BSI’s objective was to work with students (14-16) showing early signs of being at risk of leaving school early, using proven methodologies to help them acknowledge and realize their strengths, passions and values and use design thinking as a process by which they could meaningfully contribute to their own lives, their community and the greater society. The role of BSI was to create a sense of belonging and mattering within a new learning community in which the students came to understand and acknowledge the unique contributions they are each capable of making and how by working together they can make meaningful contributions. Unique to this course was the thoughtful integration of strength identification and the training in the design thinking process in order to provide the students with an early-life experience in using their strengths, values and passions as they develop creative and entrepreneurial skills.
We applied for this project to intervene with students ages 14-16 when they are showing early signs of being at risk of early school leaving. Early School Leaving (ESL) is a complex and dynamic issue impacting every country in Europe. EU member states set a goal of decreasing early school leaving to below 9% by 2030. While several member states have already met this goal there are several who have not, including Iceland and Bulgaria. Both Iceland and Bulgaria have an ESL rate above 10% (which was the EU goal by 2020). According to Eurostat, Iceland’s ESL rate is just below 15% and Bulgaria’s rate is approximately12%. The BSI learning program offered support at the Intervention level for early at-risk students for ESL. Specifically, this program worked with individual students, in a group process in which they first acknowledged and built upon their strengths, passions and values, connected these to their interests and finally used design thinking in groups to address a self-identified community challenge to contribute to their community.