In the last week of January, Dokk 1 was once again the host of the national Danish school’s challenge championship, DM I Fagene. And as is tradition, a small group of MYP 3-5 students from AIS took the bus together over to the library at the harbour, ready to throw their name into the hat and participate in the challenge. Historically, AIS have always done quite well in the DM I Fagene challenge, and this year wasn’t to disappoint either.
When students arrived with Ms Nina, they were greeted along with all the other participants. They were participating this year in the Danish subject category. To start the day, they were given a tour of Dokk 1, where there were also different activities dotted about that they could do, and a welcome speech by DM I Fagene.
Every year, students compete by working on a case study. This case study changes each year and is to help a business or organisation in Denmark solve a problem. This year, in the Danish category, DM I Fagene had teamed up with Aarhus-based Pærfekt. And as the name suggests, this organisation works with the concept of “perfection” and challenge the taboos around body and beauty – indeed, what does it mean to be perfect? To introduce the topic and give more context to what Pærfekt do, they were given a small talk by the founder of Pærfekt, Simon Toftgaard Jespersen, a spokesperson for muscular dystrophy who also lives with the condition. He wanted to challenge the students’ thinking around inclusion and understanding that perfection is more than skin deep and spoke about the difficulties young people face with superficial images on social media, that puts a lot of pressure on people to look a certain way, which isn’t representative of the population as a whole.
A very important and thought-provoking task. For their case study, the students had to write an assignment, brainstorming ideas around raising awareness for both Pærfekt and the issues they had talked about. They had to creatively come up with ideas about how to help their peers move away from these body stereotypes and how we can work on more realistic representations of beauty standards for young people.
Well done to all students who took part in the challenge. It was fantastic to see our students representing AIS in the individual Danish category and were thrilled to hear that Ingeborg claimed 2nd place runner up. This is an especially impressive achievement when you consider that the Danish is not the everyday language of our school. However, we are very proud of all our students who took part, for being risk-takers, creative thinkers and knowledgeable inquirers, who used their IB education to help them solve this task.
