Dear ASPnet community,
Hello. My name is Julie Saito. I am the chief of the UNESCO Associated Schools Network coordinating unit. We are marking the 12th issue of our newsletter CONNECT, which we launched this March, immediately after the lockdown started in France, to stay connected with you and to share solidarity. I thank you to many of you for your contributions to sending us your messages for the campaign Learning Never Stops, for having participated in our first global webinar in May and supporting our ongoing and new projects.
There is a lot of talk about the "new normal", in general as well as in education, as many countries are starting a new school year.
This is an opportunity to rethink education as a whole, to reimagine education as we have been doing with the help and collaborative efforts of our colleagues in the "Futures of Education". We have already started to do this during the global webinar, where the richness of ideas and experiences from our global ASPnet community could be seen. We will continue this collective thinking and reimagining in future events and fora, including our planned focus group consultations we presented in the last newsletter in August.
This reflective process includes thinking new ways of learning, including distance and blended learning, new ways of addressing issues beyond COVID-19, of inclusiveness, access and quality of learning, well-being and many others.
This process would also benefit from thinking way back, to mobilize our cultural resources to address this new situation, to "re-find" our roots and traditions of community learning that can greatly benefit not only 'academic' learning, but also community and social life skills, as well as of course reinforcing the universal values of respect and tolerance, and many others.
I want to give you an example from my home country Japan.
It is a movement called "Kominkan" - now referred to as CLC (Community Learning Centre) which became an important hub for promoting ESD. Kominkan literally means "citizens' public hall") and aims to provide social education, which in Japan means community and education for adults. Kominkan was initiated after the WW2, based on the more ancient movement Terakoya (a temple school in Japanese), in the era of the Edo period to support those children who could not go to school.
This concept is in line with the idea of the whole school approach, and due of this relevance a fitting example for complementary learning modality in the context of COVID-19 and beyond.
I also think the ASPnet community can explore similar opportunities like Community Learning Centres (Kominkan), to support children who do not have sufficient support to access to education.
I believe that you, the global ASPnet community, has an exceptional wealth of resources through our collective knowledge about many such traditional ways of community learning, and that we have a unique opportunity to bring together ideas on how to find strength in these cultural resources, to the benefit of our learners in the present, and also for the future.
So, in this spirit I encourage all of you, to share with our network different practices, resources, and ideas on how to shape the future education that we need.
You can find links to further resources and information in the newsletter!
Stay CONNECT-ed!
Thank you!