At the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit on 25 September 2015, world leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which includes a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice and tackle climate change by 2030.

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A key aspect of TY in St Michael’s College is our emphasis on Development Education. In short, development education aims to support young people to increase their awareness and understanding of the interdependent and unequal world in which we live, through a process of interactive learning, debate, action and reflection. It challenges perceptions of the world and encourages young people to act for a more just and equal society at a national and an international level. 

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As a staff, we are developing a TY curriculum that concerns itself with issues of global justice. 

 

Ultimately, these aims are at the core of what it means to call ourselves Spiritan.

 

Inspired by the Spiritan Rule of Life (14) which asks of us to make ourselves “the advocates, the supporters and defenders of the weak and the little ones against all who oppress them”, we hope to explore a range of topics that help us act for a better today:

 

• The basic shape of our (unequal 80:20) world

• International development and underdevelopment

• Human rights (and human wrongs)

• Justice and equality issues

• Race and interculturalism

• Views and perspectives on a variety of development issues including poverty, exclusion, women's rights, HIV and AIDS, discrimination, aid, etc.

• Development and human rights education

 

These topics will be core feature of class work, a focus of many extra curricular activities and our Brazil Immersion Trip.