Earlier this month, mutindi ndnunda packed up her life in Charleston and boarded a plane for a different world.
The third world, to be exact. ndunda, a College of Charleston professor of teacher education, arrived in Tanzania, where she is spending several weeks working with the Muslim University of Morogoro to develop and revise courses for online delivery. Thanks to a grant from the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, she has left Charleston behind for a very different, very distant life in Morogoro, about 200 miles from the country’s capital of Dar Es Salaam.
mutindi ndunda (second-from-right, in all black) during her first visit to the Muslim University of Morogoro.
Learn more about teacher education at the College of Charleston.
But for ndunda, who grew up in Kenya and attended universities in both Kenya and Canada, the trip to Tanzania is a familiar one. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to work at the University for 10 months in 2012 and 2013, during which time ndunda focused on teaching technology and math methods, as well as developed and implemented Professional Learning Communities, or partnerships between grade schools and the university These learning communities were modeled on the success of a similar program at Burke High School in Charleston.
She also focused on improving student instruction.
In a 2012 interview with Charleston’s ABC News 4 preceding her first stretch in Tanzania, ndunda commented, “I believe teachers in Tanzania are facing the same challenges that teachers at our own Burke High School faced.” At the time, she hoped the learning communities could help address the grave problems affecting communities in Tanzania, some of which, like unemployment and poverty, are shared in Charleston. Now, since the learning communities have been successfully implemented in Tanzania, ndunda eagerly embraces the next challenge – making education accessible to more people via the Internet.
As Internet access becomes more widespread in Tanzania, ndunda’s efforts will concentrate primarily on the logistics of creating and maintaining Internet-friendly teaching plans for teacher education courses. She will also help to update the content of those plans.
“Some of the curricula haven’t been updated at all since around 2000.” ndunda explained. “Of course the technology has changed, but in addition best practices for teacher education are dynamic. I expect to spend significant time working on both facets of lesson planning and syllabus development.”
Her approach to the African Diaspora Fellowship – taking on both the technical side of teaching by modernizing the University’s online teaching resources, and the hands-on side by immersing herself in the classrooms where her expertise is executed – provides insight into ndunda’s passion for teacher education in general; she gets to teach, making waves among the concentrated pool of her students, while impacting the way each will go into the world and teach his or her own students.
Or perhaps she’s in it simply for the joy of teaching those who love to learn. “The first time I was in Morogoro, the children there were so happy to be in school,” she said. “That was my favorite part of the experience.”
Featured image courtesy of Wikipedia user Strebe via Creative Commons Share Alike licensing.
