Qatar’s pioneering community-based education fair — Doha Learning Days Festival (DLD), hosted by Qatar Foundation (QF)’s global education initiative World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) — is expected to become an annual event. The DLD Festival is set to expand its activities and seek more collaboration with local organisations in the future, said WISE CEO, Stavros N Yiannouka. Since 2017, DLD Festival has been held biennially, culminating at the WISE Summit. This year, however, it is being held as an individual event.
This year’s edition of DLD centres on a strong ‘Youth Empowerment’ theme and is being held at Msheireb Museums until today, February 4. It is offering Qatar’s families, youth, and the general public an opportunity to indulge in experiential informal learning.
Rooted in WISE’s goals of fostering a vibrant local learning ecosystem, DLD aims to expand what learning means by offering hands-on learning activities, taking learning outside of the formal education setting and into informal community spaces, and expanding who is defined as a learning provider, thus making education for everyone.
The festival offers a rich selection of workshops and activities that aim to empower young people through a variety of skills focused on advocacy, arts, well-being, entrepreneurship, tech, science, and coding.
Dedicated sessions for schools in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education have demonstrated innovative teaching approaches, and a host of offshoot activities greatly expanded the learning space. According to Yiannouka, several hundred students are taking part in DLD and the number of participants is higher as the event is open to the public.
Young students at the DLD had the opportunity to learn the foundations of coding during an experiential tech workshop held by Studio 5/6 – a Fab Lab established by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
