Volunteer Teachers, Volunteer Teaching Assistants, and/or Volunteer Teacher Trainers for Primary School, Nursery Schools and Secondary School(s), Malawi, Africa

Who:
Qualified volunteer teachers or volunteer trainee teachers of any subject at any level, although we will also consider applicants who have been educated to degree level. However, we do recommend that those volunteers who are not qualified teachers or trainee teachers study for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) or TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualification if at all possible. It is important to have a genuine interest in making a worthwhile contribution and the ability to live in a rural environment while establishing a solid relationship with the local community. Enthusiasm for working with young people is also essential.

Placement Length:
We would prefer our volunteers to make a commitment of a minimum of three months to coincide with the school term times (see Term Dates below), although shorter stays can be arranged (see note about short stays on the Volunteering: An Introduction webpage). It is important to recognise that, although the volunteers will benefit enormously from their experience at Mwaya, our main responsibility is to provide consistent and effective assistance to the community.

Programme Coordination:
It is very important to maintain consistency and continuity in relationships, projects and work already underway and, to this end, we have an Education Coordinator (who is also a teacher at the primary school), a Nursery School Coordinator, and one of the Managers at Mwaya Beach who is responsible for volunteers. The Education Coordinator will introduce arriving volunteers to the primary school and the other teachers, the Nursery School Coordinator will show them around the nursery schools RIPPLE Africa supports in the area, and the Manager will make sure new volunteers visit the community library and that they know about the various projects, clubs and groups that are running.

Term Dates:
There are three school terms during the year for both primary and secondary schools. Roughly, these sessions fall into the following months:

– Term 1 (12 weeks): January - March (Term Break is normally March/April for 3 weeks)
– Term 2 (14 weeks): May - July (Term Break is normally end July/August for 4-5 weeks)
– Term 3 (12 weeks): September - November (Term Break is normally end November/December for 6-7 weeks)

Unfortunately, it is not possible to get exact term dates in advance as the Government does not release them until a few weeks before each term begins.

If your placement period includes one or more of the term breaks, please be aware that there will be less or no work to do at the schools, although we do sometimes have additional clubs and classes organised for holiday periods. We suggest that this is the best time to arrange any trips you might want to take (see Travel and Holidays in Malawi and Other Neighbouring Countries).

At primary schools, only Standards 1 to 7 attend school in Term 3 as Standard 8 pupils finish their primary education after taking their primary school leaving examinations at the beginning of September. However, all Standard 8 students have lessons throughout the term breaks after Terms 1 and 2.

At secondary schools, Form 2 students take their Junior Certificate of Education (JCE) exams in October and do not return to school until the beginning of the next academic year in January. Form 4 students also take their Malawi Secondary Certificate of Education (MSCE) in October and have officially finished their secondary education once their exams are over.

Mwaya Primary School

Primary schools in Malawi are free and open to all. As secondary education is highly competitive and relatively expensive, this is often the only education rural Malawians receive. It is not uncommon for students in Standard 8 to be as old as 15 or 16 while studying to re-sit their primary school leaving exams. Recently, secondary education has become more accessible with private schools cropping up throughout the country — including three in nearby Kande village. These are cheaper and have more lenient entrance requirements, but also lower standards, than government schools.

Mwaya Primary School has about 800-850 pupils from the local community. While there should be one teacher for each Standard (1-8), there is currently a shortage in Malawi and there are only six fully trained Government paid teachers at the school. In addition, RIPPLE Africa is paying eight Malawian trainee teachers to assist them. Class sizes can be as large as 70-100 although official enrolment can be as high as 150 per class. Teachers, especially in the higher levels, are under enormous pressure to cover a wide-ranging curriculum with very limited resources and time. Despite this, pupils are generally motivated and enthusiastic.

This volunteer opportunity is a cooperative initiative that involves evaluating the needs of the school with the current volunteers, our Education Coordinator, the headmaster, classroom teachers, and trainee teachers in tailoring your responsibilities to best meet these, taking into account your special skills and interests. This might mean helping the class teacher with marking the pupils' work, which may not sound very inspiring but will give you a good insight into the children's abilities (or lack of them) and will help the teacher tremendously as marking upwards of 50 pupils' work each day takes a lot of their time. You might also help with teaching English and science to Standards 5, 6, and 7, or maths, English and geography to Standards 7 and 8 each day. The school is a ten-minute walk from Mwaya Beach. Working hours and days off are arranged with the Education Coordinator and the headmaster.

During the holidays and in the afternoons in term time, it is possible to organise special tutorials or holiday classes at the primary school. These can follow the main curriculum or be as diverse and varied as your own imagination. As the school operates on an absolute bare-bones budget, however, volunteers should plan to provide any materials or equipment required for these courses or extra-curricular activities.

If you are interested in volunteering at the primary school, please read the document called Mwaya Primary School: Information for Teaching Volunteers for more details.

Nursery Schools

We want to recruit overseas volunteers who would be interested in helping at one or more of the nursery schools and/or who would be able to give the teachers some additional training in teaching young children of nursery school age. RIPPLE Africa supports five nursery schools in the area and, until recently, the teachers were unpaid and untrained volunteers from the community. Thanks to the generosity of one of our donors, we are now able to pay the teachers a salary. Also, we are able to fund teacher training courses for them all at least once a year. The nursery schools play a very important role in giving children aged two to five or six years old a sound grounding in the basics (i.e. numbers, the alphabet, English, etc.) before they start their primary education.

If you are interested in volunteering at the nursery schools, please read the document called Nursery Schools: Information for Teaching Volunteers for more details.

Secondary School(s)

Now that construction of the new secondary school at Kapanda (about 30-40 minutes’ walk from Mwaya Beach) has begun, there will also be an opportunity for our volunteers to assist with teaching there. We are hopeful that the school will be open for Form 1 soon (February 2008). We will be constructing the second double classroom block and second teacher’s house during 2008.

A couple of years ago, two of our former volunteers, who were post-doctoral graduates in maths and biochemistry, respectively, taught at Mwaya Primary School and also at one of the local secondary schools. In addition, they organised a two-week course in maths, biology, physics and chemistry for secondary school teachers, which they ran with another volunteer. Their efforts were so well received that we are keen for more postdoctoral graduates to volunteer for us and to continue with the work they started.

If you are interested in volunteering at the secondary school, please read the document called Teaching Experiences at Mwaya which was written by these volunteers at the end of 2005.

As for the primary school, it is possible to organise special tutorials or holiday classes for secondary school students during the holidays and in the afternoons in term time. These can follow the main curriculum or be as diverse and varied as your own imagination.

How to apply: Click here.

Clubs and Groups

There are a number of clubs and groups organised by former volunteers which are either running at present or have been discontinued, and we hope future volunteers will be willing to lead or reinstate one or more of these. Some do require funding, while others just need imagination and initiative. Examples of some of these are listed below:

Education Video

Mwaya Primary School: Information for Teaching Volunteers

Nursery Schools: Information for Teaching Volunteers

Teaching Experiences at Mwaya