Our Student Agency in PYP Exhibition journey

Our Student Agency in PYP Exhibition journey
Authors are : Mohammad Ibrahim Al-Wafi and MD. Fahim Ahmed

Our PYP Exhibition journey is filled with student agency and if you don’t know what it is then, student agency is the voice, choice and ownership of the students. For example: When we first entered our class, we made essential agreements to follow by discussing ourselves .
So let’s start talking about it

When we heard about the PYP Exhibition after 9 years of journey in learning, we were very excited. But we didn’t know what to do in this exhibition. Then of course we got an idea about the PYP Exhibition from our facilitators. Then we started the journey through a provocation into the PYP Exhibition by watching some videos of some stunning PYP Exhibitions held in different schools and then took some ideas about it. To be more clear, we chose to have a session with last year’s PYP Exhibitioners to gather more knowledge about the remarkable exhibition and get to know what we should conclude while working and what were the tips to become successful in the PYP Exhibition. And at last we went to some guest speaker sessions for further inquiry on more key points about the PYP Exhibition to make the presentation extraordinary and to demonstrate the understanding of edification that we got in our primary year’s programme.

 

Their key points were : Following the inquiry cycle, having academic honesty, collaborating with everyone who we are working with, saving time and working hard, also including the IB essential elements, etc.

So following those strategies and tips we started our journey of PYP Exhibition to make it impeccable in front of the audience. And to make our PYP Exhibition successful we need to be tolerant, confident and abide by all the advice that we got from our outstanding mentors and the enlighters who showed us the official path of working in the PYP Exhibition.

In our PYP exhibition our student agency was to take the ownership of our own learning and action. Our mentors and facilitators were there to guide us for more active participation and facilitate us with schemes which will bring betterment in our exhibition and also improve us in our learning engagements.
If we think about the definition of PYP Exhibition, then it also refers to our student agency that we got as our rights in this curriculum of enjoying to learn. And the definition of PYP Exhibition is like this : The PYP exhibition is an occasion where we are given the chance to share our understanding on any chosen topic or goals that we want to achieve. It can be a great opportunity to know and to be practiced more about assessments and presentation skills in front of the present audience. At first we made our individual student planner and planned for the further inquiry for the PYP exhibition. In voice we wrote about our action that we will take and the challenges that we faced. There were some questions that took us to personal, local and global actions and challenges and those were : “What were some challenges or opportunities we noticed?”, “Our imagination when going to any place ……, do we see anything along the way that we want to learn more about?”, “Are there any big problems we know or care about in the world?” . Then we took ownership and answered those questions. And for more understanding let me tell you what we wrote. It was like this :

1. Sometimes when coming to school we can see some poor children walking in the road and picking plastic bottles. And sometimes we can see the garbage which is the cause of global warming and unsustainability in cities and communities.

2. We want to learn and work on the goal of sustainable cities and communities. Because it refers to personal, relevant, local, and global. And it covers all of these criterias. So we are happy to work on that.
And then we went to the “choice” part. And fortunately there was the question : “What would we love to explore about?” and got the opportunity to have 3 topics to learn about global issues. And some of us chose: sustainability, Action on climate change, affordable and clean energy. Then, we said specifically what we want to learn about those topics.

And the “ownership” part is clear because we made our planner of the PYP Exhibition by ourselves, not made by our teachers.

And the next task was also filled by this “agency” rule, and those were the essential agreements we made .

So, as you can see these examples of the work followed by our agency. So you can understand about student agency and what is the importance of it.

Now we are going to say about our tasks that we have done through PYP Exhibition journey:
● We had some discussion on SDGs and found out some words which relate to these SDGs. We followed : Umbrella strategy. And hot potato strategy for exploring the actions
● We did Group Discussion to make unique thoughts under the big idea. And also to exclude the SDGs which are not related to big ideas.
● We started to know more about SDGs and learned the characteristics and types of SDGs by researching them.
● R-How can you recall and relate?
● I-Insight (the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something) or inquiry
● Q- Questions
● We did parallel thinking and when doing the task first we got to choose 2\3 SDGs and started to choose and write the causes of choosing these SDGs.
● And then most of us chose the 11th SDG “Sustainable cities and communities” and our facilitators helped us to group up.
● Then by our choice we made our group’s slogan and our own logo.
● And then we wrote about the cause of choosing the SDG and the importance of achieving it in the world.
● And after that for more clearance we made a new essential agreement group wise for our PYP Exhibition by discussing it. And our new update was:

● When getting the rights, we will also need to fulfill others rights. So we signed in academic honesty.
● In the golden Circle strategy we had answered some questions about our Sustainable Development Goal
● There was 3 Questions:
● Why have we chosen it?
● How can we make positive impacts?
● What makes the SDG global?

● Then we made our action plan for this exhibition by ourselves.
● After passing these things we came to inquiry . There we made our central idea, lines of inquiry and sorted out all the essential elements for our group. But as we said that the facilitators made our participation better so that they helped us also to finalize our central idea and lines of inquiry. Our ( sustainable cities and communities) central idea and lines of inquiry was:
Central Idea:
Advanced technology can enhance sustainability in cities and communities
Lines Of Inquiries:
● Characteristics of sustainable cities
● Role of advanced technologies to enhance sustainable development.
● Ways to make cities and communities sustainable
● And following these central ideas and lines of inquiry we did many works which relied on our issue and PYP Exhibition.

Why we chose this SDG
Sustainability is important because ⅓ of the human population is living in cities. So we have a lot of problems like pollution, transportation ,slums , housing, energy, agriculture and less access to public services. So to stop the problems we need to start now before it’s too late. If we are able to solve these problems then our cities would be better than ever.
And it aims to “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.

So now you can see that our tasks are fulfilled with the student agency. Not only that it also covers the main points in IB curriculum. And you can also see our actions below as a student.

Here you can see we took action to make our living space sustainable by making a rooftop garden.

We have taken simple actions like turning off the electrical appliances and using stairs. rather than using an elevator, this simple action can make a big impact.

In this picture you can see we chose to use bicycles for shorter distances and it’s our little step to make a pollution-free world.

We made a SMART project to save water. It’s called a recharge pit, we made this to avoid the shortage of water. And help the soils to be nutritious and help the plants to grow faster and healthier in our garden.
*It will be saving 45,000 liters of water every month which a family can’t drink in an entire decade.

This is the garden that the recharge pit will help to grow up

Our dream project of sustainable cities

Our website (as an action)

We hope that our little action will inspire thousands to make their cities and communities sustainable.
Be responsible,
Act sustainable
Thank you