In the month of June, students from the Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary, came to visit at the Institute of Educational Development (IED). As part of their post-graduate programme at CEU, the students are required to engage in a ‘Passion Project’, for which they chose to conduct their work on IED’s junior secondary schools called SSCOPE (Schooling, SRHR-G and Counseling for the Children of Post-Primary Education). SSCOPE is a low-cost secondary education school model that explores how general education together with support for emotional wellbeing and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) can be provided to outreached and underprivileged adolescents.
With regards to the SSCOPE schools, the CEU students have begun work to: a) strengthen an advocacy model (through research, designing strategies and a short documentary) for providing holistic education to adolescents that assists in their physical and mental wellbeing; b) explore avenues among parents and communities that promotes SRHR, gender and emotional wellbeing support along with academic learning, and; c) explore the promotion of the advocacy model among various stakeholders (including both government and private organizations) for replication and expansion. During their visit to Dhaka in June 2014, the CEU students conducted fieldwork required for designing the advocacy model and the research. The proposed timeline for the project is till August 2014.
CEU is a graduate-level “crossroads” university where faculty and students from more than 100 countries come to engage in interdisciplinary education, pursue advanced scholarship, and address some of society’s most vexing problems.