Making the Global Local
Acknowledging the Traditional Lands of the Sc’ianew First Nation
Pearson College UWC is located on the traditional territory of the Sc’ianew First Nation, also known as Beecher Bay. The College is proud to acknowledge the First Peoples on whose traditional territories we live, learn and work. Acknowledging territory shows recognition of and respect for Indigenous Peoples of both Canada and the world.
Our mission
As one of 18 United World Colleges, our 4,300 alumni, dedicated faculty, and committed staff personify the UWC movement and mission: to make education a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. Pearson College UWC is a two-year, pre-university school for 200 exceptional students aged 16 to 19 who represent over 80 countries and every Canadian province and territory.
The context for the strategy
Welcome to the executive summary of the Pearson College UWC 2022-27 Strategic Plan. Developed in consultation with stakeholder input and endorsed by the College’s Board of Directors, this plan builds upon our previous five-year Roadmap for the Future. We are excited to share our new strategy with you, and we welcome your observations and counsel. The 2022-27 period marks a time of celebration and reflection as we look forward to celebrating the 60th anniversary of the UWC Movement and the upcoming 50th anniversary of Pearson College UWC.
Positioning Pearson as a global leader in climate action built upon cutting-edge educational innovation utilizing local university and Indigenous expertise.
During our initial consultations, we heard calls for a strong focus on specific deliverables drawing on Pearson’s distinctive strengths:
Place-based experiential education & sustainability
Indigenous reconciliation
Student leadership and community well-being
The focus on place-based education strengthens our position within the UWC movement as a leader in climate action and sustainability. Our unique access to First Nations partners, knowledge and practices, plus our local post-secondary institutions specializing in climate adaptation and Indigenous education, offers the wider UWC essential resources to help achieve our mutual commitment for a sustainable and peaceful future.
Just as the UWC movement was created in the post-war era to help prevent future global conflict, Pearson is now rising to the challenge of developing new leaders with the skill sets and mindsets to address our global climate and ecological crisis.
This is not a limiting or narrow agenda. In fact, it is the opposite. The new Climate Action Leadership Diploma pathway honours the UWC commitment in the best liberal arts traditions and fully embraces the advantages of our location to ensure our students can become the most impactful and successful future global leaders.
Whether a student pursues our new IB Career-related Program (IBCP) Climate Action Leadership Diploma or the existing IB Diploma Program (IBDP), the increased choice and personalization offered by additional education pathways, will ultimately benefit all students collectively as our new competency framework and micro-credentialling give everyone access to best innovative practices. This future-focused, challenging educational foundation strongly supports key goals beyond curricula programming. This includes:
Refining and expanding our institutional social impact and outreach
Advancing student leadership training
Clarifying operational priorities
Facilitating expanded philanthropic outreach
Enhancing our overall financial strategy
Building upon this vision and these strengths, our updated College profile would look like this:
Pearson College UWC continues to produce students who excel academically with enhanced leadership skills grounded in university-level competencies and credentials informed by an innovative new curriculum to help solve the biggest problem facing humanity. Young people graduating from our academically-demanding and challenging experiential programs will go forward with an explicit and concrete roadmap to meet the UWC mission of peace and sustainability through their further education, careers and personal pathways in life.
Vision and values informing our strategy
The UWC mission, vision and values are foundational to our philosophy. However, the innovative and ground-breaking educational structure we outline in this plan demands that we also understand and incorporate new values and principles that complement this. They also push us to future-proof our offerings by opening ourselves to Indigenous knowledge evolved since time immemorial and equipping young people to meet and overcome the disruptions challenging our world.
Whether we are enhancing our educational programs, facilitating greater student agency, enhancing community well-being and decision-making or committing to sustainable operations and facilities, these are embedded in the First Peoples Principles of Learning that emphasize intergenerational responsibility, a focus on place, sustainability, collective responsibility and environmental stewardship. A foundation of Indigenous knowledge and ethics curated over thousands of years will inform our future-facing strategic approach.
A promise that learning will be
Transformative
Intergenerational
Experiential
Inclusive
Holistic
Place-based
7th generation principle
The Seventh Generation Principle, based on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy, states that decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future.
Strategic drivers
These strategic drivers emphasize Pearson’s strengths in place-based education and harness our unique position in driving an educational moral imperative. This also broadens and deepens every student’s social and educational outcome by elevating agency, leadership skills and creative problem-solving competencies. Details informing the three drivers are shown in this summary:
» Place as land, sea, sky, people, aesthetics and ontology
» Distinguishing Pearson’s characteristics amongst the UWC network
» Maximizing our location, resources, partnerships and expertise
» Sustainability in all things, including infrastructure, travel, energy, food, philanthropy, finance, and operations and a commitment towards net-zero operations
» Place and sustainability through the lens of Indigenous wisdom, practices and involvement
» Prioritizing Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan Working Group actions as a core component of our wider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commitments
» DEI working group to involve all stakeholders
» DEI is the main driver for our five-year human resources strategy
» Climate Action, Reconciliation and DEI will be explicitly interlinked
» Increasing social emotional literacy, mental health and wellbeing, self-regulation, and autonomy
» Further develop means to enhance transparency and collective problem solving
» College commitment to widening responsibility, distributing leadership and creating a cohesive culture of trust and support for decision-making
» College Assembly (CA) model of authentic student and adult decision-making
» Program focus on developing advanced competencies, skills and literacies for both students and adults
Educational programming and community well-being
Engagement, outreach and philanthropy
Financial stewardship and initiatives
The following sections demonstrate how these describe a comprehensive way forward for Pearson College UWC as a thriving and vital educational institution dedicated to supporting and guiding young leaders and changemakers from across the globe with a foundation of peace and sustainability and a readiness to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.
Educational Programming
This describes our work to develop Pearson’s new curriculum pathway, which will run alongside the existing IB Diploma program. This ambitious project involves co-delivery
partnerships with Camosun College, Royal Roads University (RRU) and First Nations educators to provide enhanced educational opportunities for all Pearson students and allow us to deliver several key goals in our Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan.
Community Wellbeing, Distributed Decision-Making and Skill/Competency Development
This describes community wellbeing with a focus on student agency and influence on decision-making as well as skills development. Further development of the College Assembly (CA) model of student co-constructed decision-making working alongside leadership and staff. This also includes our DEI Working Group, which draws together alumni and other experts working in the field of DEI in different industries. Student involvement in competency-building is supplemented by a new Core Course to develop self-management skills, social-emotional literacy, respectful community understanding and awareness of misconduct policies, restorative justice and tone-setting agendas.
This will be tracked, evaluated and captured by a student leadership Climate Change Adaptation Competency Framework (see next page) in development through Royal Roads University. High school-aged students who work together on this agenda and develop complex leadership skills focused on solutions will accelerate competency development linked to future employment, social impact, versatility and resilience. This framework will be utilized by all Pearson students in both the IBDP and IBCP pathways.
Student well-being and safeguarding will be enhanced as training for faculty, staff, and houseparents equips them with better skills to support early intervention for student support and encourage shared responsibility for collective community wellbeing. Responsiveness from the College in reacting to staff/faculty wellbeing concerns is also a strategic commitment. This will be enhanced by having a 360-degree component in all staff/faculty evaluations to ensure consistency and collective feedback in appraisal processes.
Climate change adaptation competency framework
» Climate Adaptation Leadership (change management, decision-making, professional practice)
» Climate Adaptation Planning and Implementation (strategy, solution design, policy and governance-building capability)
» Climate Adaptation Science and Practice Literacy (Indigenous knowledge systems, climate change science, climate adaptation science, research)
» Climate Adaptation Challenge (vulnerability & impact analysis, risk assessments, future thinking, economic and “Indigenomics” analysis, personal resilience)
» Climate Adaptation Collaboration (communication, cultural agility, facilitation, engagement, collaboration, and solidarity)
This section describes efforts to engage with alumni, parents, supporters, stakeholders and the broader community to advance the mission, understanding and awareness of Pearson College UWC. A key highlight includes the successful completion of our Renew and Re-found Campaign that already has supported the full renovation of all five student residences and other campus infrastructure upgrades and has grown our endowment to provide scholarships for students from around the world.
Within the plan period, the College will celebrate its 50th anniversary. This is an opportunity to raise our profile and grow our audience of supporters to ensure funding is in place to deliver on the College’s strategic drivers.
This section focuses on sustainability in ecological, operational and financial terms.
Sustainability in all its forms is key to ensuring the College’s future as a robust and financially healthy institution committed to sustainable operational practices. These are fundamental components of the College’s climate action and Indigenous reconciliation agendas.