Student Committee at St Paul’s Co-Educational College
Posted: 29 August 2018
School:
St Paul’s Co-Educational College, Hong Kong
Number of students on the committee:
10 -12 (from Grades 8 to 11)
The leadership structure of the group:
Two senior form conveners to co-ordinate the events and call meetings
How often does the committee meet:
Once or twice per month
What is the core function of the committee?:
They draft the year plan during the summer holiday, and implement various programmes to promote the RS IDEALS, including the RS Day, Green Fashion Show and inviting speakers to do talks and sharing. They also make use of the social media to promote their events.
How does the committee communicate with the wider student body/school:
They always work with the other student bodies, for example, the Student Union, the Community Service Group and and the Environmental Protection Club to organize events and make use of the resources and manpower. As a whole-school approach, these student bodies are also required to put the RS IDEALS in their year plan and programmes as far as possible.
Recent initiative:
Digitalized Information – a way to bridge the urban-rural education gap in China
The Student Committee at St Paul’s Co-Educational College wanted to tackle the rural-urban education gap in Hong Kong and China. “From our personal experiences outside of school, we recognize that a great disparity exists between privileged and underprivileged students in Hong Kong and China,” says student Adrian Kwan.
The Student Committee begun by undertaking extensive research exploring the idea that digitalised information is the best way to bridge the rural-urban education gap in Hong Kong and China. The first part of the study examined a wide body of literature concerning the existing achievement gaps and opportunity gaps in both regions in order to pinpoint intermediate: information, and how a student’s access to information greatly affects their motivation and aspirations.
“In the research stage, we reviewed existing academic, public and private sector research and discussions on education inequity and interviewed students in less well-funded public schools,” explains Celeste Ho.
“We confirmed our initial belief that internet coverage in Hong Kong and China is extensive enough for our website to be used by a meaningful amount of people, that current solutions to education inequity fail to consider the two aforementioned problems, and that a tremendous disparity exists among less privileged students and more privileged students,” agrees Eason Li.
“Since we did so much research and summarised a lot of different opinions, we decided that it would be productive to write a research paper to share it with the world, and we ended up publishing a 36-page paper in March 2017,” says Karen Chan proudly.
Now armed with sufficient researched based data, students undertook the development and implantation of a online learning tool.
“In the implementation stage, we built www.eduklase.org from scratch,” explains Lauren Chan “The website aims to do three things: first, inspire and instill self-confidence in students through success stories of people from underprivileged backgrounds; second, give students the skills to use the internet effectively; third, provide information in various areas to broaden their horizons (eg. study resources, extracurricular information etc.).”
Since launching the website in February 2017, students have received over 3000 hits on their website.
“Our solution is made by students for students – nobody can solve a problem involving students better than ourselves!” says Sebastian Pun “our solution is something different. It’s innovative.”
The students plan to continue the initiative “We are currently recruiting more people to the team that runs our website (we hope to reach 30), and we plan to continue updating the resources we have on our website in the future,” explains Eason Li “We are also discussing plans for collaboration with charities and schools in both Hong Kong and China so that our team can deliver talks to their students and introduce more users to our platform. The Confucius Institute in Hong Kong has agreed to sponsor our project, so the financial aspect is covered as well.”
You can watch an overview of St Paul’s Eduklase project here or visit the online learning platform here www.eduklase.org
All students involved in this project received excellent exam results and got very good offers from overseas universities, and will be attending Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge respectively.