Hi,
Im so glad to have stumbled on your web page, we ( http://humanityafrica.org.uk/ )are building a agricultural project in Zambia Mukushi, and there is a educational component in it, i was just writing a concept note for the high commissioner of Zambia in the UK, i will include the first section for you here, hopefully we can work together
Educational Acceleration Hubs
Vision
Humanity Africa will use technology as well as the latest breakthrough in the field of education to create nodes with all our agricultural value addition nodes to facilitate curiosity through discovery in a tactile learning environment based on current lesson plans based on community development, resource development, bio diversity, climate mitigation and especially agriculture.
This will allow children to be resilient and self sustainable, and indeed productive members of society in rural areas and curb urbanization, it will improve health and allow children to be positively engaged in creating entrepreneurial skills to be self sustainable upon leaving school.
The nodes will provide supplementary quality education to all the schools in the district, based on peer development and leadership qualities. Teachers will benefit from this program as much as the children.
The program work from early childhood literacy right through to grade 12 but will also hold value for graduates and especially distant learning individuals.
The glaring vacuum in current educational models
Although Zambia, and indeed most African countries accept South Africa has a abundance of land available for agriculture and is indeed available under the traditional and cultural land management system our youths that finish grade ten and 12 does not have the skills to be efficient productive farmers ones they leave school, we believe that this is totally unnecessary and that the potential to change this is self evident and amazingly simple.
We foresee a system where school leavers will be able to embark on agricultural on agricultural endeavors with ease and self assurance and make a success out of it.
All the ingredients is already in the syllabus offered by the Ministry of Education and all it is going to take to facilitate the success of this program is a little cooperation between Humanity Africa and the local schools.
Tactile/Kinesthetic learning and remembering
We need to move away from a two dimensional learning platform to a ten dimensional model.
The human capability to remember and to understand is not utilized in modern education where everything is presented on a black board (white today ) and a piece of paper, it is falling far short on how we naturally remember things vividly from the past.
There is a lot of definitions on tactile and kinesthetic learning but for us most fall short of the essence of what it means. Tactile learning simply means creating a environment of learning that includes all the senses, but it can not stop there as it still fall short in associations that is as important as sensory imprinting itself, and in this imprinting lies the potential of retention of knowledge and understanding.
The ten dimensions of learning
Sight
Smell
Taste
Touch
Sound
Life - the ability to present what is being learned within the physical community itself, the soil, the water, the air, the fauna and flora, the systems and the structures, in other words the association with the reality of life
Reality – the actual reality currently prevailing in that community from a whole systems perspective
Vision – the world we want to see, the relationship between what is and what we can dream it to be
Engineering – the “how to” analytical and critical thinking how to move from what is to our desired outcome
Scope – perspectives on scope, Individual, Family, Community, Country, Globally including the health of the planet as the foundation for the survival of everything
