A group of people with a shared vision have started a non-profit company to train teachers.
Called Ma Se Kind, their vision is to nurture talented young people with hands-on training in quality education.
“In the modern world, teachers go and get a degree. They become teachers and then they go out and learn how to teach,” said Ma Se Kind’s chair, Neill Pleaner. “And this is a massive problem.”
Pleaner is an education advocate who has founded several schools in Gauteng.
“The idea is to take a group of people that come from previously disadvantaged environments, train them up as teachers, put them into an environment where they can learn to teach along the way and by the time their four years are up and they get their degree, they hit the ground running,” Pleaner said.
Robertha le Roux, Ma Se Kind’s operations director, said the goal is to give the youth from Mitchell’s Plain hope.
“We’re going to use Mitchell’s Plain as the kickoff because we’re from Mitchell’s Plain,” Le Roux said. “And the goal is to change the narrative within our communities. It doesn’t mean that if we come from a gang-infested area and your parents are druggies and there’s unemployment in your house, you can’t be what you’d want to be, but, because of social ills, many of our youngsters think they are destined to be the next gangster or the next drop out or the next pregnant fairy.”
Ripples in education
The idea behind the sponsored training is that it would then have a ripple effect by putting youth training to be teachers in partnered schools as teaching assistants.
“A teacher who’s teaching 45 to 50 children cannot possibly instill how to do mathematics properly, how to know which children are learning to read for understanding, etc. So the idea here is to immediately halve the number of children to teacher ratio in the classroom. They are not going to become the teacher, they are going to assist the teacher,” Pleaner said.
The next ripple is that these children will then have a better understanding of their curriculum and get better marks which will open more tertiary opportunities for them.
The teachers being trained alongside them will get more hands-on class experience and therefore become better teachers.
“We want to start with 30 students,” Le Roux said. “They’re going to have an effect on so many other young people within the schools that they’re going to work with.”
The team of five board members are partnering with Two Oceans Graduate Institute and are raising funds to pay for all the students’ education needs. They hope to have students enrolled by next year and have already started the interview process.
Pleaner says they are looking for people who are ”passionate about teaching and passionate about becoming teachers”.
“And not just passionate about earning a stipend,” he said.
For more information visit https://www.masekind.org.za/
