The Peace Wapiti Enterprise Centre welcomed an international guest on March 4th to showcase the school’s off-campus programming and discuss high school education policies to better suit student’s needs.
The PWEC is described as an outreach school within the Peace Wapiti Public School Division, offering a range of flexible program options for highschoolers who might be facing challenges finding success in a traditional learning environment.
Dr. Atsushi Okabe, Associate Professor at the Seisen University in Nagano, Japan, has been studying high school education policy related to school-to-work programs in Alberta since 1999, and throughout the past 12 years, has focused on vulnerable youth in particular.
Okabe has spent years researching how educational programs can be used to foster career development. According to him, there are currently around 350K Japanese students per year consistently absent from class. He says it is up to the high schools to accept these students with significant gaps in their education.
“Part-time and correspondence schools each have differing flexibility that allows students to complete high school in ways that traditional schools are unable to offer,” he says.
Okabe adds that by studying the initiatives at PWEC, he hopes to gain insights that could contribute to high school education reform in Japan.
PWEC Assistant Principal Robert Robinson says he is grateful for the visit with the doctor, saying he took away several “key understandings” from their visit.
“Though the research is being undertaken by Dr. Okabe, as a teacher at PWEC, I also took away some key understandings that will push me to look at our own program with a new perspective,” he says. “I appreciate Dr. Okabe taking time out of his very hectic travel schedule to learn about PWEC, and how we support our students.”
After his stop in Grande Prairie, Okabe has plans to visit different programs in Calgary and Edmonton, before returning to Tokyo next week.
