News
April 2012
The ASKAIDS team held a series of dissemination seminars in Manzini, Swaziland, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi following the publication of Old Enough to Know: Consulting Children on African Sexualities. More ...
February 2012
CCE Visiting Scholar
Dr Rafat Nabi joins us as a Visiting Scholar for three separate months, February-March 2012 / July 2012 / December 2012, attached to the Centre for Commonwealth Education. She is hosted by Dr Alicia Fentiman, and will work collaboratively with Alicia and with Professor Alan Rogers (UEA), on a project on Community-based schooling for the education of children (especially girls) among the nomadic/pastoralist populations of the Kuchi of Afghanistan-Pakistan).
Dr Nabi has worked with the Aga Khan Foundation for many years on a variety of educational projects including girls' schooling (formal and non-formal) and adult literacy. Her doctoral studies were in education (University of Bristol 1992-5: teacher training in rural areas of Pakistan) and she recently completed an ethnographic research study of everyday literacies among non-literate adults in Pakistan (published as Hidden Literacies: ethnographic studies of literacy and numeracy in Pakistan, 2009). She has have been working in Afghanistan for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan for the past three years.
Comic Relief / VSO visit of Ghana headteachers to Cambridge
A group of headteachers and circuit supervisors from northern Ghana spent a day in Cambridge during their recent VSO-coordinated visit to the UK. Funded by Comic Relief, VSO is working in partnership with the Ghana Education Service and other organisations to implement a five year education programme in northern Ghana called TENI (Tackling Education Needs Inclusively). More...
January 2012
Staff update: We are pleased to welcome Stephen Jull who joins the Centre to work with John MacBeath, Sue Swaffield, George Oduro and Alfred Ampah-Mensah on the initiative in Ghana: Building Headteachers' Leadership Capacity for Enhancing Quality Teaching and Learning in Ghanaian Basic Schools.
November 2011
On 15th November the Centre hosted a welcome event for Commonwealth MPhil and PhD students at the Faculty to get to know one another and discuss opportunities for further events. Possibilities being explored include social events such as film screenings, seminars and maybe a reading/discussion group.
October 2011
The ANTSIT project is featured in the Humanitarian Centre's 2011 Cambridge International Development report: ICTD4 (see page 27): www.humanitariancentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2011-International-Development-Report.pdf
September 2011
CCE were well represented at the 11th UKFIET International Conference on Education and Development held in Oxford (13-15 September). The theme for this year's conference was Challenges for Education: Economics, Environment and Emergency. CCE staff and their collaborative partners contributed two symposium sessions on Sustaining Transformation in Educational Practice through Partnerships.
Session 1: Meeting the professional development needs of teachers
Professional development for interactive use of digital resources in Zambian primary schools (Haßler, Hennessy and Zulu)
Transforming school leadership policy and practice in Ghana (Oduro, Swaffield and MacBeath)
Tackling educational ‘under-achievement’ through developing communities of practice in the Caribbean and the UK (George, and Younger)
Session 2: Issues of gender and pedagogy in East Africa
Successful women against the odds in Uganda (Muhwezi, Fentiman and Warrington)
Exploring hybrid HIV/AIDS curriculum development through dialogue with pupils, teachers and community stakeholders (Swartz and McLaughlin)
Pedagogy and leadership in a Tanzanian primary school: a whole school perspective (Fentiman, Wyse, Sugrue and Dachi)
Visiting Scholar Suseela Malakolunthu also contributed a paper entitled Vernacular school versus national school policy in Malaysia: an issue of integration or division to the syposium on Education in Multi-language Environments. For further information see UKFIET 2011.
Staff update: We are pleased to welcome Seonghye Moon who joins the Centre as the new Research Assistant working on the Pedagogy initiative. She has recently completed her PhD at Reading and will be working with us part-time for six months analysing video data from Tanzania.
The Centre are also delighted to welcome Solomon Kazzah who commences his Commonwealth Professional Fellowship on Monday 26th September.
July 2011
Solomon Kazzah, Head of IT at Kaduna State College of Education, Nigeria has been awarded a Commonwealth Professional Fellowship to undertake a 3 month work placement at the Faculty (hosted by the Centre for Commonwealth Education and the IT Department) from 26th Sept - 16th December.
Whilst in Cambridge, Solomon will collaborate with colleagues in Cambridge to develop a project which will benefit both the Faculty and Kaduna State College of Education. At the same time, he hopes to gain a broad understanding of how the Faculty uses information technology in all areas of teaching, administration and research. On his return to Nigeria he would like to:
- Improve the ICT infrastructure in the College
- Expand the use of ICT in teaching and learning by cascading his learning through training sessions and setting up a community of Teachers for ICT in Teaching/Learning
- Implement distance and virtual learning to help meet the demand for teacher training courses which exceeds the physical resources of the college to accommodate and cater for the number of students seeking admission.
- Develop online in-service teacher training programmes
- Produce quality e-learning materials
- Change to a digital library
The Caribbean Poetry Project
The Caribbean Poetry Project (2010-2012), headed by Professor Morag Styles, is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the University of the West Indies with links to the Online Poetry Archive. The Poet Laureate is patron and advisory poets include John Agard, Edward Baugh, Kamau Brathwaite, Mervyn Morris, Olive Senior and Benjamin Zephaniah. Among the other project outcomes which will include joint international research, the team have collaborated to devise a core Teaching Caribbean Poetry course which is being taught (or is soon to be) variously as part of a B.Ed course to undergraduates, a masters unit for higher degree students and a CPD course for teachers in Barbados, Cambridge, Jamaica and Trinidad. The book of the course will be published next year. A conference on THE POWER OF CARIBBEAN POETRY - WORD AND SOUND will be held at Homerton College and Cambridge Faculty of Education on 20-22 September, 2012 with a Call for Papers soon to go out. Speakers include John Agard, Kei Miler, Mervyn Morris, Grace Nichols, Velma Pollard and Olive Senior. For further information, please consult the project website - http://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk.
May 2011
eLearning Africa 2011: 6th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training
Sara Hennessy and team member Andrew Cross recently attended eLearning Africa, the 6th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training. A total of 1,702 participants from more than 90 countries from Africa and beyond convened at the continent's leading event for ICT-supported education. This year the conference was hosted by the Government of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam. Sara and Andrew gave a presentation, co-authored with Bjoern Hassler, Tom Lord and Alan Tackson on Portable Technologies to Support Interactive Teaching in Zambian Classrooms. Download abstract.
April 2011
CAL Conference 2011
On 14th April Sara Hennessy gave a presentation Creating interactive pedagogical spaces using portable technologies in the Zambian classroom to CAL 2011 at Manchester Metropolitan University. The presentation, co-authored with Bjoern Hassler, reported on a research project which uses portable technologies with Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Source software to help embed interactive forms of teaching into classroom practice in Zambia. The work is jointly funded by the Centre for Commonwealth Education and DfID and is carried out in conjunction with Aptivate, an NGO.
Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past
Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State, South Africa visited the Faculty of Education on Tuesday 12 April and gave an inspirational talk about his experiences in South Africa as the first black dean of education and what it meant to confront deep seated racism among his students and colleagues. His book Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past is a compelling account of the struggle to change his students' uncompromising world view, in the process helping to reframe his own understanding. The event concluded with a stimulating and wide ranging discussion with the audience of staff, students and visitors to the Faculty.
March 2011
Mobile Technologies for Education: The experience in the developing world
On Wedsnesday 30th March the Centre for Commonwealth Education co-hosted a panel discussion with the Humanitarian Centre (organised by Becky Qin Chen). Discussion focused on the questions: How can we use mobile technology to improve education in developing countries? Which mobile technologies are most versatile and appropriate for interactive teaching in poorly resourced classrooms? What are the roles of NGOs, the private sector and research institutions in contributing to mobile education? From ‘M-Ubuntu’ to mobile phones for higher education and social inclusion, what can we learn from existing mobile education initiatives? The speakers were Niall Winters (panel chair), Sacha DeVelle, Geoff Stead, Sara Hennessy and Bjoern Hassler. The event was attended by around 70 people, many coming from outside Cambridge, and the talks were followed by a lively question and answer session with the panel of speakers.
February 2011
We were pleased to welcome Suseela Malakolunthu from the University of Malaya on 23rd February. Suseela joins the Centre as a Visiting Scholar and will be in Cambridge until November working primarily with John MacBeath and Sue Swaffield on the Ghana project. Suseela was one of the participants of the CCE conference in Mauritius in 2010.
On Monday 14th February Ruth Millson joined the support team in the CCE office. Ruth relocated from South Africa to the UK a few years ago and has been running her own start-up business. She will work for CCE part-time (Monday / Thursday mornings and all day on Wednesdays).
On Friday 4th February Ireen Jahan joined the Centre for Commonwealth Education on a work experience placement from Cambridge Regional College where she is undertaking a course in Advanced Administration. Ireen is from Bangladesh and has a Masters in History from Dhaka University. She will be working at the Centre on Fridays until June, and began her placement by spending a full week with us in February, with plans to do a further two weeks in March.
Events
June 2010
The Centre hosted a three day invitational conference
Millennium Goals Revisited: Directions Beyond 2015: Transforming Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Commonwealth Schools in Mauritius at the end of June. 
Leading development educators from across the Commonwealth presented papers on pedagogy and leadership in schools, on initial and continuing teacher education and on themes associated with the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in schools, on gender issues, and on HIV / AIDS. For more information see conferences
June 2009
Cambridge Summer School
The Centre held a successful two week summer school from 22nd June-3rd July, 2009. Participants came from as far afield as New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania as well as from the UK. They represented academic institutions, Government Ministries and international aid organisations. More