The “Moral and Civic Education” programme for secondary schools was successfully launched by YUVA on Monday, 14 January 2019. The development training took place at Patten College (Girls) and our first batch has commenced with around 35 ambitious students of Grade 9.

The moral and civic education is an important component which targets at fostering teenagers’ positive values and attitudes through the learning and teaching of several key learning subjects. The programme also aims at developing students’ ability to identify the values entrenched and help them make a reasonable judgement on different issues that they may face at a certain point in life.

The session has started with an ice-breaking, where the YUVA team has introduced themselves to the audience. Students were encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and present themselves to the audience. This was like the first step to engage the students into the session and prevent boredom. The team requested the students to tell the audience about their names, passions, hobbies and fun facts. Most of the students showed great interest during the session and were quite energetic.

For the second activity which was free thinking, the students were asked to state what comes in their minds when they hear about the words values, ethics and morality. This has been designed to develop critical thinking of the students. On further elaboration, the story of “the boy wolf who cried wolf” was shared to the students and later were asked to analyse the moral behind the narration. Again, this encouraged the participants to come forward with certain morals that they knew about. The activity helped the students in sharing their personal experiences.

The third activity consisted mainly of a group of two people and was asked by the YUVA team to say something good of the person sitting next to them. This activity was conducted to encourage interaction and kindness between the students. The main aim was also to remove a barrier between the students who did not want to befriend someone due to shyness or social anxiety. Later on, the YUVA team encouraged the participants to make a group of 4 to 8 people for a sketch. This was conducted to make the session more competitive with the main topic being morality vs immorality.