Education for the Next Generation
Children’s best teachers
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are a set of seventeen global goals set out by the UN, which governments all over the world have accepted. They include objectives to reduce inequality, improve standards of living and protect lives and the planet. Governments have agreed on the most pressing issues of today and committed strong political will to ensure that development and human well-being continues to advance within the planetary boundaries. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a momentous opportunity for change in social, economic and environmental issues. As stakeholder demand for accountability and assessment is prompting change throughout the business world, this could be a company’s biggest opportunity. The sanction of the goals has the potential to fundamentally shift the way businesses are.
The Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) is one of the many NGOs that stand for a sustainable future and follow the SDG №4: Quality education. The EAUC has a membership of over 300 universities and colleges, supporting sustainability within the UK tertiary education sector. The EAUC seeks to drive sustainability to the heart of further and higher education. The EAUC is the recognised hub of sustainability best practice in the sector. The EAUC provides strong alliance of Further and Higher Education Institutions, sector bodies and commercial organisations, working together both in the UK and internationally. With links to similar bodies in North America, Australia, Spain and South Korea amongst others, the EAUC is working on a global scale to raise the profile of sustainability in the tertiary education sector.
Sustainable Goal №4: Quality Education
Quality education represents the foundation for sustainable development. We can only obtain quality education if we create lifelong opportunities for everyone. According to the United Nations, 6 out of 10 children and adolescents are not achieving a minimum level of proficiency in reading and math. The lack of equal opportunities poses an obstacle to achieving quality education globally. We tried to answer to this problem by creating an organization that tackles these issues at the grassroots level.
ENG
Education for the Next Generation is a non-governmental organization, based in Athens. Our goal is to support the parental involvement in the educational process. Our plan is both to organize training workshops, seminars and conferences at schools, and plus, to offer online counseling to parents with a bi-weekly podcast.
The goal of our organization is to provide equal education opportunities by encouraging the parental involvement in the education process. Although education is a shared responsibility among many different actors, we believe that we can’t talk about sustainable solutions without focusing on the crucial role of the parents, the children’s’ first teachers.
Parental involvement in education is not always a given. When discussing the problems facing the education system, the role of the parents is often times overlooked. At the same time, we can observe an overreliance on teachers by the parents, a situation that doesn’t represent a sustainable alternative to the presence of the parents in the education process. Nevertheless, studies indicate that parental involvement in education much more predictive of children’s’ academic success than the socioeconomic status of the family. Moreover, the more involved the parents are, the higher the children’s’ achievements will be. Research shows that parental involvement in the education process leads to improved grades, school attendance, HomeWorks and social skills, while also paving the way for postsecondary education.
While the evidence in favor of encouraging parental involvement in education is consistent, it is more often than not neglected by most of the educational programs that focus of children’s academic achievements. We at ENG support the idea that academic achievement is predicted less by the socioeconomic status and more by the parental involvement in the academic life of the children. As a result, we believe that equal education opportunities can only be provided if the opportunity gaps represented by the lack of parental involvement are addressed.
The innovative character of our organization is our focus on parental involvement as a way of ensuring an inclusive and an equitable quality education. Firstly, we encourage parents to be more involved in their children’s education process and further development. In order to achieve this, we try to equip parents with parenting knowledge, helping them to be more engaged with their children. Secondly, we believe that, by supporting the parental involvement in the educational process, we can positively impact the children’s achievements and their learning outcomes. Because this is requires more free time on behalf of the parents, we aim to address the lack of time with which parents are facing by offering flexible and accessible solutions.
Many parents don’t always know how to get more involved in their children’s’ education. However, with guidance and support, they can become more involved through practical and easy to implement solutions. Once implemented, our ideas will create a more equal access to education opportunities.
We at ENG are offering:
· everyday opportunities for meaningful parent-child interaction, specific and useful practices to embed into their daily routines;
· ideas for easy-to-do indoor and outdoor activities;
· digital educational resources, such as webseminars and podcasts;
· online counselling regarding early childhood development;
· training workshops, seminars and conferences at different schools across Greece.
Before choosing Greece as the starting point for our activities, we researched the educational opportunities offered by the various organisations and initiatives in this country. What we found were solutions that were targeting groups based on the socioeconomic status, but didn’t address the overall problem represented by the lack of parental involvement in education. It was this discovery that motivated us to start this project.
Design Thinking Methodology
In order to create accessible platforms, we started thinking about our users. The majority of them are going to be parents, with some of the resources being directed to the children as well. We emphasized this point and reflected different target audience’s preferences in our design, especially for the website.
The reason why we think design thinking is the most important part of our NGO’s definition and purpose is that this platform is the place where the users can interact with us the best. In addition, the Facebook page is created in order to draw attention to some articles, organize some events and notify people about it. The Instagram account helps deliver information fast, to summarize difficult topics, to present information much easier and more interactive, and to share the experience that our users develop listening to our recommendations.
All considered, we view the ENG website as being the most important part of pursuing our organizational goals.
For the theme of the website, we chose two rather complementary colors to portray the parents and the children. Orange is a color of happiness and activity, while turquoise ideates independence, communication, and love. Overall, the colors, reinforced with fun photos, are meant to suggest in an optimistic tone the fact that parental involvement has a great impact on children’s education.
The logo contains the same colors, but also includes green, which can be interpreted as the color of nature and life. The shape of the air balloon reminds us about children’s dreams. It is a symbol of teamwork, setting goals and achieving them, all very important for building healthy relationships in the family.
The navigation of the website was tested by our users and we got the feedback that we had expected, as we have designed it to look friendly and familiar. We also expect kids to use the website, since there is a lot of information for them as well.
At the same time, the ENG Instagram page is mainly targeting the parents, besides which we are expecting other groups of people such as businessmen, investors and NGOs to visit the page.
Our prototype
ENG has already established Facebook, Instagram and a website to further social collaboration, both between us and our users and between the users themselves.
First step: Foundation
ENG started its activity by building and then enhancing a solid base of users via Facebook group. Our social account was a good way to reach a wide enough audience to acquire users and subsequently their feedbacks. One hand, we linked the description of the SDG 4, which aims to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all‘, to the mission of our organization, which states that parents are “Children’s best teachers”. On the other hand, we showed our users several statistics and researches that underlined the importance of parental involvement in children’s education. The combination of these two aspects gave users more credibility and confidence in our next steps.
Second step: Consolidation
Besides the Facebook group, we created an Instagram social account immediately in order to promote our NGO. Different from Facebook group, the main purpose of the Instagram page is not to directly interact to the users, but to enhance our organization by posting some of the useful materials about parental skills and details about the events we are organizing. We have also established our main platform, the website, that has the role of enriching social opportunities for users’ interactions, through categories such as Events, Blogs, Forum and Resources. For example, users could post pictures or videos in order to share their experience with other parents and ask questions about education, questions that we will be able to answer with the help of our team of professionals.
Third step: Expansion
After growing a presence on Facebook and Instagram, we are going to add new functions and services to our website. For example, if at the first stage we created the website having in mind mostly parents and teachers, we will work in the nearby future on child friendly content in order to attract more children users.
In other words, we won’t stop evolving our platforms, but instead we will devote to offer good education opportunities to an increasing number of users, in order to achieve our goal and to contribute to the quality education SDG.
Did we test it in real world?
Firstly, we already have more than 50 users, and we maintain a good relationship with our users, which currently are either parents or teachers. ENG aims towards a participatory culture model, that would boost the involvement of the users, audiences, and fans in the content creation process.
Before the NGO was created, we had a small interview for sample users. When we asked them if they are willing to collaborate with our organisation, one of our sample users replied: ‘I’ve searched quite a few times on the Internet for a Greek website that supports parents with their children, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I really want to build stronger relationships with them, but as a working mother, I don’t have enough time to do everything. I would love to try the resources that you offer.’
As of this month, we have uploaded on our website more than 20 resources, including articles, podcasts and videos, most of them being very well-received by parents. Moreover, the participatory culture model encouraged parental skills, which lead to many users expressing their support for the platform.
Secondly, most participants were satisfied with our Facebook events. On one hand, the events helped parents to bond with their children. On the other hand, they represented a good opportunity for quality informal education.
We believe that organising more family events could not only strengthen family bonds, but also improve quality informal education for kids.
We would like to underline the importance of our NGO’s online interfaces, which in our opinion represent the core basis of our whole initiative. ENG’s goal is to provide equal education opportunities by encouraging the parental involvement in the education process. The way we see it, it is important for parents to play a greater role in the education of their children, but we believe that time-consuming offline meetings are not feasible in the long run.
As a consequence, we aimed to make our online interfaces both time-saving and user-friendly. The website was created with Wix.com by Brandon Wu and Nefeli Papagiannopoulou, while its original content was written by Sebastian Stoica.
Easy-to-use, user-friendly design and navigation were important for us. The website is a time-saving resource in itself, that can be accessed by the users even during a coffee break. On the website there is a brief introduction that helps users know what our goals are and that highlights the importance of our mission. In addition, by creating the blog and forum functions, we provide a friendly interface for parents to communicate with each other, ask for help, and give advice. This allows parents to form a small online community.
On the website we also publish useful information, articles, podcasts and videos on parenting, education and time management. With this, we would like to help parents deal with problematic situations and to raise awareness of problems such as anorexia, drug use, cyberbullying, or the importance of reading in relation to the children’s brain development. In addition, we share our offline events on the website, such as a Picnic day or Family Hiking. With these events, we want to provide cost-effective, accessible yet meaningful family learning opportunities for parents and children alike.
Furthermore, the website also serves as an interface between us and the parents. Users can find our contact address, our Facebook and Instagram pages, and they can connect to us via email or chat directly on the website.
Our second very important online interface is our Facebook page, which was made by Kata Horváth. The Facebook page is primarily aimed at advertising and at maintaining daily contact with the users. We publish at least two scheduled posts per day. The first is published at 5 am, so we are already among the first pages that our users get notifications from. These are usually podcasts or videos about parenting topics that can be consumed as a secondary activity by the users during the day, which also saves time. Furthermore, we are also publishing articles and studies about children, parenting and education. We are also creating a community by providing this Facebook page and sharing our offline events.
Last but not least, we would like to write a few words about our NGO’s Instagram page, that was made by Alina Sozinova. Since Instagram is the more widespread and popular for our target group, the Greek users, it was essential for us to create an Instagram page. Obviously, this site is dominated by visual content, although similarly to the other two pages, we also share important news, events, and content that is relevant to our users.
One of the targets of the Quality Education SDG refers to increasing the supply of qualified teachers in developing countries, thus indicating the importance of educators. When we decided to work on this goal, we started with the belief that equal education should focus on educators all over the world. Instead of going in the same direction as the SDGs target, we considered we would have a bigger and more sustainable impact by targeting the children’s first and best teachers, the parents.
Working over the last few months on implementing our ideas and perfecting our organization, we have gained a much better understanding on how the problems facing the education system are layered. This understanding has led to us bettering ourselves, helping us in our pursuit for ways through which we can positively impact the world.
ENG Team:
