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

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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 for Kindness at School and at Home

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Nam Thanh Ngo, Contributing Author
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
@mrnamvas

After returning from Dubai, where I attended the 2018 Global Education & Skills Forum, I continue to think about the story heard from three students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Each shared their experiences surrounding the recent school shooting. As I heard these children recount the deaths of their friends and teachers, I could not hold back my tears. In Vietnam, we are fortunate that there has been no such attack on any school. School violence, however, is still the sadness of many people in my country. I was faced with the question of how I can end school violence. I drew the conclusion that only when human beings treat each other with kindness, empathy, and sympathy, can society enjoy sustained peace. Teachers must do more than simply talk with the students about these characteristics. So, I’ve engaged in celebrating and teaching kindness in my own learning space while launching a project focused on promoting acts, thoughts, and words of kindness in learning communities around the world.

The students’ school day begins with 15 minutes spent listening or watching stories of kindness. Some children became emotional as they recognize the power of kindness in these videos and stories. It is encouraging to listen as they share their thoughts in response. While most students have experienced lessons on kindness, it is not enough to be limited to thinking or talking about kind actions. Teachers, as I do each day, must expect our students to demonstrate kindness in their actions.

We take time as a community of students and teachers to identify and discuss acts of kindness at home, at school, and in the community: helping parents or friends, keeping a clean environment, or taking good care of oneself. This changes the concept of kindness into something students can understand and demonstrate. I challenge students to take concrete action to show kindness in different places, such as school, home, public places. This is a prime example of how the space to learn isn’t limited to school. Parents appreciate seeing photos of students’ kind acts and, in cooperation with the parents, kindness is becoming habit in their daily lives. This partnership is seeing nearly every student engaged in consistent, frequent acts of kindness. We celebrate this at school by posting photos of students’ kind actions (photo above).

The students I teach are 10 years old and enjoy moving around and being active as they learn. I’ve designed the learning space to have adequate room for students to interact and play as part of their learning. One game that we play is called “Love Words” (see photo right). Students place a piece of paper on their backs so other students can write positive and kind words. Students smile as they read and experience the kindness shown to them. It is a natural part of encouraging a supportive and kind community of learners.

 

Learning about kindness towards people and the environment is a fundamental aspect of teaching students lessons focused on the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is a joy to know that they are using these lessons in real life, both now and in the future. For example, one student took action to pursue SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. She spent her weekend traveling to a contaminated water supply in Vietnam to teach people how to use a filter water as well as reducing pollutants to keep the water cleaner.

The Everyday Kindness Project
  “I feel I am useful person.”
  “I understand parents’ hard work.”
  “I’m happy to help everyone.”
  “I’m proud of myself.”

These are the words of students who are participating in the Everyday Kindness Project, my strategy to scale up teaching and learning about real acts of kindness carried out by students. The project invites teachers to engage their learning spaces as a place to experience and envision kindness in the lives of students. In my experience, children have gained a heightened sense of awareness about their parents’ struggles, their parents’ concerns, and the concerns of others around them. Many have shown a change of interest away from isolating activities and screen time and toward spending time together with family and sharing responsibility for housework.

These are the great effects that the project had during 5 weeks. Students described how it felt to to see the smiles of their parents and to see their parents happy. More importantly, students described feeling more engaged with their family and discovered how they can contribute to life at home. I invite you to visit the project website and explore kindness connections between your students experiences at school and at home!

Nam Ngo Thanh works as primary school teacher in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He is a Microsoft Learning Consultant and Varkey Teacher Ambassdor, having been a finalist for the 2018 Global Teacher Prize. He has authored multiple articles, and been nationally and internationally recognized for the implementation of creativity and the integration of technology into his teaching. Nam was also named Educator of the Year Asia 2017 and the winner of the 2018 Global Collaboration PLN Award.

A Democratic Space in the UK

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Sean Bellamy, Space2Learn Co-Editor
Sands School
Ashburton, Devon, United Kingdom

Learning, like healing, needs buildings within which it can happen successfully.

The Sands School welcomes children aged 10-17 from a range of social backgrounds and abilities, who have chosen to study in a Democratic School, but who often come to this space because they have high levels of anxiety, issues with self esteem or confidence. In this space, students learn psychology, ecology, and history, while experiencing the value of mentoring and group/team-building work.

I have always appreciated that the building has been controlling us as much as we have been controlling it. I believe that your learning space can be another teacher. And it can also be a place where a child can day dream and be lost in their imagination, be inspired and where they can heal. The space I’ve designed encourages a sense of homeliness, amity and excellence.

     

By luck and design, it is at a’ Human Scale’ and the rooms and dimensions of the building encourage the people within it to react at a human scale as well. Classes rarely get larger than fifteen children, but then the rooms can only accommodate that many comfortably. And those children, who founded the school with us, loved the small rooms and the friendly atmosphere they created. One can often walk into lessons where there is as few as five and occasionally just one pupil.

Visitors often comment that the school has the feeling of a small university; that the children behave with great independence and initiative. Maybe this is something one can more easily learn in a small school where the conventional enormous economies of scale, that create places that are both impersonal and frightening to children and disempowering for all, do not exist.

Individuals can influence small buildings; no one gets lost and the movement from classes is easy and natural.

This building defines us as a family of learners. The amity created by the scale of the property allows noise, smells, events and even moods to be commonly felt. Information moves around fluidly and the feeling of common ownership is made possible by the very size of the enterprise. We, students and teachers alike, all feel that we own it and we all therefore care more for it.

Sean Bellamy is a Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize, the co-founder of Sands School, the Phoenix Education Trust, IDEC and an Ashoka Foundation Change Leader. I specialize in Human Scale and Democratic Education and work with the South Korean Ministry of Youth Health and Democratic School start ups.