Principal's Message
PRINCIPAL’S MESSAGE
ChangeMakers: Always Connecting, Creating and Contributing
More than 100 years ago, John Dewey proposed a philosophy of education known as progressivism. A central idea of progressivism calls on educational institutions to do more than prepare students to participate in society after they leave education. Instead, students can learn more and better by participating in society while they are studying. Furthermore, Dewey and his colleagues believed that students should not accept society as it is and then learn in order to carve out the best niche for themselves within the status quo. In contrast, students should seek to help society progress for the benefit of all, and students should learn with that altruistic, cooperative goal in mind (Dewey, 1916).
To develop young changemakers, we must identify ourselves as changemakers, practise changemaking, and model that journey for students. A Changemaker School recognises the power of investing in people at all levels of the organisation, and create spaces where we are encouraged to pause and reflect on our action, our professional relationships, and our practice. Agency has become a buzz word in education in recent years. To be an agent or to be agentive is, in the words of Albert Bandura, to “intentionally make things happen by one’s actions”. In the field of general education, scholars have talked about teachers as agents of change or agents of curricular and pedagogical reform.
In a Changemaker School, students are immersed in a community environment where living out values of personal responsibility, hard work, initiative and excellence go hand-in-hand with empathy, creativity, contribution, and caring. Set routines and procedures enable students to understand the class expectations. How are they supposed to act toward other students? What are they supposed to do when they start losing control of their emotions? What are they supposed to do when a conflict occurs? When we become a Changemaker School, we should be able to feel and see the trust, respect and equality between the students and the adults. Here, vulnerability is a learning asset, emotional expression is encouraged, and mutual trust is built over time in small, daily interactions.
Changemaker Schools focus on creating the conditions for changemakers to emerge and flourish. The mindset that supports this kind of learning environment can be summed up by the mantra ‘I matter. I can.’ It is about humanizing education by centering the students and their holistic development. Students are not merely passive recipients or disengaged consumers of education, they are active participants and leaders of their learning experiences. Kurt Hahn, the founding father of UWC Atlantic, a UK Changemaker School, famously said: “There is more in us than we know if we could be made to see it perhaps, for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.” Changemaker Education embodies this aspiration to ‘see more’ as educators so we can meet the demands of young people to step into their power as changemakers in ways that truly prepare them to rediscover certainty in these complex times.
May we continue to contribute to the Yu Neng story as changemakers – as we connect with our past, we create our future.
Yours in Education
Mr Ng Yeow Ling
Principal
