Capstone: Civic Engagement in Education (SDG 4)
Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education strives to ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. There are 10 targets that make up this goal, consisting of aims from free and equal access to education at pre-primary, primary and secondary level to building and upgrading inclusive and safe learning environments. In this day and age, education is becoming increasingly crucial to provide a foundation for better life opportunities. Many inequalities exist in education due to geographic location. Developing countries heavily face a problem of uneducated youth and adults. Over the past decade, major progress was made towards increasing access to education and school enrollment rates at all levels, particularly for girls. Nevertheless, about 260 million children were still out of school in 2018, which is about ⅕ of the population in that age group. With coronavirus, it has become harder to make progress on this Sustainable Development Goal.
Education gaps are not limited to abroad, however, and also exist in our very own communities. According to a UCLA study, New York schools are the most segregated in the country. This segregation of minorities and whites also correlates to low-income and high income, and therefore low-funded vs. well-funded schools. Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s elite public schools, offered only seven of 895 slots in its 2019 freshman class to black students. As iterated by Anindya Kundu in a 2019 TED talk, schools are supposed to provide equal footing and opportunity, but our system fails by keeping the working class disadvantaged.
For my service-learning project, I worked with an organization called SAYC, or Students Advocating for Young Children. Entirely volunteer-led, SAYC was launched in 1992 as a children’s advocacy group to raise awareness of the plight of low-income children in New York City. As a high school student, I worked in the Saturday Academy to tutor and mentor high-potential, high-need elementary school students. I was given great autonomy in how to approach my students on a personal level and also gained valuable experience as I dove into curriculum development, lesson planning, and classroom management.
Using resources outside of the traditional school day has become an increasingly important factor in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4. OER, Open Educational Resources, provides equitable access to knowledge as the movement states “publicly-funded research and educational content belongs to the people”. UNESCO first used the term to advocate for teaching, learning and research materials to be in the public domain free for use, adaptation and distribution. The rise of technology has greatly aided accessibility to an enriched education and OER can be used effectively to reach a vast amount of learners.
We all made the transition to online learning this fall, but being able to continue to provide tutoring to students at SAYC was an invaluable experience beyond academics. Many students report academic gains throughout the school year and into the next. The program’s director, Michael O’Leary, says he mostly notices a shift in an overall positive relationship with schooling that is rooted in confidence regarding discussion (ELA) and persistence regarding problem-solving (Math). He often hears back from parents, as below, that their children have begun to enjoy school more and find schoolwork and homework easier from early exposure to complex concepts:
“Recently, my son came home from school and started his math homework. He quickly surveyed it and remarked, “this will be easy. This is just like the stuff I used to do at SAYC.” He finished it very quickly.”
While policy is important to achieving sustainable development goals, the current global framework constituted by elites restricts the goals of SDG 4 and has flawed structural details. Civic engagement is key when it comes to improving education because of the lasting impact. This is a program run under Prep for Prep, an organization I’ve been affiliated with in my own educational career since the 5th grade. While I was new to this program, my familiarity with the organization as a child gave me more of an incentive to come back and work with other children. The model of using older students to teach younger students is important because it creates a cycle of inspiration and connection. I tutored students, but also talked to them about their interests and had fun activities set throughout our sessions. Elementary school students who have been mentored or tutored by older students will feel more inclined to do the same for a younger generation later, and so on. This model of tutoring is effective when done locally and within communities, and would do great if it were to be implemented within each school district so it could be both close-knit and widespread.
Through my individual project and the extensive discussions we’ve had in class, I’ve learned that service learning, in order to be productive, needs to be both calculated and genuine. When I first chose SDG 4, I had wanted to work with an organization that lobbies for changes to be made in the NYC public school system policy-wise, but I am glad to have ended up with SAYC. My role as a tutor felt more fragile, knowing I was having a direct impact on a student.
Education plays an interesting role in the notion of citizenship. One would say a good citizen is an informed citizen, and an informed citizen is educated. The best way to create a global citizen is by starting at a young age. By creating community engagement structures at school-level, we can make active citizens. By teaching to value the commonalities you have with other people on factors other than a common heritage or nationality, we can inspire global citizenship.
