The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identified and propagated by the United Nations, have enormous potential for changing lives all over the world. They set a roadmap working towards which nations, communities and individuals will help improve lives in the years to come, while ensuring the earth can sustain itself.
Our universities and colleges are the crucibles for leadership. It is from the portals of these that the citizens of tomorrow emerge. The students emerging from these colleges will carry the torch of change into the big wide world into which they step. There is an extraordinary impact of teachers on the values imbibed by a student.
There is no better way to teach a student about the values of implementing SDGs than by letting him/her see the commitment in the teachers themselves. Teachers would need to be very knowledgeable themselves about the sustainable development goals and the linkages between them. Unless teachers themselves are empowered in this regard they would not be able to contribute optimally towards capacity-building amongst students.
Teachers need to be exposed through seminars, symposiums, brainstorming sessions, teachers’ school group cluster meetings and visits to various places, either physically or virtually, where these goals are being implemented successfully. One of the major gains from the Covid-19 pandemic has been the rapid expansion and proliferation of the internet across the country. Online learning, teaching, meetings and interactions have become the norm.
This opens new avenues and vistas for collaboration between students, schools, teachers, people, communities and nations across the globe at virtually no additional cost. There is enormous scope of exploiting these new media available for collaboration on SDGs.
There exist a large number of resources even within the local communities within which students live and learn. Efforts should be made within schools and between clusters of schools to identify where and what these resources are. For example they maybe green housing being constructed in the vicinity, water conservation projects, forestry initiatives, agriculture projects, soil conservation projects, astronomical observatories, novel financial sustainability projects and many more such projects which emerge from, or impact upon, one or more of the SDGs. These can be visited by teachers and students to enhance the value of learning.
All schools and universities have a great deal of land and resources which are at best used partially, given that class or teaching hours are limited. There is great merit in using the resources of our schools and universities after class hours to expand on interaction with the local community; say by allowing classrooms to be used for teaching poor children from the neighbourhood, use of sports fields for others in the community and use of auditoriums and other facilities for the local community.
There would be great merit in adopting the credit point approach to giving students who opt to interact with the local, regional and global communities and projects for enhancing work towards Sustainable Development Goals; so that they benefit by having the hours spent on these projects towards earning their certificates, diplomas and degrees. This will greatly incentivise students to participate in the collaborative effort on SDGs.
The solution to taking forward and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals really lies in collaboration between all the various stakeholders both for advocacy as well as for implementation. Students of today are the leaders and ambassadors of tomorrow and investment made towards capacity-building in students will pay handsome dividends. There is, hence, great merit in investing into teachers to prepare them to be role models for children and students for long-term benefits accruing to society.
