INTERLINK Students at TVTC Spearhead an Environmental Fair
By Adelina Holmes
Assistant Country Director, Technical and Vocational Training Corporation
Published September, 2015
In partnership with the Technical and Vocational Training Corporation, INTERLINK runs an intensive English Language program in various colleges in Saudi Arabia. The method of instruction focuses on Project Based Learning (PBL), which is something most of our Saudi students have never encountered before. Usually each individual class is led through a series of steps to participate in a project that interests them, and then each class presents their final product to the rest of the student body. Last semester at the women’s college in Riyadh, the students decided to do something a little more challenging!
The whole student body, consisting of multiple levels of English learners, participated in a department-wide project for Earth Day. It was a month-long project in which each class researched environmental issues such as deforestation, global warming, recycling and ecology. Each class was tasked with running a booth at the Environmental Fair at the end of the month to demonstrate what they had learned and involve the rest of the college, teaching students from other departments and encouraging them to think about these issues. Activities run from these booths included: an informative display on sustainable farming, a live demonstration of contaminated water being purified, workshops where visitors learned how to make decorative items from recycled materials, among many more. Students, teachers and administrators from each department attended the fair, along with the Dean of the college who pronounced it a resounding success.
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One of the classes took this idea even further and collaborated with a class at the women’s college in Medina. The classes arranged a time each week that they would both be in their respective computer labs and utilized online sharing platforms such as Google Docs and Skype to work on a joint project – an Earth Day magazine. The magazine was presented at a booth at the Riyadh Environmental Fair and to other students at the Medina college.
It is our hope that in continuing to collaborate and share ideas and resources across our network in Saudi Arabia (and beyond), that we can introduce our students to the workforce with the skills to join the global community, and excel there.