The Journey to a Masters Degree by Research in Mozambique

After diving for the first time in 2012, my whole future pivoted towards marine biology. I was in my first year of an ecology and conservation bachelor’s degree at the time when I completed both the Open Water and Advanced. Upon returning to university I changed my degree to Marine Biology. To say I was hooked to the underwater world is an understatement. After completing the bachelor’s degree I fulfilled a few of my other dreams, such as a ski season in Canada and completing an Ironman triathlon.

After these things, I was ready to get re-submerged in the world of marine biology – I emailed a dive centre in Tofo, Mozambique, and enrolled into a 3-month Divemaster internship. I had heard that there was a lot of active research conducted in Tofo, and with a view to finding a master’s degree topic, I got to work with meeting everyone I could. It was then that I met Katie, the marine research director of All Out Africa. Katie quickly became and continues to be an invaluable source of knowledge and help. I was also lucky enough to be offered a job at a dive centre, allowing me to stay in Tofo. After some deliberation stingrays became the family of interest as, despite a global distribution, so very little is known about our pancake-fish friends.

Being able to stay in Mozambique while I complete my research is a privilege. With every dive, I learn more and more about not just stingrays, but all the incredible creatures the ocean holds.

All About Stingrays – Jenny Keeping

Stingrays have had a bad reputation; Steve Irwin’s fateful interaction and the menacing barb on their tail does not comply with their docile, relatively quiet existence. It is actually the last resort for a stingray to use its barb, they would much prefer to take flight than fight.

Stingrays (in their current form) have been flapping around in the oceans for 150 million years. They are a close cousin to sharks, as they also have a skeleton made of cartilage instead of solid bone. You can see this close relationship with some species which have co-evolved with the stingray and shark families, such as the Guitarfish family, which looks like a shark’s tail has been stuck to a stingray’s head.

Stingrays are a valuable part of the marine ecosystem. They provide a link between apex predators, like the requiem sharks, and lower trophic levels, such as the crabs and shrimp they munch on just under the sand. Unfortunately, they face a threat operating at an unfathomable scale. Stingrays like to hang out on the sea floor, which is where some fishing methods, like trawling and gill nets, will entangle and drag them up by mistake.

The lack of baseline data for stingrays globally means it is impossible for effective conservation measures to be put in place. Some stingrays are more common than others, but herein lies the challenge for all marine researchers – how do we research things we rarely see? I can tell you it takes time, perseverance and patience. In Tofo we see stingrays on approximately 1/3^rdof dives, and every dive is recorded in the hope that the secrets of stingrays may start to be unlocked.

Click here if you would like to know more about our Marine Research Project, or our Dive Master Training Project.

In 2012, when our story starts, these six NCPs, supported by All Out Africa, were providing two meals a day for the children and very basic childcare. They were staffed by women from the local community who tried to give the children some basic education but struggled because they had no resources and lacked any form of teacher training – some of them had not completed their own schooling. All Out Africa maintained the NCP buildings and volunteer groups painted the walls with educational materials such as the alphabet and numbers, but any teaching that did happen simply involved rote learning, with few opportunities for children to learn through play. Although free primary education for all had recently been introduced in Eswatini the country lacked teachers and schools, so children were (and still are) interviewed at the age of 6 before being given a school place. Many children from the NCPs were failing to pass this interview, so were being excluded from the education system from the very start . . . and so the cycle of poverty continued.

Now, in 2017, all children who are about to graduate (102 children) from these six NCPs have been awarded school places. The schools report that they can no longer distinguish between children from the NCPs and those from more advantaged backgrounds. What is more, the NCP teachers have received training so that they understand various teaching strategies they can employ to help their children learn, and have the confidence to try out various teaching methods through a structured programme of activities which covers the key learning areas of language, maths, art, science and discovery, and physical development. The focus on holistic child development means feeding and health programmes now form a structured part of the development of these children, and parents are becoming engaged in their children’s learning.

What has brought about this transformation, and what has our role been in this?

Dianne first came to Eswatini in 2012 to meet our local partners and to ask what their needs were for volunteer support. She learned about the children’s poor chances of passing their interview for school, and that although All Out Africa wanted to introduce a more formalised learning programme they did not have the time or expertise to do this, either within their own staff or from the generally young and inexperienced volunteer groups they took. She visited the NCPs and saw their basic buildings and lack of resources – until very recently one of them had had no building at all and was referred to as ‘the school under the tree’. She met one of the teachers who had found out on a half-day training course (the only training she had ever received) that a pre-school classroom should have separate areas for writing, reading, dressing-up etc, and the image of this teacher standing by the sign she had stuck up saying ‘Book Corner’ in an empty room with no books was one that remained in her mind long afterwards.

Sarah and Dianne at one of the teacher workshops in 2015

Sarah joined All Out Africa in March 2014. She quickly identified that even those children from the NCPs who got a school place struggled to achieve well and lacked understanding of many of the basic concepts of education. She admired the local women running the NCPs but soon realised they lacked the skills set to do anything much more than childminding. At the same time, she realised that the volunteer groups who spent some time at the NCPs were having inconsistent and not always satisfactory experiences, and as she became more knowledgeable about the ethics of volunteering she realised the volunteer experience they were offering did not meet the criteria of having a clear purpose and a clear role. She looked for a way to address all these issues and realised an organised curriculum for the NCPs, involving the teaching of relevant skills by teachers who had received appropriate training, alongside a clearly directed programme for the volunteers as classroom assistants, would go a long way towards meeting these needs.

Dianne contacted Sarah during 2015 to find out if there was still a need for someone to help write a curriculum for the NCPs. She had had some experience of curriculum design, albeit for older children, during her teaching career and felt motivated to help local staff put something together if the need was still there. This coincided so closely with Sarah’s ideas that we decided to go ahead. Dianne returned to Eswatini as a volunteer in September 2015, Sarah cleared some space in her diary and we approached the task with enthusiasm.

The teachers did not have the expertise to write the curriculum but were consulted from the very beginning. We held teachers’ workshops to get their ideas on topics to include, and got their buy into what we were proposing. Our idea was to produce a curriculum which covered a different topic every week, with suggested activities for language, maths, discovery, art, and drama/physical development. Dianne and Sarah consulted pre-school teachers in the UK and Eswatini, had some local help in finding pictures and activities, and put some trial weeks together, which the teachers tried out for us. It quickly became apparent that although they loved the worksheets they could not do the teacher-directed activities without further direction. So, rather reluctantly, we became more prescriptive and put a lot more detail into what we produced. By the time Dianne’s placement was over, the first term was written, including teaching materials and resources for the children. A training session for volunteers had also been put together, showing them how they could provide useful in-class support for the teachers, and trial with a group of Australian teenage volunteers.

On her return to the UK Dianne continued to work on the curriculum, getting help and advice from a pre-school teacher in the UK who checked the content and made sure tasks were set at an appropriate level for this age group. She checked the entire curriculum against the Eswatini Early Learning Development Standards (a somewhat intimidating document) to make sure all aspects of a child’s development were covered that directed us as to the skills, knowledge and abilities that we need to teach our children to prepare them for primary school. She sent a draft for a year’s curriculum to Sarah by the end of 2015.

It quickly became apparent that the curriculum was still too ambitious. The teachers provided invaluable feedback on what worked and what was too difficult, and Sarah worked hard to make changes, working on this every Sunday in her own time. She included more local /cultural issues, such as respect for elders, safety and to create ambition for the children’s future (hence the topic jobs was included). She also recruited their unskilled volunteers to make resources such as laminated cards which could have multiple uses to help teach recognition of colours, letters, and numbers. As she was doing this alongside her other work this was a massive undertaking. She also realised that we had tried to push things on too fast and that although the teachers were willing to try out the curriculum they were still very nervous of it and lacked confidence in their own abilities. It was therefore decided that volunteer donations that clients pay in their joining fees should be used to fund the appointment of a local, trained primary school teacher who could drive the curriculum forward and train the teachers in their own language – and so Eunice joined the team.

Eunice during a toothbrushing lesson- demo at one of the NCPs

During 2016 Eunice worked hard to engage the teachers, build their confidence and give them teaching skills, and also to trial various topics from the curriculum to gauge what worked and what didn’t. She consulted local primary schools about what skills the children needed to settle well into primary school and wrote these into the curriculum. Already by the end of 2016 primary school teachers were talking very positively about the improvement in the skills of children coming from the NCPs.

In November 2016 a people and places volunteer, Cecilia, came to Eswatini. She was invaluable in helping Eunice insert all she had learned into the curriculum, and by the time her placement had finished a full curriculum for term one was ready for printing. Teaching started in earnest with the start of the school year in January 2017, and Cecilia returned for a second placement and worked on the second term, as well as continuing to help with teacher training sessions. A second people and places volunteer, Yvonne, also came with the specific aim with working with two of the teachers to build their skills and confidence in the classroom, especially as one of them had been very nervous as to whether she would have the ability to deliver the curriculum having dropped out of school so early herself.

As we write this, the teachers are just starting to teach the third term of the full curriculum. Parents are taking their children for their primary school interviews, and so far all have been given places. One parent even reported that the school had said ‘if he comes from an All Out NCP, we’ll definitely give him a place, they’re always really good’. Interviews with the teachers who have been part of the whole process have all been really positive – they are so much more confident than they were two years ago and couldn’t wait to show us their children’s work – one teacher said ‘I am so excited to tell you how well my children are doing’.

The curriculum is by no means perfect and there is a lot more that can be done to build the teachers’ skills. However, we are delighted that after only two years we can say the following things have been achieved:

For the NCP teachers:

• Vastly increased confidence and passion
• No longer fearful that they don’t have the ability to teach
• Improved spoken English
• Understanding of the role of the volunteer groups and how they can use them in their classrooms to enhance learning, whether that is through splitting large classes into groups to enable small group learning, or through asking the volunteers to teach new songs and games, or through asking them to find and prepare resources, or through broadening the children’s cultural experience.

For the children:

• Primary school places for all of them (to date) and therefore a chance to benefit from all that education offers them
• The chance to start primary school on an equal basis with those from more advantaged family backgrounds
• A more varied curriculum with a lot more activities, games and songs as well as a good grounding in writing, counting etc.

For the community:

• For the first time, parental engagement in their children’s education with parents coming into schools to see what the children have been doing
• Better health because of the feeding programme, introduced as part of the holistic approach to education
• Better school buildings with better resources, because this clear and sustainable programme for the NCPs has attracted more donors.

For volunteers:

• The opportunity for skilled people and places volunteers to participate in a really meaningful programme which is showing real results, and which one volunteer described as the best organised placement she has been on.
• For groups of young or unskilled volunteers, the chance to participate in a meaningful programme which involves a clear definition of their role explained as part of their orientation programme, at least one training session in how they can best help, support of a qualified teacher at All Out Africa (Eunice) as well as working with an NCP teacher on a daily basis, participation in a programme of planned activities designed to build children’s skills in a progressive way.
• It is notable that volunteer ratings of their experience have gone up in the last two years and that consistency of the volunteer placements has increased.

We are both immensely proud of these outcomes and grateful to the NCP teachers for being brave enough to participate so willingly in what must have seemed a frightening new curriculum. We feel more privileged than we can say to have had the opportunity to get this project underway.

Dianne and Sarah

This article is written jointly by Dianne Ashman, programme advisor for people and places and Sarah Corley, director of volunteer and student travel at All Out Africa. People and places’ are a recruitment agent for All Out Africa and send experienced volunteers.

We are currently looking for interns to assist us with the development and analysis of our curriculum. If you would like to be a part of this project, check out the description here or email us at bookings@alloutafica.com to find out more!

Although, I was fairly new in my position at All Out Africa, having joined the organization in May 2015, these questions needed answering;

For a number of days, a lot of things were going through my mind on how these questions couldbe answered in a more practical and physical environment. More so how could one monitor a sponsored child progress at school on a monthly or perhaps a weekly basis.

I honestly did not know where to start. I geared up myself to face this challenge and I startedgathering some information as part of a resource mobilization approach in getting an activity up and running, that would simply indicate a child’s learning, ability and progress at school.

What made it worse for me was that I had no teaching experience in any particular formwhatsoever. In any case my heart felt that perhaps if I set up a sustainable pilot outreach programas an afternoon program/activity for our sponsored children, is could possibly answer most of the questioned asked.

I knew back than I would encounter a few problems, mainly getting some of our children in one room to interact with, to basically find out their challenges at school, and perhaps even further challenges they faced at home or at community, because all this would later affect theiradulthood.

After liaising with our project partners. I informed them of an idea, in setting up a “homework club” for some of All Out Africa sponsored children. A list of 16 sponsored primary school children was submitted to two head teachers.

I have to admit, the first few sessions of the first initial homework club was scary, especially because students were new to this and had no idea on how to react to this to such an initiative. Having an afternoon activity dedicated to them, to improve or strengthen their English, Math and a bit of science skills was just overwhelming for all parties, including myself. I was more amazed on how the attendance rate was consistent throughout the weeks and months since club was set up!!!

Due to the success of the first pilot project of the homework club, a second club was rolled out in August 2016, where 15 primary school students from Ezulwini community school started attending this club. Then earlier this year a third “homework club” was introduced, with another 12 students. 

I felt that every problem had a solution. As an organization we have not only achieved one of our goals, in meeting and providing sustainable projects with the communities in which we work. Our 3 times per week “homework club” had quickly became another success at All Out Africa, Eswatini. Not only have we provided answers to all these questions. “Early Childhood Education and Development” has continued to strive in a child’s everyday life by opening these clubs. It’s truly been a rewarding experience for me to see this initiative grow. This, in part I hope, shall ensure that a child gets into the habit of doing homework at home on an everyday basis in addition to attending a club once a week.

Written by Tjengisa Dlamini – Social Projects Manager