The Right Colour Blue Mr. Jonathan Yee, Co-Founder/Director Planning and Governance, Echo Change, RCE Saskatchewan 9th Americas RCE Regional Meeting 13 & 14 October, 2020

2. OVERVIEW
• Education is falling behind with educating the public on today’s issues
• There is a need for new creative and innovative ways for educating the public
• Informal and non-formal education needs to be prioritized

3. PROBLEM
• Textbooks still do not adequately address crucial concepts of social cohesion,
political stability and the planet’s future.
• Coverage of immigrant and refugee rights has increased, but some textbooks still
include stereotypical images of migration and migrants.
* 2016 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report – Target 4.7

4. OPPORTUNITY
• Children, adolescents and youth should be made aware of the SDGs through
child-friendly education and learning materials
• 12.8: By 2030, ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and
awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles
• Children, youth, families and communities must internalize how the issues
represented by the SDGs affect their own daily lives and environments, whether
that be on improving health and nutrition; the importance of early learning and
quality education; fostering more peaceful communities where children live free
from violence; or establishing more sustainable approaches to use and
preservation of natural resources
* UNICEF – Key asks for 2019 SDG voluntary national reviews

5. THEORY OF CHANGE
Why a children’s book?
• Children’s books are some of the first experiences that children have that grow a
sense of the greater society in which they live. The concepts in children’s books
are often moralistic, simple, and educational.
• As children are the next generation capable of implementing the SDG’s, and
bastions of the SDG’s for future generations, it’s important to give them early and
easy access to SDG content.
• This is achievable through children’s books and, beyond children, creates a
method of scaffolding for any age. The scaffolding potential of a children’s book
stems from the accessibility of the language in the method.

6. SOLUTION
What is the book about and how does this relate to
the SDGs?
• Our first book, “The Right Colour Blue”, focuses on Immigration and utilizes a
combination of conventional adventure and transformational plot elements with
a rhyming scheme.
• These two plots are the most frequently used by fairy tales, which contain moral
lessons or are traditional educational forms for children.
• Utilising a rhyme scheme allows for the repetition of content, expectational
thinking, and is easier to remember.

7. SOLUTION
What is the book about and how does this relate to
the SDGs?
• We took into consideration the benefit the host country receives from
immigration and used that in an appeal to the self. We felt learners would be
more receptive if they understood that immigration is not a one-sided benefit.
• We identified three main benefits of immigration to the host country:
productivity, innovation, and tax collection.
• From these benefits we turned each into a story element. Productivity became
the ability to change form and move faster, innovation became knowledge and
the ability to find your way home, taxes became proper governance of
sustainable resources and improvements on infrastructure.

8. SOLUTION
Key Concepts
• Resistance to Immigration: The clouds in the group will only take the colour blue
and actively discriminate against other colours and clouds who use them.
• Methods of Combating Resistance: The main character, an everyday cloud
named Taylor, is a front-runner of an insular group who goes out and learns about
the other cultures, realizes his group is falsely representing the world, relays
benefits and learning to his group or society, but with mixed results.
• Moral: Taylor manages to create lasting change. Some of his group joins him
completely, while others are changed only slightly, but they do shift towards
acceptance.

9. Learning Objectives
UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable
Development Goals – Learning Objectives
• Cognitive
• Socio-Emotional
• Behavioural

10. SOLUTION
ESD
We used UNESCO’s “Education for Sustainable Development Goals - Learning and
Objectives” to guide the development of the book:
• Cognitive learning objective: The learner understands that inequality is a major
driver for societal problems and individual dissatisfaction. The learner
understands ethical principles concerning equality and is aware of psychological
processes that foster discriminative behaviour and decision making.
• Socio-emotional learning objectives: The learner is able to raise awareness
about inequalities.
• Behavioural learning objective: The learner is able to identify and analyse
different types of causes and reasons for inequalities.

11. SOLUTION
Cognitive learning objective:
• The major driver for societal problems and individual satisfaction is shown within
the book as:
• The shrinking of the puddle or climate change causing shrinking (the main
food source of the clouds),
• The hate of coloured water or the rejection and discrimination immigration
and immigrants
• Rejection of Taylor: The individual dissatisfaction occurs when Taylor returns
from his journey to save the other clouds and is rejected for simply being
another colour or accepting immigration, this is unfair and not based on real
reasoning

12. SOLUTION
Socio-Emotional Learning Objective
The learner is able to raise awareness about inequalities.
• Through the book, the learning should be able to learn about the method of
identifying inequalities (exploration outside of your context, questioning your
own context, interacting with outside knowledge)
• Through identifying these inequalities, the learner will be able to
communicate them back to their relevant groups, as Taylor did in the story,
and raise awareness with the group for the betterment of the group
• The example in the story is raising awareness through verbal communication
to a large group of peers

13. SOLUTION
Behavioural Learning Objective:
The learner is able to identify and analyse different types of causes and reasons for
inequalities. The reader should identify with Taylor, the main character, who:
• Only discovers the inequalities in this group through exploration outside
of the group dynamic and conversations with others
i. One of the prevailing reasons people find it difficult to raise
awareness of inequalities is their inability to identify them in the
first place as they live within their own context
• Identifies these inequalities through his journey
i. Taylor interacts with a number of different kinds of clouds that are
not as his group described them and discovers, on his own, the
truth