Alice Leaper and I go back a long way, and I’ve been visiting her and her Butterfly Space projects (also a CRED Partner) in Malawi for several years. Some of those visits were with CRED teams, others were just me visiting the projects that come under the umbrella of Butterfly Space (which is a CRED Partner), and catching up with Alice.
The first time I visited the site of Stepping Stones primary school it was just a field, and Alice was sharing her vision for the school with me. The school was to be one that provided high-quality education for children of all incomes. One third would be fee-paying, one third would be sponsored, and one third would be given a free place, subsidised by the income from the other students. The classes would be small (ie maximum of 30, which is small by Malawian standards), and whilst the curriculum would still be Malawian, there would be a stronger element of play-centred learning for the early years.
The next time I visited, in 2018 (I think), some classrooms were built and the first year groups were starting to progress through the school. Then we had the pandemic and all travel ceased. Now I am back, and it has been beyond wonderful to see how much the school has grown. All the classrooms are complete and in use, there is a nursery class for 30 pre-schoolers, and there are three vocational classes (soon to be four) for those students who don’t feel academically able to continue to secondary education. NB students can be in their mid teens when they finish primary education, so it’s not that unusual for them to be embarking on vocational training at that stage. The classes are in hair and beauty, tailoring (including making school uniform), and basket weaving (including making baby baskets for a Butterfly project that delivers baskets full of baby items to new mums in hospital).
There is also a brand new library and IT suite, and next project is a hostel for the standard 8 students as they enter their final term and need a conducive environment for revising and preparing for their national school leavers primary certificate.
These past few days I’ve had the delight of working with the teachers and delivering the 360Life training to them. Many conversations have been prompted out of that training and the information that I have shared, and it’s been wonderful to help the teachers think through how to adapt their teaching styles as a result, and what it could look like to incorporate a trauma-informed approach to their school ethos. The conversations have included sad acknowledgment of the very tough situations that some of the children have to cope with at home, due in part to poverty, parents with alcoholic tendencies, and cultural norms that are more accepting of tough disciplining. But the teachers spoke of how they felt more equipped to respond positively and helpfully to these situations now, and the role that the school can play in helping the children to have a safe and healing environment in which to spend much of their waking weekdays.
I pray that as I journey on, the teachers will go into the new week with determination to put their words into action, and to adapt their practices to incorporate what they have learnt. Certainly the implications were that this is what will happen, and I Iook forward to receiving feedback to confirm as much. And maybe, God-willing, I’ll be able to come back and do round two of the training, to equip them more, and also to take the training wider into the community, which is their wish.
No comments:
Post a Comment