AOK Basic Skills Project
Portland, Maine
E: kirkjohnb5@gmail.com
W: www.aokbasicskills.gratis
2021- 11-20
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/contact/
United Nations Headquarters
Sustainable Development Goals Office
405 East 42nd Street
New York, NY, 10017, USA.
Re: How the AOK Basic Skills Project Has Been Used to Contribute Towards Sustainable Development Goals 2 (Nutrition) & 4 (Education) for 2030 and a request for these SDG’s to Manage Participant Websites
Hello UN Sustainable Development Goals:
I’m a semi-retired ESOL teacher over 65 and lived in Ecuador for over 10 years before recently relocating to Portland, Maine in the U.S. I am the director of AOK, a charitable educational effort and retirement project that was connected to my English school in Quito. AOK isn’t an organization. It specializes in teaching basic skills in ESOL, native speaker education, and nutrition. During the past three years, I have written 20 AOK Basic Skills Workshops and before the Pandemic presented many of them throughout the Ecuadorian Sierra.
Before COVID, AOK received 1,000 positive, informal, anonymous, and voluntary evaluations from its participants. By relating its workshops to the Global Goals, AOK has been able to better inspire the participants who have attended to learn and grow educationally through independent study with direction.
Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, AOK lends support No. 2 – Zero Hunger and No. 4 – Quality Education. The AOK workshops in the sections “Pre-K – Grade 12 & Adult Education Workshops (ABE)” and “Whole Food Workshops” are mostly written for people of low economic means. The third section is made up of ESOL Workshops, which are written for everyone. All but the English Club Workshop take only 50 minutes to present and are also readily adaptable to Zoom.
Workshop Goals
For the participants, the short-term goals of the workshops are to teach the life skill, to teach how to freely and independently use the Internet to research it, and to grow further understanding of it through interacting with others on the Internet and in person through English clubs.
The long-term goal for the participants is to involve them in the effort of helping the UN to meet the 2030 Global Goals through their self-education.
The three categories of AOK Basic Skills Project
The AOK workshops fall into the following three categories: (1) Pre-K to grade 12 & Adult Basic Edcuation (ABE) workshops for native speakers and their families, (2) ESOL Workshops for teachers and students in grades 1-16, (3) and Whole Food Workshops.
1. The Six Pre-K – Grade 12 & ABE workshops are for those who wish to improve their pre-university education and that of their families. These workshops are primarily for families of low economic means and help build the basic education of their participants with instruction in using websites that provide free courses for all ages.
Each of these six life skill workshops has its own annotated folder which contains free content and process learning websites. These sites include reading, math, science and basic technology courses.
There is one workshop for pre-k, one for elementary, and one for the secondary level. There are also three adult education workshops – one for those learning literacy, one for grades 3-10, and one for those who have graduated from high school but aren’t ready yet for the university.
2. There are ten 50-minute ESOL workshops and a 10, 15 or 20 hour extended workshop for English clubs that introduces individual systems for teaching and learning English as a foreign language.
The workshop curriculum is based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which describes language ability in terms of levels and skills in a student friendly manner; it’s also based on the learning system of the European Language Portfolio (ELP), which teaches individual learning systems for K-16 foreign language learners. The ELP is the learning system used in the EU.
Available AOK ESOL workshops under this category are presentations for families, businesses, high school and college students, and “methods workshops” for high school teachers and university professors. Information on these workshops can be found in this category on the AOK website.
3. There are three whole food workshops that introduce simple, healthy, recipes with easy cooking instructions for breads, grains and legumes. One workshop explains how to cook healthy, inexpensive meals ahead of time on a budget.
Featured is a workshop for an AOK developed recipe for making high protein, steamed bread with just one stove burner that’s primarily for small children and the elderly. Included in the workshop are healthy pancake and granola recipes.
Both the bread and the pancake recipes were accepted by the Ministry of Health of Ecuador in July, 2019 for the Province of Pichincha to help prevent stunted growth in small children. Steamed bread and pancakes also provide the elderly with a nutritious, inexpensive food that’s soft to eat. This bread takes about 75 minutes to prepare.
Accompanying digitized workshop materials for the participants
The accompanying free materials for the AOK workshops include a request to share the materials with participants for the workshop director, anonymous, optional evaluation forms for the directors and participants, a Power Point presentation (usually), supporting handouts, and a digitized folder of annotated websites with a table of contents and the workshop bibliography.
Life skills as part of the overall infrastructure of Global Goals 2 & 4
Global Goals 2 – Zero Hunger & 4 – Quality Education encompass information for a number of life skills. These life skills are part of Global Goal’s program for teaching people how to take care of the planet and its residents.
Not only can these life skills create interest and enthusiasm for directors planning a top-down curriculum for the classroom, but they also provide a bottom-up avenue for teachers and their students to contribute to and become involved in Global Goals in practical ways. Moreover, the interfacing of top-down and bottom-up objectives makes for a more vibrant Gestalt.
The AOK workshops presented from 6/2018-1/2020 and some of the interested organizations to date in Ecuador
Of the workshops presented in 2018-19, the primary topic was ESOL. The second was “ways students can learn English independently”; this topic was presented to a number of police departments, a Red Cross center for professional certification, and volunteers in Red Cross volunteer centers.
Other AOK workshops were presented as well. For example, the workshop on “how to prepare for the high school graduation/college entrance exam” was presented to about 100 high school students in a small indigenous town; also, in the same town a small group of adults attended the presentation of “how to make steamed bread and pancakes”.
AOK visited these organizations in Cuenca in January, 2020 with the following results:
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- MIES – the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion – was appreciative of receiving the six Pre-K – grade 12 & ABE workshops for families of low economic means.
- The Education Dept. at the U. of Cuenca accepted the same workshops for possible use in their teacher training program.
- The Director of Artisan Markets for local & foreign sales for Azuay Province in Cuenca enjoyed receiving the booklet for learning “Market English” along with the supporting websites. The booklet helps vendors with very basic English skills for the sales of their products and also includes an optional workshop for hands-on practice. The Province of Azuay has about 2,000 people in artisanal sales.
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A life skill website helps build Global Goals’ stake holders
A multilanguage website providing a summary of life skill practices from different countries could be used for different age and ability groups. Also, with the use of communication boards, students from different countries could share stories to tell their preschool children, which is one of the life skills AOK teaches.
If students were learning English, they could look for pen pals for email and conversation pals with “Whatsapp”. Students studying nutrition or with good recipes from home could contribute regional recipes to a multilanguage website for healthy, popular, simple foods. These possibilities and many more could help the participants to become Global Goals stakeholders in the SDG’s.
The AOK Basic Skills Project: Zoom & “The Medium is the Message”
Today the Zoom platform has become an international sensation. A 40-minute presentation for 100 participants is free! As life skill workshops can be condensed to this time limit if necessary, future presentations will have a good chance for growth. Zoom carries the message for all students that technology is the “lingua franca” of the educational and working world.
Ideas for obtaining qualified volunteer instruction for worldwide life skill workshops
Professors of Education in universities sometimes like to use the life skill workshops as practice for their student teachers – the topics are practical and provide good, basic teaching practice. The topics are also motivating for the student teachers, as many of them enjoy helping the disadvantaged and contributing to a healthier planet.
University professors and their student teachers could write requirements for different levels of life skill certification in their own particular countries. The resulting efforts could be certified with national badges and certificates that include the SDG/Global Goals insignia, such as Scouts BSA have done.
Also, for SDG 4 -Education, the effort could be driven by high quality curriculum such as the CEFR for learning languages, which already has levels and categories.
Recommendations
Based on the interest generated by the life skill workshops in Ecuadorian Sierra, AOK believes groups such as student teachers and Peace Corps volunteers would have success offering life skill presentations in different parts of the world and that the possibilities warrant investigation. It’s possible that SDG´s could enhance its effort to promote interest in the Global Goals in elementary, secondary and ABE students by:
1. Offering free life skills workshops using both in-person and Zoom presentations. The Corona virus has put constraints on the world of education; however, as Internet connectivity increases, the potential for education programs should significantly increase both in both cities and rural areas.
2. Recruiting universities, education department professors, and student teachers to write, promote, and present free life skill courses with the support of multilingual websites and communication boards.3.
Using World Goals’ badges and certificates of accomplishment to motivate participants to learn about the World Goals. This could help them to enhance their educational skills and become stake holders in their communities.
3. Providing a website for ESOL learners similar to the one the UN provided five years ago. AOK is proposing that SDG’s offer a similar but expanded site.
4. After each AOK workshop, the students were given the anonymous, optional evaluation. One of the questions they were asked was whether they would like to see an organization such as ONU take over the responsibility for managing an international, life skill website that includes their workshop topic.
In all cases there was almost unanimous agreement that this would be a good idea. AOK received 1,000 positive, informal evaluations to this effect.
Conclusion
AOK believes that SDG’s 2 & 4 consideration of the four above recommendations would be worth the effort. If Global Goals is interested, AOK could freely send digital copies its workshop materials in Spanish for both the teachers and the participants their programs to serve as part of a base to construct more in-depth presentations in a variety of languages.
To learn more about the three types of life skills AOK offers, please also refer to the application letters for the different life skills in their respective categories on the AOK website. These letters include the objectives for the different life skills.
Also, to see the details of the AOK presentations, please refer to the AOK Google Drive Account at … If you would like to freely have any of the materials for use with your programs, please contact me and I will send you a sharing link.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
John B. Kirk, Director
E: kirkjohnb5@gmail.com
About the writer:
John Kirk is semi-retired ESOL teacher over 65 who lived in Ecuador for over 10 years before recently relocating to Portland, Maine in the U.S. He is the director of AOK, a charitable educational effort that was connected to his English school in Quito. To learn more about the details of his program, please refer to his website where you can read about the 20 life skill workshops that he’s offering. The theme of the presentations is “How you can use the Internet to improve your knowledge of important life and educational skills without cost”. John holds degrees in MATESL, 1992 & M.S. Ed in Reading Education K-12, and A.A.S. as a Dietetic Technician.