Embracing Emergence
24 May 2021, Kuwait City: Over the past few months, the coalition has been focusing on refining strategies that will help us get closer to our North Star, a society where everyone has the skills, opportunity and desire to actively contribute to the betterment of the community. To ensure accountability and learning across the organizations that make us up, we have been working to create baselines and set out relevant and collaborative data collection tools and mechanisms. As our various Think Tanks engage in surveying stakeholders, mapping educational models and approaches, and promoting collaborations, the coalition is able to start feeding these inputs into our collective strategies, and finding ways in which we can strengthen one another’s work.
We have also recently onboarded a number of new members who bring additional expertise and reach for the programs and data collection that we’ve been working on. In line with our approach, they represent very diverse stakeholders, including public and private cultural centers, school superintendents and department heads, student leaders, international organizations, creatives, and others, and together, they help us ensure that even more voices have a seat at our (currently virtual) table.
As next steps, we will begin to pilot some of the collaborative strategies we have been developing across the different organizations in the coalition, with a focus on promoting critical thinking and social-emotional skills, student engagement in the school and broader community, awareness and acceptance of equity and inclusion, and adoption of sustainability practices.
We have also introduced a series of fireside chats to inspire and engage our members as a learning community and a community of practice. In our first fireside chat, Roger Burton, a systems change consultant and change catalyst, made us reflect on how we can create the conditions for emergent thinking when promoting educational transformation in change-resistant environments. In our second event, Tatjana Colin, Chief of Early Childhood Development at UNICEF, shared some key learnings from the field of ECD, leading a discussion on the key challenges we’re facing in Kuwait, and the kinds of intervention strategies which might be more effective locally. The discussion will be kicking off the most recent addition to our work as a coalition – our Early Childhood Education Think Tank.
