By Mark Leong from our Skillseed team and our programme participants from SMU and BEAM Foundation
The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by storm in early 2020, imposing unexpected restrictions to all of our lives in more ways than one. Wearing masks while out, restricted social gatherings, and social distancing have become some of the “new norms” that we’ve had to adapt to in these unprecedented times. One other aspect of our lives that has seen huge changes is cross-border travel. While many of us do so for leisure or business, one reason that tertiary students choose to travel is for Overseas Community Service Projects (OCSP).
Pre-Covid-19, overseas community service projects involved local students travelling to interact with overseas host communities, immersing and learning more about their way of life while exchanging insights and supporting the host community in their endeavours. Due to the pandemic, this was no longer possible, and similar to how many businesses and platforms pivoted online, so did OCSPs. In the inaugural virtual OCSP organised by Skillseed, we brought together a team of scholars from Singapore Management University (SMU) and students from BEAM Education Foundation in Thailand, an organisation that seeks to provide educational access to marginalised people, many of whom are Burmese refugees living in Thailand.
The main aim of this partnership was to empower the SMU students to tap on their strengths, lived experiences and skills to share this knowledge with their Thai and Burmese peers. In order to prepare for their interactions with the students from BEAM, Skillseed first conducted pre-equipping sessions with the SMU students, ranging from helping them to identify their own gifts through an asset-based lens, to understanding the complex situation that the Burmese migrants are facing. This allowed the SMU students to better design their engagement sessions with the BEAM students.
The SMU students were split into two teams to carry out the engagement sessions. Team A focused their engagement sessions on topics that would help the BEAM students to ignite change in areas that they are passionate about. Some of the topics included goal-setting, communication and interpersonal skills, critical thinking and project management. While most of the engagement sessions centered around the sharing of skills on these topics, time was also set aside during these engagement sessions for SMU and BEAM students to understand and learn from each other culturally, forging a two-way relationship between both sides. Here’s what Lorraine Goh from Team A had to share about her experience!
“The pre-equipping sessions were useful in allowing us to reflect on our concerns and what we wanted to achieve and learn through the process. It was heartwarming to know that our team had the same goals, which was to create a positive impact for the participants in Myanmar and Thailand by sharing our skills and knowledge with them. Many of us also wanted to make more international friends, so that we could learn about their lives and culture. This also allowed us to be more appreciative of the things in our lives, widen our perspectives and be more understanding. Our team had diverse concerns, which included language barriers, internet connection and whether our sessions would be helpful for the BEAM students. Nonetheless, everyone was very excited and hopeful that we had the opportunity to do something that could positively impact others.
Some things I learned while designing the engagement sessions was that everything is a team effort. These included deciding the slides theme, delegation of work, designing the curriculum, setting up of backend support and schedule, all of these tasks had to be discussed and planned out properly. It was very helpful to have a curriculum template with the timings and description of the activities so that all the team members were aware of what they had to do and we could delegate the work accordingly. Additionally, we wanted to make the session engaging while sharing our knowledge with them. I learnt how to use icons, pictures, as well as Burmese translations on slides to make it more fun and engaging for the participants.
Overall, the experience was very heartwarming, fun and eye opening. I am very grateful to have completed this project with such a wonderful team, and that the BEAM students were all so friendly and open to share their experiences and opinions. I learned many things from this experience, some of which include learning how to plan engaging virtual sessions and how to use tools on zoom and other platforms to make the sessions more interactive. This experience allowed me to step out of my comfort zone, improve my communication and public speaking skills. The highlight of the programme was definitely hearing from the experiences of the BEAM participants, as well as sharing my own experience so that we could better connect with them. One thing I will apply to my life is that we should not always expect for things to go as planned, but what we can do is to listen to feedback so that we can adapt and improve future sessions.”
-Lorraine Goh, SMU Scholar
Team A during a reflection activity
On the other hand, Team B took a slightly different approach, focusing on the theme of Life-skills to support the BEAM students in their journey towards higher education. For Team B, their engagement sessions centered around more technical skills such as the use of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, presentation skills, interview skills and resume writing. Similar to Team A, the engagement sessions were not completely focused on a one-way sharing of these skills, but also on the mutual exchange of ideas, knowledge and experiences between both the SMU and BEAM students.
Let’s find out more about their experience from Tan Yu Yang of Team B!
“As a part of team B, I was tasked to design the engagement session for Microsoft Excel. One key challenge I faced while designing the session was specifically on the preparation of materials with sufficient flexibility to adapt on the actual day.
Firstly, there was ambiguity surrounding the BEAM students’ familiarity with Excel and we were worried about the potential gaps in knowledge. Hence, we structured our engagement with an increasing level of difficulty to tackle scenarios where what we were sharing with the BEAM students was either too simple or too complex.
Secondly, we had concerns surrounding potential technical difficulties and software challenges, such as navigating between different ribbons, sheets, and data sources. Hence, it was a very enriching process whereby my team and I stood (for the first time) from a teaching perspective to design our resources in the most organized and structured format to ensure optimal delivery.
Lastly, conceptual challenges were identified while we were preparing our materials. Certain concepts in Excel such as VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and absolute referencing were not thoroughly intuitive. Therefore, we reverse engineered the overarching bases of these concepts and identified “supporting” concepts to build our materials up to a “capstone” concept – similar to applying the pyramid approach to learning.
One thing I wished I could have done differently was to include a short video or introduction to Excel prior to the engagement session itself. This would cultivate curiosity surrounding the topic and give a good head start to the purpose of the engagement session. With that end in mind, the BEAM students would then be able to develop expectations and deliberate their thoughts and questions prior to the session itself.”
-Tan Yu Yang, SMU Scholar
Team B’s session on basic Microsoft Excel skills
Upon the conclusion of Project Hai Khun, here’s what one of the BEAM students had to share about the engagement sessions:
“I am so glad and grateful to have joined this workshop. I am sad that there will no longer be Tuesday and Saturday workshops. You guys are so amazing and talented. Thank you so much for everything. The last video clip made me cry in my heart because I will miss all of your innocent smiles and faces.”
-BEAM student, Project Hai Khun participant
It was certainly a refreshing experience for the SMU and BEAM students as well as the Skillseed team to have gone through this virtual OCSP journey. It was a reminder for all on how agility and adaptability is vital but more importantly, we visualised what can be achieved when we tap on our individual and collective assets to make this experience possible despite the many challenges.
Through such virtual skilled volunteerism programmes, Skillseed hopes to leverage the unique skills and knowledge that our local students have, while equipping them with the confidence to share this knowledge with and empower the host community in their endeavours. If you are seeking out virtual skilled volunteering programmes, do reach out to us at info@skillseed.sg and we look forward to co-creating this experience with you!