Sowing Ideas, Growing Changemakers

What SEED looks like in practice

The SEED curriculum is designed to help students move from understanding sustainability to actively shaping it. By building systems thinking skills and applying the five stages of Service learning in real-life contexts, students learn how meaningful change actually happens. Through case studies, real-world examples, and hands-on projects, they research, design, implement, and evaluate actions that have a genuine impact. 

Each grade level deepens this journey in a different way:

• Grade 6 begins with environmental sustainability, exploring waste, permaculture, and composting—and applying systems thinking to understand food waste and e-waste on campus, in Singapore, and globally. Students design their own individual changemaker actions and put their learning into practice through collective composting with their mentor classes, making sustainability visible and tangible in daily life.

• Grade 7 shifts the focus to social sustainability and community building as students collaborate with local partners such as Lion Befrienders, All Hands Together and Apex. Through these relationships, they strengthen community connections, practise active listening, develop empathy, and design activities that highlight inclusion and resilience.

• Grade 8 turns toward economic sustainability, introducing students to circular and linear business models, the world of social enterprises, and the innovators behind them. Students design their own social enterprise concepts from packaging waste and meet changemakers such as Marie from Wildness Organic Chocolate, learning how entrepreneurship can create dignified opportunities for people with diverse needs—in partnership with APSN Centre for Adults (CFA)—while producing sustainable, organic products like chocolate.

Becoming changemakers

This steady progression mirrors the students’ development: as their skills grow, so does the complexity of the challenges they take on. Sustainability, community, and entrepreneurship aren’t separate topics—they are ways for students to understand the world and their own potential. We really try to guide our students to view sustainability beyond just a project, but as a lens through which they can see the world as they grow and develop their own interests and passions. Whether in classrooms, on campus and/or the earth, we want them to build long-lasting relationships with our community partners, see the impact of their efforts and step forward and embrace their role as changemakers, shaping a more sustainable world in ways both big and small.

Students from UWCSEA come to APSN CFA, to make chocolates and biscuits with adults with special needs. It’s a win-win situation where both sides get to learn how we make it possible to integrate everyone in our community. The students also get to learn about organic farming and the importance of good practice to preserve the land. They also learn about the Social enterprise business, how it works.

– Marie Monmont, Wildness Organic Chocolate