AROUND THE WORLD
Education Beyond Borders: The Power of Learning from the Natural World
by Tomás S. Ó Ceallaigh
II consider myself to be quite a fortunate being. Thanks to my upbringing, I have been blessed with a calm temperament and an inquiring mind. With this in mind, when I applied for my current job as an English teacher, around four and a half years ago, one of the lures of the position was the ability to get involved in a partnership with a school in Uganda.
All these years later, as I rapidly become a part of the furniture in my workplace, I am preparing for what will be my fifth visit to Uganda in East Africa. The difference is that I am no longer the newbie, but the person responsible for organising it. The most common questions that I’m asked are: what do you actually do out there and why do you keep on going back?
Such questions are a pleasure to answer, and more often than not, lead to the questioner wishing that they hadn’t asked.
The projects, organised more recently in conjunction with All Our Children (UK), centre around education in and around Kabale District, south-western Uganda. Originally the focus was on the sponsorship of students at a high school, but now there is much more to the partnership, with one of the key focuses being teacher training.
The teachers at my workplace in the United Kingdom realised that we were in a position of privilege. Part of our establishment’s obligations to us is to allow us to work on continually improving our teaching practice through Continuing Professional Development (CPD). We quickly realised that teachers in Uganda did not have the same level of CPD built into their working lives as we did.
Providing advice on education in an unfamiliar territory can be very problematic. Conscious decisions had to be made to strike a balance between trying to share new teaching methods learned in the UK and applying them in a different country without causing offence, or coming across as neo-colonialist.
During my first visit it became obvious pretty early on that the prevalent teaching methods from the UK, based around student-centred learning in well-equipped learning environments, with interactive whiteboards and the like, would not work in a room full of eighty form Senior 4 (15-16 year olds) students. The simple idea of rearranging a classroom with 80 desks in it to accommodate a group activity filled me with dread.
II had to have a think that evening: how can I try to encourage creativity and free artistic expression in such a cramped environment?
As the sun set over the lush green valleys of Kigezi that evening, and the wisps of smoke from small cooking fires rose up to meet the slowly thickening mist, the idea hit me. It all meant going back to basics and possibly being laughed at by Penninah, the class teacher, in the process.
I arrived at the school the next day, marched up to the teacher, and declared, “Your best resource is all around you. It is the valleys, the small shambas, the birds in the trees, the earth you walk on.” I thought I sounded poetic and inspiring, but Penninah fell about laughing, but was willing to give it a go.
Just before the lesson, I quickly ran around the compound picking up any objects I could find – an old Coke bottle lid, a branch of a tree, a rock and so on.