Photos and words by Katiana Zubryn, who is working in Mombasa, Kenya as part of AKFC’s International Youth Fellowship Program.
It’s nearly the October school holidays, but at Madrasa Early Childhood Programme in Kenya (MECP-K), classrooms will be full of eager learners all week.
Despite the sweltering heat, which will intensify as the sun warms the iron roof, the classrooms are alive with the buzz of excited conversation, songs, and laughter. These learners aren’t the preschool-aged children you would expect to find in a typical pre-primary classroom. Instead, MECP-K’s classrooms are full of teachers, who have gathered from Kilifi, Kwale, and Mombasa counties to celebrate World Teachers’ Day.
In large block letters, the facilitator has written “LET ME LEARN FROM YOU” across the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. Whether the learners are 5 years old, or 50 years old, the expectation for an MECP classroom remains the same: that everyone will engage in mutual learning. No matter your title, education, or level of classroom experience, everyone is expected to be both a teacher and a learner. In keeping with the theme of World Teachers’ Day 2024 – “Valuing teachers’ voices: towards a new social contract for education” – the MECP classroom embodies what it means to celebrate teachers as both teachers and learners.
In the hallways of the MECP offices, you will often hear the saying “Every day is a learning day”. This saying is not taken lightly; it is the undercurrent of everything MECP does, beginning with a study on early childhood education access conducted in the 1980s that informed MECP’s inception , and extending to present-day projects delivering quality, community-based, culturally relevant, and pluralistic early childhood development (ECD) services to underprivileged communities across East Africa. Every meeting, field visit, and program activity at MECP begins with an exercise in learning: each participant shares their learning expectations, setting the scene for a dynamic, curious, and reciprocal learning environment. The learning rituals and routines that are integral to MECP’s work have taught me that the learning mindset is like a muscle that has to be strengthened; it may not come naturally in every situation, but the more you practice, the more easily you can see the world through a learning lens.
As a Regional Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) and Communications Fellow at MECP, I am constantly reminded of what it means to be a lifelong teacher and learner. My work revolves around the teaching and learning process; I collect and analyze data to learn new and insightful things about the programs I am supporting, and I use what I have learned to teach my peers and colleagues how to review, refine, and improve these programs. From classroom environment assessments to interviews with caregivers of young children, the data collected from MECP projects allows ECD teachers, caregivers, local government and religious leaders, and community members alike to teach me about the opportunities and challenges they have encountered through their participation in MECP programming. As a MERL professional, my role is to transform the opportunities and challenges I have learned about into actionable solutions – areas for teacher training, new classroom materials, or play materials for caregivers, for example – to enhance the quality and accessibility of ECD service delivery. Without teaching and learning, MERL would be impossible.
I come from a family of teachers: a primary school teacher in Tartu, Estonia, a community school principal in New York, an adult ESL teacher in Montreal, a secondary school teacher in Ottawa, and many, many more. They have all taught me what it means to be an educator both inside and outside of the classroom. Although I am not a teacher by profession, I have come to recognize the many ways that I teach and learn as part of my work.
My Fellowship placement at MECP has helped cultivate the skills necessary to be an active teacher and learner – skills that I will carry with me throughout my entire career, and across the development sector.
This World Teachers’ Day (and every day!), I am taking time to celebrate the teachers who have shaped me in the past, the teachers I work alongside every day, and the teacher I am becoming.
