Global Citizenship Summit II

The Global Citizenship Summit II, hosted by NIST in collaboration with the JUMP! Foundation, was held at The Pine Resort, 2 hours north of Bangkok.

Global Citizenship Summit II Learning about the WHY, HOW, and WHAT of Global Citizenship. The Global Citizenship Summit II, hosted by NIST in collaboration with the JUMP! Foundation, was held at The Pine Resort, 2 hours north of Bangkok.

Its purpose was to create a collaborative time and space for service, sustainability, environmental and experiential educators to share materials, ideas, methods and skills and meaningfully explore shared questions and challenges.

The 3 day-course was as exhausting as it was exhilarating. We learned and contributed to the WHY, HOW, and WHAT of Global Citizenship in general and then went further and looked at how we were doing at our own school. We realised that Regents International School Pattaya already had a strong Global Citizenship programme. In Primary, every year group has a community partner with constantly changing and developing projects and we are involved in events such as Jesters and we value all of the aims and attributes associated with global citizenship and embed them across our curriculum in many ways.

What stood out for me during one of the break-out sessions was the value of the relationships schools have with their community partners. It was mentioned that these partnerships were like dating – when there is no reciprocation (no giving or receiving on both sides), the best thing would be to walk away. Regents prides itself on having a huge number of community partners but this year, the focus will be on quality rather than quantity; emphasis on making our current partnerships more valuable rather than finding new ones.

Regents strives for strong academic performance whilst instilling those values that truly allow our students to become global citizens with the potential of going on to make world changing contributions. This allowed all three of us (Kayleigh Smith, Laura Crew and I) to leave feeling empowered to continue with the fantastic ethos of the school and strive to make it even better.

Aina Rakotonirina

Round Square & Global Citizenship Coordinator

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