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"The best residential school environments are those that expect the most of students in terms of behaviour and leadership, places where peer influence is a positive factor, and where students mature into well disciplined, principled, and happy young adults."
What's new
Creating leaders and fearless learners at AKA
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Student Focus - Extract from Drexel.edu
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New head for Aga Khan Academy
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Televisao de Moçambique (TVM) report on Minister's visit to the Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa
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The Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa celebrates its fourth graduation ceremony
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AKA,M becomes a Microsoft Mentor School
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The Academies visit the USA
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Aga Khan Academy to be Established in Bangladesh
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Aga Khan Urges Educators to Embrace Pluralism and Diversity in Teaching: He urges intellectual humility and pluralism as essential to a 21st Century education
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Aga Khan to Build Uganda's First Aga Khan Academy: Economic development must be matched by human development
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Tools
Play the Aga Khan Academies Video
Aga Khan curricular strands: Examples
Pluralism
1. The central idea of the Year 6 transdisciplinary unit of inquiry Learn to Live and Live to Learn’ is “Learning is a process that defines our humanity and connects us to the world.” Students investigate how we (and each of them) learn, they study basic elements of the biology of learning, what stimulates infants’ and young children’s development. In these investigations, students consider the uniqueness of human learning and how learning helps us connect to others and the world. They experience the ways in which our senses contribute to the overall learning experience (and the ways in which one can learn to cope with blindness or deafness), they explore different learning styles and develop ways of fostering learning in a range of ways (e.g. creating maths games dealing with fractions to assist pictorial learners). Students also consider learning differences-developing an understanding and appreciation of children with learning disabilities. The students investigate the lives of famous individuals who overcame learning difficulties (e.g. Einstein, Churchill, Edison, Walt Disney, M. Wanyoike – a blind marathon champion) and discuss the statement “Disability is not inability”. This year, the unit inspired concrete action with students participating in a charity walk with the Blind Paralympics.
2. Within their English language and literature course Year 8 students read Beverley Naidoo’s novel Burn My Heart, which tells the story, set in Kenya in the early fifties, of two young boys who share a friendship but are separated by race in the troubled time of the Mau Mau rebellion. The unit of work’s guiding question (for students to explore from a range of perspectives and contexts) is “How does my cultural/social background affect the way I relate to others?” Students explore different perspectives through their reading and discussion of the themes, topics and issues emerging from the novel, their discovery of literary devices related to characterisation, plot and setting, and through their research into that period of Kenyan history and its legacy into the present. For example, they are asked to rewrite and dramatize a short passage in the novel from another point of view; they write about a conflictive issue in their personal experience from their own point of view, reflect on the ways in which their social and cultural background affects that point of view and consider other perspectives on the issue. Students also read another account of the Mau Mau period and write a text to defend one author’s point of view over another. An important aspect of the students’ reflection has to do with the power of friendship and trust and the ways in which important differences in social status and context can be overcome through a deeper understanding of common values.
