24th annual Hwa Chong Institution’s Student Leaders Conference
At the end of May our Head of Senior School, Mr Roger McNamara accompanied four of our Year 11 students to Singapore for the 24th annual Hwa Chong Institution’s Student Leaders Conference.
This year’s conference had 323 participants from Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong, India, South Korea, China, New Zealand and Australia.
The theme of the conference was Cognizance: Connecting the dots. In the 21st century, media has proven to perpetuate every sector of our daily lives. In this increasingly technological world, different groups of people are being connected economically, socially and politically. This creates a need for media literacy amongst present day youths, to enable them to come to their own conclusions with the information the media provides them, for them to then prudently manage the way they use the media.
In smaller sub-themed groups with a wide variety of media related issues that are plaguing our world today, students engaged in discussions and then formulated solutions to these issues to produce a final presentation of ideas. Topics included social media, online privacy, advertising, detrimental effects of free speech, social media activism, propaganda, government and citizen data, fake news, globalisation, erosion of identity, cyber bullying and media regulation. Year 11 students Jackson Coad, Robert Elkerton, Luca Gentile and Johnathan Lau were members of different groups and represented Hutchins well in the way they engaged in discussion, shared ideas and collaborated for the final presentation. As a result of this commitment and involvement, at the final assembly Hutchins was awarded the Best Delegation.