Last week École Olds High School (ÉOHS) hosted a conference for 13 UNESCO delegated schools across Alberta with representatives from schools in Saskatchewan and Mexico.
UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The students got to hear from UNESCO program officer Cassandre Pérusse, reminding them about the UNESCO mission and its core values.
“UNESCO was created in 1945 after the Second World War and the mission is really to ensure and promote peace, human rights and sustainable societies,” said Pérusse. “I think that’s the true essence of UNESCO and UNESCO schools.”
Pérusse says the event at ÉOHS was one of the best conferences she’s attended in her career.
“I was really inspired and amazed by (École) Olds High School as a school, but also as a community. You wouldn't necessarily expect this from a community with a population of — I think it’s a population of 12,000 people,” said Pérusse (The town's population, according to the 2016 census, is 9,184).
Grade 12 student Hein Bronnes says he enjoyed the conference because it made him think about things differently.
“The UNESCO conference I think was really good because it just shows you all these different perspectives and topics that you might not think about during your daily lives, especially the aspect of when we include fair trade choices.” said Bronnes.
“People don’t normally think they can do that in their regular day-to-day life, but a massive conference like this shows that it is something you can accomplish.”
“I know myself, I came out of the day with a larger appreciation for the land and the traditional communities that existed here before we did,” said Paden Knull, another Grade 12 student.
Grade 9 student Kenzie Hickman was also impressed by the conference.
“I thought it was way better than I thought it was going to be. Like, I didn’t know that there was so much you could learn in that short amount of time and from different people,” Hickman said.
ÉOHS educational assistant Beverley Toews, who organized the event, says the conference was a huge success because organizers made it “very experiential.”
“We went out on the land and let kids just be on the land. We had drumming they could participate in, playing the spoons. And New Blood was kind of an experiential thing too,” Toews said.
New Blood was a performance staged at the TransCanada Theatre the evening of May 6, the first day of the UNESCO activities.
New Blood is a story of reconciliation, featuring poetry, music and traditional Indigenous dancing. It shows the experience of a child in a residential school and how he reclaimed his way of life and became the chief of his people.
“That was probably my favourite,” said Grade 12 student Rex Asis. “I’m a music person myself and I liked the music choices they had made.”
Toews said that the reactions from the visiting schools were all positive and made a lasting impact.
“We evaluated all of the sessions and things on a scale of one to five. Most of them were fives with some fours,” Toews said. “So it was overwhelmingly enjoyed by everybody and one of the people said that not only did this conference touch their mind, but also touched their heart and made them feel welcome.”
