Seeding Social Entrepreneurship St. Andrew’s offers a course in which students learn to become transformative agents for change.
BY CHARLES (“CHUCK”) JAMES Science Teacher and Co-Director of Service Learning
At St. Andrew’s, there has been a decisive shift in the curriculum toward connectedness and context, a shift in response to today’s interconnected world. Pressing issues such as globalization, poverty, and climate change challenge educators to produce creative and innovative historians, business experts, scientists, theologians, psychologists, and artists able to converge on solutions that defy disciplinary boundaries. St. An18
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drew’s faculty members are collaborating across subject lines in innovative ways that connect our students to real world problems with a focus on service to others. During the 2014-2015 academic year, St. Andrew’s created a multi-disciplinary course, International Development and Social Enterprise (IDSE), which teaches economics, history, and a new model of service through social enterprise. Using the relationships that St. Andrew’s has developed across many years in Haiti and South Africa, the course encourages students to turn belief into practice, to be transforma-
tive agents for change. Throughout the year, students examine global issues alongside models of social enterprise that demonstrate the power of personal initiative and the types of creative thinking that bring local solutions to large problems. As a final project, each student identifies a problem in the area of public health, water, food security, or infrastructure in Haiti or South Africa. Using incountry initiatives, ideas, projects and people, students create and propose to a panel of experts a social enterprise initiative for Haiti or South Africa. If implemented,