationships and overcoming challenges, enabling us to understand and explore our relational sense of self.
Rainy days felt like life sentences, confined in a house that suddenly felt like a jail cell. As children, we longed to be outdoors, primarily because we wanted to share new experiences with our friends in the absence of our parents. We craved that sense of beingness.
Source: Hochalpines Institut Ftan AG
The shift to a technology-driven childhood
At some point in the intervening years, culture began to frown upon this freedom and started to see it as dangerous, something we needed protection from. At the same time, the growth of technology – phones, tablets, game consoles, and social media – made keeping children ‘safely’ indoors much easier.
This new, technological lifestyle has become so normalised that many forget to question it, and most children don’t remember a time before it. We have connected children to the world whilst simultaneously removing them from it; we have expanded their possibilities whilst augmenting their feelings of isolation.
The role of experiential learning in a changing world
Digital technologies and artificial intelligence, in addition to globalisation and conflict, are rapidly disrupting economic and social structures. The outcomes, though, are not determined by these factors in their own right: it is the nature of our collective responses that determines the outcomes.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is clear in that we need a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to growing a ‘global’ competence in our young people—one where schools, teachers, parents, and the environment all have an important role to play. One of the most interesting findings from their work is that certain activities, such as the nature of how we learn at school, contact with people from other cultures, learning other languages, and a connection to the environment, are positively associated with a variety of skills. These include the ability to examine local and global issues, empathic understanding, intercultural communication, and, ultimately, the ability to take action for the betterment of the societies we live in.
Schools as catalysts for global competence
Schools and school leaders have a duty to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. We need to do more than enable our students through knowledge acquisition: we need to support their development of a strong sense of right and wrong, foster sensitivity to the claims that others make about us and the world, and empower them to challenge the limits of individual and collective action. If we want our students to actively contribute to productive, sustainable, and civic society, we must help them develop a deep understanding of how they and others live, to experience different traditions, and to think differently.
Igniting a passion for the outdoors
Joining the Education in Motion (EiM) team as Head of Campus at Hochalpines Institut Ftan AG (HIF) in the Engadine region of the Swiss Alps offered an ideal setting to implement this future-ready learning approach.
Source: Hochalpines Institut Ftan AG
Our outdoor education programme, aptly named ‘Ignite’, includes skiing, hiking, sailing, climbing, white water rafting, and mountain biking, and functions as a key element in the experiential learning process. Additionally, in the three years the programme has been running, we have seen over 250 students pass through our doors to engage in real–life learning opportunities with organisations such as UNICEF, CERN, and WEF. Students strongly benefit from the rich cultural heritage of the central European region, with opportunities to visit places such as Munich, Zurich, Strasburg, Vienna, and Venice.
Creating the next generation of global citizens
Our focus on nature-immersion, cultural visits, and relationship-building, alongside a range of micro credentials such as water safety, forestry management, bee keeping, and first aid, are part of a complex curriculum that fosters students’ global knowledge and development of modern skills required for the highly competitive further education arena.
Ignite has been so successful in maintaining the educational rigour of traditional qualifications whilst recognising the future skills gap, we are designing an opportunity in the pre-tertiary qualifications market for a personalised, specialist pathway diploma that will differentiate HIF from schools offering more traditional academic routes. Our four-year qualification combines scholastically robust pre-tertiary qualifications with a range of accredited experiential opportunities, enabling our students to accumulate specialised knowledge and future-orientated skills, experiences, and dispositional traits.
With a strong academic foundation in disciplinary knowledge being offered through a range of specialist A-Levels, our offering of the Extended Project Qualification will act as a bridge between formal study and the real-life application of the knowledge gained. Importantly, the Future Skills Credit Profile, developed through partnerships with research institutions, industry, the not-for-profit environmental sector, and sports organisations, will integrate with competency credits to provide valuable external validation for the experiential component of the Diploma.
Top tips for school leaders
- Concentrate on opportunities for ‘Skills Development’: Your curriculum should highlight the importance of equipping students with essential skills, including critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, and digital literacy, all deemed vital for adapting to changing job markets and societal challenges.
- Engage multiple stakeholders to develop a network of ‘Collaboration and Partnerships’: Promote collaboration between educational institutions, industry, and communities to create more relevant and practical learning experiences.
- Flexibility: Ensure your curriculum is flexible, and your leaders are agile, advocating for learning ecosystems that support ongoing skill development.
By Jared Nolan
Jared Nolan is the Director at Hochalpines Institut Ftan AG (HIF) and has previously led schools in the Middle East and China. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.
