South-North School Partnership for Sustainability

The aim of this 2 year project from 2009-2011 was to create a South-North School Partnership for Sustainability. The project involved a collaboration between Oulun Lyseon Higher Secondary School in Oulu, Finland and Ullens School in Kathmandu, Nepal.

In 2009 there was a visit by Timothy Bedford and Rosalind Cooper of Oulun Lyseo Higher Secondary School to Ullens School to share ideas on a South-North school partnership for sustainable development.

The process of co-creating a web-based learning environment (SUSNET) was started to provide resources on sustainable development issues and indicators, transformative pedagogy, media literacy, action research and distance education, as well as teaching materials, courses, and activities within and between the schools.

The web environment connected the teachers and students of the two schools by providing messaging and chat facilities. In addition, the schools explored the possibility for synchronous distance teaching using videoconferencing technology.

A further visit was made to Ullens in October 2010 that included filmmaking workshops for teachers and students on sustainability themes. Following this, students from both Ullens and Lyseo produced short films related to sustainability. The films were shared in the web-environment that promoted a dialogue between the Nepalese and Finnish students. Some of the student and teacher films can be viewed here (User account: SNSP, Password: visitor).

Overall the project enabled teachers and students from both schools to gain more knowledge of their partner country, the South-North relationship and the similar and different sustainability challenges they faced.