Innovations – The Learner

How to prepare young people for the future of work and lifelong learning

“With little idea about the jobs of the future, the key responsibility of the education system is to equip young people with the skills needed to manoeuvre this ever-changing landscape.”

With the future of work and learning having been the key focus at Quest2Learn Summit 2019, Dr Anantha Duraiappah – Director of the UNESCO MGIEP – helped map the landscape of education to make sense of the opportunities that lie in lifelong learning.

Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt from his keynote speech at the Summit:

‘Leaving no one behind’ has been at the center of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with its emphasis on equitable and inclusive education. Anchoring his keynote speech at Quest2Learn Summit 2019 around this theme, Dr Anantha Duraiappah – Director of the UNESCO MGIEP – spoke about the problems plaguing the education sector and the structural changes needed to promote equity and inclusion.

Dr Duraiappah opens with some startling facts that shed light on the level of extremism and intolerance prevalent among the youth in India and the sense of anxiety and depression common among this subset of the population today.

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How can we make women ITIs future-ready?

As a step towards bringing more women to the workforce, Quest Alliance – in partnership with JP Morgan – hosted a round table on ‘Driving Holistic Reform in the Women ITI Ecosystem in India’.

With the aim of bridging the gender gap in India’s workforce, the multi-stakeholder participation led to several important solution strategies.

Women’s participation in the workforce continues to decline across the world. The situation is particularly stark in India, some of the reasons for which are expounded here.

While the battle to fight social norms keeping women away from the workforce will be a protracted one, an urgent step towards bridging the gender gap in India’s workforce was taken in the form of a round table on ‘Driving Holistic Reform in the Women ITI Ecosystem in India’.

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Three keys to building a learning organization

Through learning we re-create ourselves, thereby extending our capacity to create. This, then, is the basic meaning of a ‘learning organisation – a body that is continually expanding its ability to create its future.

While it may seem like stating the obvious, the concept of a ‘learning organization’ is not comprehended correctly by most establishments. Learning – in contemporary usage – has come to be synonymous with ‘taking in information’. Yet, that is only distantly related to real learning.

Organizations claim to care deeply about learning, but their understanding is purely technical – be it scholarly learning or industrial expertise. But learning is different from knowledge. It is deeply connected to the vision one builds for oneself and before exploring the lesser-explored aspects of it, it would be wise to understand what it broadly means in this day’s context.

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How Quest Alliance is playing the role of an ecosystem builder with Q2L

“We need to ask ourselves – are we really putting our heads together as a community to work on a problem? Or are we doing it in our own spaces?”

As the city cools off amidst a string of showers, so does the fervour that characterised this year’s Quest2Learn Summit. Weeks of relentless work had culminated in a two-day conference, inadvertently setting the standard for discourse around the future of work and learning.

In a freewheeling chat at the Bangalore International Centre, Aakash Sethi – CEO of Quest Alliance – sinks into a chair, ready to organize his thoughts and reflect on the days that passed by and what it means for the ecosystem. Excerpts:

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The Innovation Revolution

Only through nurturing a culture of innovation at scale can our education systems change fast enough to meet the needs of 21st Century learners. IDEX Fellow Chloe Edmundson shares how this belief brought her to Bangalore, and to Quest Alliance.

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I am a devout believer in the power of innovation. Innovation has the power to completely shift existing realities both in incremental ways and on immense scales. I strongly believe that one of the most important areas to be harnessing the power of innovation is in our education systems. Our educational systems are simply not built to support the current state of our world. Lack of access to education or using antiquated models means that we are not preparing students to flourish in our rapidly changing world. We are individually and as a planet facing overwhelming issues threatening our very existence, and I believe that the foundation of addressing these issues is through education.

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The Future of Social Sector Storytelling

The next step for storytelling in the development sector is “democratization” – enabling more people to capture and share narratives.

Why do we tell stories? It’s a basic human need, and you can trace it right back through history – through oral traditions, art and literature. Storytelling through the moving image, or video, is a more recent phenomenon, but speaks to the same part of the human spirit. Seeing action unfolding visually before you can have a very profound impact on the viewer.

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Anandshala: Working Within the System

As Quest’s State Head in Biar, Amitav Nath has been instrumental in the development and implementation of Anandshala, a program which works closely with the district education system to create stronger relationships between students, teachers and parents. Here he shares his insights on partnership, and working within existing government frameworks.

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Working on Quest Alliance’s Anandshala (literally translated: joyful schools) program in Bihar, our job is to define the theory of change for the program. Our team ensures that the design strategy functions on the ground, and works out how plans get translated into action at the field level. One very important aspect to achieve this is making sure that the program is institutionalized by the district through advocacy.

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