This August, the new Early Learning Center opened its doors and marked a strategic step forward for the school into a different future; one that will follow the demands of our changing world and the differing demands that it makes upon our students. We recognize that children today have different needs and must be educated in new ways adapted to the visions of tomorrow’s realities. Such changes will continue as we develop high quality programs of education that are able to support the development of inquiring and thoughtful young minds.
Fundamentally, we need to foster in our students, as the IB states; ‘caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect … not as an alternative to a sense of cultural and national identity, but as an essential part of life in the 21st century.’
As part of this vision, it must be recognized that our buildings were designed to accommodate past educational traditions, whose purposes and outcomes have now changed. Thus, in early November we started to extend and reorganise the Secondary School; renovated from the principle that construction should be based upon the intended educational vision for such spaces. At the same time, we are drafting plans for the Design and Engineering Center, that will be housed in the vacated Early Childhood spaces.
 
Over past years, much has been written about such future skillsets, and it is upon these principles that this Centre will focus - The Framework for 21st Century Learning (http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework)
 

 
 
 
Our Step into the Extraordinary Capital Campaign has engaged our community support whose objective is not just to build additional spaces for our students, but to transform how we teach Technology, Design and Engineering to break the educational mold on how we encourage our students to appreciate life-long learning. It is the role of this new building to adapt our current teaching environment, and to transform its curriculum to give our students an educational journey into unfamiliar settings and expectations.
 
If you would like to be involved in this process, please reach out.
 
Read the entire WORLD Magazine Winter 2017 edition here: https://issuu.com/urbanbrand/docs/aisb_world_winter17/