College Theme and Goals
2012 College theme – Shaping Our Future
“The future is not something that just happens to you. The future is something you do.”
Glen Hiemstra, futurist.
The Beaconhills College theme for 2012 is ‘Shaping Our Future’.
This theme is a natural progression from this year’s focus on celebrating diversity. In 2012, the College will build on the strong foundations established under its key goals of achieving personal excellence, international learning, care for environment, service to community and learning with technology.
2012 will see the College take these goals to new heights, encapsulated in the theme of ‘Shaping Our Future’.
Beaconhills students will shape their own future through the use of cutting-edge technology in the form of iPads, through the College-wide mission to create a lighter environmental footprint, their care and concern for those less fortunate and their own spiritual journey to personal growth and happiness.
This new theme has a strong individual component with an ultimate wider goal of each individual’s contribution to our collective future.
Students have a responsibility to use the knowledge and skills they gain at Beaconhills College not only for their own benefit, but for the greater good. As the world faces the challenges of global warming, poverty, disease and rapidly-changing technology, our students have a very important role in ‘Shaping Our Future’.
College Goals
1. Striving for Excellence
The College provides a broad curriculum to cater for the diverse abilities and aspirations of our students. For many years Beaconhills has encouraged students to strive to achieve their ‘personal best.’
This year we will continue to encourage students to not only aim for personal best, but to strive beyond that – to stretch their abilities and aim higher than they may previously have imagined. We strongly believe that academic standards can be raised further with the full support of parents, staff and students.
The College goal is to inspire our community to embrace academic learning as the central part of a student’s life. We want to encourage individuals and families to value study as being as important as other pursuits, such as part-time work, sport and other extra-curricular activities.
2. Embracing International Learning
2012 promises to be an exciting year of development for Beaconhills on an international scale. The College already has an active International Program with well-established relationships with three sister schools in Bourg St Maurice and Laval, France and Ibaraki, Japan. Each year the College facilitates reciprocal, short-stay, cultural student exchanges with each of our sister schools. Beaconhills was delighted to expand our International Program last year to accommodate a fourth sister school relationship with Suining, China and this year staff and students have visited the Suining school.
This year the College also welcomes a number of international Senior School students for an extended period of time to study at Beaconhills. This program offers many cultural, language, learning and experiential benefits for our current students as well as the international students.
More than 100 additional students will have the opportunity to travel abroad in the next year through cultural, art and service programs. Again this year, a small group of Berwick students and staff will tour to East Timor and visit our Sister School, 20 de Septembo, in the Ermera District, to witness what a positive difference the fundraising work that our College community has made.
The College also offers student tours of Canada, the USA and Nepal. These students will learn of the local culture, customs and history through art.
3. Caring for our Environment
Beaconhills has finalised its College-wide sustainability plan which focuses on energy use, waste management, water management and building design and development.
The most critical component in encouraging positive behavioural change at Beaconhills is to challenge our current attitudes towards environmental issues across the College community. Every member will be challenged to make a contribution and raise his/her awareness. This will include the College Executive, teaching staff, students, maintenance staff and, importantly, Beaconhills families who play a critical role in helping to drive change in the attitudes and behaviours of their children regarding environmental issues.
Some of the key objectives in the College’s environmental plan include the following:
Water Usage: To decrease the College’s consumption of mains water to seven litres per person, per day by 2015. This will mean that the College has made an 85% reduction since 2005, when water consumption peaked at 46 litres per person.
Energy and Electricity: To reduce the College’s consumption of energy that produces carbon emissions by 50% from 2009 levels by the end of 2015. This is an enormous challenge as the College has installed air conditioning in every area, therefore increasing our consumption of electricity. The College is also increasing our use of electricity through the use of technology across the three campuses.
Waste Management: To develop an alternative policy and practices for waste management and recycling across the College to ensure that Beaconhills disposes of no waste to landfill sites by 2015. This is also a bold move and will call on the College to revaluate its use of recycling products in all areas of the College. Beaconhills must also consider what products are purchased in the future to ensure that any waste can be recycled to meet this goal.
Buildings: To ensure each newly developed building operates independently of the environmental conditions and to evolve our existing structures to be more ‘eco friendly’. The first building to have these features built into its design is the new Year 9 Centre at the Berwick Campus and the new Senior School buildings at the Pakenham Campus. We will make this a key design component for all future buildings.
4. Serving our Community
The spirit of giving is a Christian principle which is an integral part of the College philosophy.
The College has always recognised that we can make a difference – individually and collectively – to the lives of those less fortunate, but the idea of ‘Community Service’ was consolidated in 1994 when we responded to the crisis in Rwanda.
Now our Community Service activities are established throughout all levels of the College, from Campus to House, Subschool and at an individual level, with students independently committing time or fundraising to charity.
Our annual fundraising for various charities now runs to the tens of thousands of dollars and we aim to continue and improve on those efforts in years to come.
The College continues to support, through fundraising, our school in Bangladesh built by CO-ID, an organisation which has built 45 schools for children in the poorest parts of the country. This is the major House project for the Pakenham Campus.
Our efforts have also supported the rebuilding of our friendship school, 20 Setembro De 99, in East Timor, the major Berwick Campus project.
The Common Good component of our Year 9 program encourages students to research a social issue and come up with a solution, including a fundraising project which they then share with their parents and the community.
Pakenham and Berwick Campuses participate each term in a major charity event, such as the Drive for 4Cs’ Emergency Food Bank and Operation Christmas Shoebox.
And of course there are four visits a year from the Red Cross Blood Bank, which recruits more than 200 students and staff to donate their blood each year. Added to this are many fundraisers throughout the College for specific charities or as an emergency response to natural disasters. These include out of uniform days where money is raised through gold coin donations.
5. Learning with Technology
At Beaconhills College, we are determined to not merely keep pace with rapidly-changing technology, but stay a step ahead of it.
A brave new world of education is here, where students learn differently and the days of teachers standing before a blackboard is a distant memory.
Research shows young people now actually process information differently – their visual and spatial intelligence is increasingly becoming more developed and their access to information is boundless. Students now communicate with people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, they work more collaboratively and must consider a multitude of viewpoints.
The introduction of iPads across the College in 2012 and our new digital library are some of the ways to we aim to enhance student learning through the use of latest technology. But ‘technology’ covers more than just hardware and software; teachers face the important challenge of guiding students through the enormous mass of information, help them make sensible decisions about what is good or bad quality and what is relevant to their interests.
Our goal is to ensure teachers work with students to develop ‘skilled learners’ who have the passion, ability and insight to determine their own path.