A Space to Learn, Live, and Love in Sierra Leone


Miriam Mason-Sesay, Contributing Author

Freetown, Sierra Leone
@EducAidSL

The conventional wisdom is that the best place for any child growing up is in their family.  In an ideal world, where that family is financially stable and the family has the wherewithal to care for the emotional, social and welfare needs and rights of a child, then this is clearly the case.  But, what about when the family is two or three adults who are surviving as subsistence farmers, palm wine tappers or fishermen who rarely see cash and are already trying to cope with a dozen or so more dependents?  Is adding another mouth at the table, another body needing clothing, shelter and healthcare really likely to result in a life that is truly best for the child?

Far too often in Sierra Leone, this results in a less than positive ‘men pikin’[1] situation where the child becomes cheap labour and is viewed as an additional burden to be treated with as little joy and love as one would expect a dependent burden to be treated with.

What about, if instead of a relationship of total dependence, a relationship of interest and kindness can be maintained by regular visits and interactions between the child and her/his relations?  What if the institution where the child lives, learns from the best of family life, to provide a secure home, a space where kindness, encouragement and love are the norm?  A place where the child is valued as a member of a community, learns about her or his rights and responsibilities? A place there the child can easily access their welfare rights as well as social and emotional support while maintaining a relationship of concern with actual family relations?

This is the environment that EducAid has endeavoured to create for its most vulnerable, young family members.  For many of our children, EducAid is a place to learn to live and love just as much as it is a place to learn maths and English.

How do we manage this in a resource-constrained context?  Our learning spaces are also our living spaces.  Our schools have to be flexible spaces that can be adapted for many uses.  Traditional classrooms have groups of around 30 students encased in four walls and at the end of the day, the room is locked up and unused until the next morning.  In EducAid, we need spaces that can be home to a great variety of activities: family meetings, lessons, after hours games, whole school debates, sleeping, eating and learning.

EducAid Lumley is a great case in point.  My mother in law’s vegetable patch was the only available space when, in 2005, EducAid was obliged to move out of the rented house we had been using up to that point.  The space was sufficient for one spacious room but not more.  When it was impossible so spread out, we went up.  Now, this unfinished building is learning space for over 500 young people during the day and living space for over 100 who do not have safe homes to go to where they can continue to study.  The girls stay on the top floor.  The boys are downstairs.  Smaller spaces have been carved out of the 2nd floor to create the ICT room at one end and a science lab at the other end.  To add space, we have windows that open completely, transforming the corridor / veranda along two walls doubling the lab’s size.

The blackboards that get used for small group explanations and demonstrations also double as cupboards where the live-in children keep their bag of clothes, their property and their sleeping mat and mosquito net.

After evening study, benches get packed together and mats placed across them to form a bed.  Tables are upturned on each other to facilitate the hanging of mosquito nets.  The electricity, which has been on for the previous 3 hours to make study time possible, is turned off.  Silence slowly comes as over one hundred youngsters get their beauty sleep.

I sometimes come in late and make my way through the tangles of sleeping teens and, too often for my liking, find groups who have woken each other up for additional study during the night – gaining an education in Sierra Leone is a life or death issue, determining who will flourish and who may too easily be marginalised forever.

Yes – our schools are schools, so they are learning spaces, but they are so much more than this too!

[1] ‘Men pikin’ translates as ‘minded child’ i.e. foster child and happens a lot where children are left when parents die or are incapable of providing for them.  It happens informally and with no supervision – it can work wonderfully sometimes but at others it can be severely abusive.

If you are interested in knowing more about EducAid’s work with vulnerable young Sierra Leoneans please go to www.educaid.org.uk 

If you are interested in supporting our work in any way, please to go: www.educaid.org.uk/get-involved/


Miriam Mason-Sesay trained as a teacher at Cambridge and taught in the UK for eight years before visiting Sierra Leone – at that time the poorest country in the world. She was moved to relocate there and open a school for vulnerable children: ex-combatants, orphans and child-mothers. EducAid Sierra Leone, her nonprofit, started with twenty children and now educates over 2,500 students across nine primary and secondary schools. Due to a high emphasis on equality the participation rate of girls in secondary school is double the Sierra Leone average. Miriam leads a teaching team of 150, two thirds of whom are past pupils. Miriam is a Varkey Teacher Ambassador and 2016 Global Teacher Prize finalist.  

A Space to Hack (but not in a bad way)


Mark Reid, Space2Learn Co-Editor
SET-BC
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
@mmgreid

During years as a music teacher, I never lost sight of the fact that I would teach a student for the entirety of their high school experience. Unlike my colleagues in science, math, or social studies, I was the one-and-only band and choir teacher in the school. As some students take five years of social studies with a different teacher each year, the connection between music teacher and student-musician is quite long-term. The benefit of this is significant and frequently elicits the “with great power comes great responsibility” challenge – one I gladly accept. It is pretty encouraging, then, when these kids grow up and engage the leadership skills they’ve learned and mimic the community engagement we model. Having learned in a space that celebrated leadership, it is no wonder that students create meaningful spaces for others. Such is the power of education.

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a judge on a panel that would pick the winner of the 2018 edition of nwHacks, “Western Canada’s Largest Hackathon”. The invitation came from Jason Smith, a former student. He is easily described as a social motivator – his excitement about something is contagious and inspiring. What he and his peers on the organizing team may not have recognized is that this for-students-by-students learning experience established a space for participating university students to collaborate, improvise, innovate, and respond with a focus on making our world a better place. For a few examples, it is worth taking a look at the published list of winners. Despite the overwhelming currency of blockchain finance (pun intended), it is worth noting the many solutions to food security, accessibility, public safety, and education developed during this 24-hour work period.

I was impressed that this competitive space was free of dividers, barriers, or any form of isolating element. Intentional or not, the organizers sent a message that collaboration is critical to a better future. Mentors from sponsoring companies and institutions, including Google, Microsoft, Scotiabank, and Hootsuite roamed the room providing advice and making connections with the technology solutions that participants needed. Major League Hacking, a well-organized network of hackathons, brought equipment that participants could borrow. All this, in addition to coordinated meals and the occasional game, to make sure these hackers could sustain themselves through the entire 24-hour work period.

Photo courtesy nwHacks via Facebook

The whole experience reminded me of the three critical capacities that my good friend and edu-hero, Jelmer Evers, described to me as requirements for independent efficacy: tools, time, and trust. The organizers created a space that would facilitate engagement on multiple levels, recognizing both short-term needs and long-term possibilities.

It shouldn’t be lost that this event was organized by a group of individuals who are also full-time students. I can’t help but wonder what prior experiences informed their thinking as they developed such a highly-productive environment. How are teachers making the context of their choices known? This only reinforces the need for teachers to talk to our students about our own design processes. It is common practice to ask students to share their learning with teachers, but how do we make it more common for teachers to communicate how we design learning spaces, assessments, instructional experiences, and professional learning? I’d argue that this is how we inform a future generation of what it takes to make change, to empower, and to engage.


Mark Reid is a former Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize, Varkey Teacher Ambassador, Qudwa Fellow, TeachSDGs Ambassador, and the 2013 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year. He specializes in facilitating dialogue that connects policy and practice. With a background in music education, Mark has experience in the classroom and as a provincial curriculum coordinator at the BC Ministry of Education.