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EVERY cloud has a silver lining! While the breaking news on 3,180kg waste collected from the Janabiya beach was heart-breaking (‘Hundreds of volunteers take part in massive beach clean-ups’, GDN, November 13), it was heart-warming to see amongst the volunteers, Generation Alpha, the true global citizens and the ruling generation of this century.
With an unfair share of cosmic chaos they inherit from us it becomes our moral obligation to prepare and equip them better for the future. With technology as their first language and hence their skills in the use of gadgets and machines undoubtedly to be far advanced and incomprehensible to the generations before them, they will still need education in life skills.
This is where parenting, schooling and community service play a key role.
When asked casually to express the choice of community service activities that can be conducted at the school level, many teacher trainees listed preferences in varied categories such as service hours that can be spent by their learners in: collecting things that can be donated to the needy in the community, offering help and assistance services to people or institutions, teaching certain skills to those who can benefit from them, fixing things or places that may need clean up, hosting events in the community for awareness or charity, hand-crafting things to preserve the national crafts, and volunteering for services in the community.
There are also a host of other activities students could volunteer for online community service.
To propose sustainable models of community service, with technology as the key driver of today’s generation, teachers could initiate community service hours through gamification and create a star board in the class with service hours of each student. They could also create digital badges for accomplishing levels of service.
Furthermore, an important aspect of assessment could be a certain percentage of the total grade set aside to validate service hours. A more dynamic and progressive move would be to grant scholarship to the high achievers of accomplishments accumulated through service to community.
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