Recently I attended the Sail Training International annual conference in Bordeaux France. Sail Training International is a world-wide outdoor education group with a focus on personal development through sailing for which I volunteer some of my time.
Key tasks for me this year at the conference this year:
- Support and supervise the International Youth Council (made of up youth aged 17-26 from over 30 different countries) establish their goals and strategic direction for 2018 in support of Sail Training International’s aims and objectives.
- Coordinate and manage the international research symposium. This year I had a presenter from Latvia discuss her work on non-formal and informal strategies for education (of which I have taken notes and will start to share here), an Australian talking about the value to the community of students undertaking adventurous learning and finally a researcher from the UK talking about adventurous learning as a cultural community. Previous years I’ve had speakers from UK, Germany, Bermuda, US, Poland, Spain, Portugal as well on different topics relating to education and personal development.
- Launch a $35K International Research Fund (supporting researching into outdoor and adventurous learning)
- Engage in the overall strategic planning for Sail Training International’s future direction.
From this year’s conference I have begun gathering resources on;
- a bank of research on evidence based practice for in-and-out of the classroom to support student learning and outcomes.
- an international link between UNESCO’s announcement on Ocean Research, The environmental / sustainable program the tall ships participate in and scientific ocean/marine based data gathering that can be accessed by students all over the world. (PS I am awaiting confirmation of my membership to the United National Association -Australia Branch, which will further support this objective).
- mapping the various syllabus to the outcomes generated by participation in this type of activity.
- developing a teacher PL program utilising adventurous learning to develop not just cross curricular content understanding and delivery but also a wide range of personal and resilience skills in students.
This is volunteer work conducted in my own time over the course of the year but I will be bringing the lessons learned and resources into the classroom to benefit our students.