Amala
( Sky School )
“If you want to build an ambitious education project and are unsure how to turn vision into reality, Stuart is the person to work with. We came to him with a big idea and a blank sheet of paper. Drawing on his deep educational background and strong expertise in curriculum and pedagogy, and through skilful facilitation, deep listening, and thoughtful challenge, Stuart helped us clarify what we wanted and needed. He guided us in developing a full upper secondary education programme from scratch, thriving in open-ended and complex spaces. His work gave shape and coherence to our vision, resulting in a powerful educational approach that continues to underpin our work today.”
— Polly Ackhurst and Mia Eskalund co-founders of Amala (Sky School)
2017 Amala Refugee High School Diploma, formerly called Sky School
In 2017 Stuart met Polly Ackhurst and Mia Eskelund at the UWC Global Congress.
Polly and Mia wanted to create something to support the many refugees who did not have access to secondary education, unlike the UWC scholars who gained the very limited UWC places available. Stuart had spent years writing programmes and curriculum for transformational learning for nomadic learners and suggested he could help create the programmes. Sky School was born as an idea, and development started.
Stuart at UWCSEA in Singapore convened a student group to help codevelop the programme and curriculum development approach. These students had a large influence on the early development and support for Sky School.
Learning Designs
The work started with writing foundational documents to create a coherent and aligned set of guiding statements, definitions of learning and pedagogy, so that Stuart, Polly and Mia had a shared understanding of what we believed. Paolo Freire and Amartya Sen were particularly strong influences at this point. Below are some early prototypes of models.
Hackathons
Innovation for Amala included not only the content but the process. We developed a two day Hackathon methodology to bring together students, educators and field experts to co-design the programmes.
Inspired by Jony Ive’s ‘Love From’, Stuart, Polly and Mia captured some of the sayings and ways of thinking that permeated the developmental arch of creating Sky School / Amala
