Service Learning
Community service is a major part of the student experience at the Academy. Both the curriculum and student life incorporate aspects of community service.
Through community projects with local organisations and groups, our students gain a sense of the connections between their education and the world around them. Students can participate in a variety of structured community initiatives and internships to learn about their place in the world.
By partnering with local agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network, students learn first-hand about the operations of an organisation, and work toward making tangible contributions to the agencies.
In addition, community engagement gives our students an understanding of broad concepts such as human rights, dignity and autonomy, while emphasising the ethos of leaving the world a better place.
Core to the vision and mission of the Aga Khan Academies is that students should be developed in terms of their values of giving back and contributing to the communities in which they live.
This short film follows a group of students from the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad , who formed the group STEM for Growth (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), to mentor younger students at a local school and help them gain higher achievement levels and greater confidence through hands-on experiments and activities.
“As part of our service learning initiative, we taught students at the Anexa School, a public school in Matola, Mozambique, how to effectively use laptops and different programmes like Microsoft Word for educational purposes.
Even though my classmates and I were the teachers, we also learned a lot about the different features of Microsoft Word and different teaching strategies to help deliver our lesson plans. The most significant experience I had was working with the students as if we were close friends and I was helping them revise for a test. Soon we all felt comfortable with each other and the students started asking us questions, which made the teaching process a lot more successful.
Aside from gaining some confidence through this initiative, I gained a new perspective on the world. Seeing the amount of effort everyone at the Anexa School put into showing up and learning made me realise that I am fortunate to be receiving an education of high quality at the Aga Khan Academy Maputo. I also got to understand what it means to be a teacher and all of the hard work that goes into it.
I believe helping students interact with people they normally wouldn’t approach will help open their minds up, such as this service learning project. Not everything about our local community is taught at school, which is why projects like these where we work with our community are important and would make a difference in the way we perceive the world.”
Marie-Claude Bonaventure Simbine, Grade 8 student, Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad
