At DLTS International School, Community Engagement (CE) is a core part of the Middle Years Programme (MYP). It is not an add-on to our learning, but a structured form of learning that connects our classrooms to the wider world.
We embrace the International Baccalaureate (IB) definition of community engagement as collaboration that results in a mutually beneficial exchange between students and their communities. At DLTS, we aim for our engagement to be ethical, reciprocal, and grounded in genuine partnership.
From Service FOR to Engagement WITH
The most important idea guiding our Community Engagement activities is a shift away from a traditional charity model, where students do things for a community, toward genuine partnership, where students work alongside community members to identify challenges and work together in developing responses.
- Our students do not arrive in a community with ready-made solutions.
- They listen first, ask questions, build relationships, and act together with their partners.
- We focus on two-directional partnership rather than one-directional “helping”, which can reinforce harmful power dynamics and create dependency.
How Community Engagement Works
Community Engagement at DLTS is qualitative rather than quantitative. We do not track or count hours; we focus on the quality of student engagement, reflection, and personal growth over time.
The Three-Phase Cycle
Every community engagement activity follows a structured three-phase process aligned with the IB’s inquiry-action-reflection cycle:
- Explore & Prepare
- Relate & Act
- Evaluate & Share
Pathways of Engagement
Students can take action through several distinct pathways depending on the needs of our partners. These include advocacy, action research, social entrepreneurship; community building.
Monitoring and Growth
Because CE is about meaningful development, it is not graded like a traditional school subject. Instead, teachers monitor progress qualitatively based on details the student has documented on their journey through journaling, structured reflection responses, and learning artefacts. Through this process, we challenge students to look both outward at the experience and inward at themselves, considering how their own backgrounds, identities, and assumptions shape how they see and act in the world.
