JUMP! is a non-profit social enterprise dedicating to exploit passion and potential of individual, community leaders, and global citizens through experiential education. JUMP! has two hubs, one in Beijing, China, the other, Bangkok, Thailand. It still is a fairly young organization attracting people all over the world to contribute to its mission. JUMP! is reaching its 10th year anniversary. During past years, JUMP! has developed sustainable partnerships with international and local schools, outdoor programs, business, NGOs across industries. In the past summer, my colleagues and I designed, organized and facilitated an experiential education program with 130 8th graders from Dulwich College School in Beijing, an well-established international school located at suburban Beijing. The program was themed as personal discovery, sense of community and connection to China.
What leads me to JUMP! is the idea of facilitating the process of learning as an external facilitator, instead of a didactic lecturer, and its focuses on personal discovery, sense of community, and global citizenship. Emphasizing on mindset, growth, and shaping a safe environment for participants and encourage them to jump is what fascinates me. Throughout the experience, I learned operation process of running an experiential program, how to communicate with teachers, as well as other stake holders. On program, facilitating activities with 8th graders is my favorite thing. Setting up background content, architecting questions and challenges, and debriefing experiences can keep me alive, awake, alert, and enthusiastic all day long. After program is officially completed, researching on topics like learning theory, mindset, character development, and evaluating program constructed my daily work. That is where a lot of learning coming in play. The flow is natural.
I guess what I have learned most is mindset, and its impact on my daily behavior, as well as of others, especially kids. My colleagues and I paid great attention on how different situation influences our mindset, and its influences on our decision making, communication and efficiency. What we found out is that whenever situation gets tough, it is naturally, even intuitively for people to get anxious, upset, or frustrated. However, as long as we acknowledge the existence of these "negative" feelings, we would be able to guide our mind back on look for ways/strategies to solve the problem. That changes the whole game, especially when facilitating with kids. We often forget how imitative kids are, how well and fast they can actually learn from our behavior. By having the mindset above, kids would also know that it is OK for them to make mistakes, or fall because all they have to do is to get up and think of another way out.
In sum, even with the unfamiliarity of a new city, heavily polluted air and hotpot-like weather, I was JUMP!ing around Beijing, learning, meeting new friends, and finished my first 5K race. So pretty amazing summer!
