By Akio Miyamoto – Director and Secretary General, SJVE
The Society of Japanese Value Engineering (SJVE) started up a collaboration project with the National Federation of UNESCO Associations in JAPAN for the purpose of introducing the concept of Value Engineering in ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) program in schools. ESD is about enabling us to constructively and creatively address present and future global challenges, and create more sustainable and resilient societies. It includes key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning: for example, climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction and sustainable consumption. It also requires participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behavior and take action for sustainable development. ESD consequently promotes competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way.
UNESCO has been recognized globally as the lead agency for ESD. It coordinates the implementation of the Global Action Program (GAP) on ESD, as official follow-up to the United Nations Decade of ESD (2005-2014).
SJVE believes that those skills and capabilities required for promoting ESD can be obtained by applying VE methods and techniques. If VE is firmly established into ESD program, the children of today will be able to take actions to resolve and overcome various global challenges we are currently facing in a proactive manner.
Our short-term goal is to develop textbooks and teaching materials of VE which can be used at ESD education program from the primary to the high-school curriculums. In addition, we will be conducting awareness-raising and fundamental VE seminar for school teachers.
Also, we have started with fund raising and sales of bottled mineral water as part of our cause-related marketing initiatives, in order to obtain funds for conducting this project.
At the 49th SJVE Conference scheduled on October 25-26, 2016, “VE & ESD Forum” will be a good opportunity to inform this new initiative of SJVE. The forum will showcase some case studies of VE application in ESD program, and the panel discussion by key experts in VE and ESD from SJVE and UNESCO.
We hope that many people will join this forum and be aware of VE and ESD to contribute to the global sustainability development, and encourage their acceptance and assistance toward this endeavor.
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