The Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) is a UNESCO’s Research Institute focused on transforming education towards the Social Development Goal (SDG) 4, through programmes that promote social and emotional learning, innovate digital pedagogies; and the empowerment of youth towards “Building Kinder Brains”.
Dr Aaron Nkosi, DBE’s Director for Curriculum Research explained that, “approximately 4,800 teachers will be trained on UNESCO’s MGIEP’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) approach during 2024. SEL can be broadly defined as the process of gaining competencies, skills and attitudes to recognise and manage emotions to develop caring and concern for other people, whilst helping to establish positive relationships with ourselves and others to make responsible decisions and handle challenging circumstances, whilst also incorporating Digital Training (DT).”
Dr Nkosi further explained that the training model will unfold as follows: “KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng Provinces which will be piloting the project, will follow a hybrid, personal and online, training system, with 4 days of in-person training with two sessions of three weeks of facilitated virtual training sessions for 300 teachers per province. The timeline envisaged for the training is from February to April 2024. The other seven provinces will only attend online training, with three sessions of three weeks of facilitated virtual sessions for three cohorts with 200 teachers, a total of 600 teachers per province, from February to September 2024. The training will also include 90 minutes of Community of Practice sessions and each cohort will have a break between the two courses. The phases will include initiation and set-up with meetings with the various provinces and the establishment of task teams for defining of processes; the research and design; rollout; and training and data collection will then follow. Data analysis and reporting is scheduled from October to December 2024. The group of female and male teachers will include a geographical representation of each province with a mix of subject teachers, ICT teachers and teachers responsible for extra-curricular activities”.
This programme supports teachers in developing their own Social and Emotional Competencies (SELs) whilst enhancing their wellbeing. It also strengthens teacher capacity to implement activities that foster the SECs of learners. This will empower teachers to have effective strategies to create safe and supportive learning spaces to improve classroom management. The programme introduces teachers to various digital tools and empowers them to create immersive, engaging learning experiences using technology to utilise these for pedagogy and assessment and fostering effective and innovative teaching methodologies.
The traditional notion of a compartmentalised emotional and cognitive brain is obsolete. The brain is a complex yet dynamic organ, which uses an interplay of emotional and rational neural networks to make decisions. Education, if designed and implemented with this understanding of the brain, can have implications for learning and human behaviour that offer great promise and potential to address problems such as violence, poverty, inequality and change for the common good. Human wellbeing depends on humans learning to communicate individual needs to each other and managing emotions in healthy ways. Emotional and social development is therefore essential. Education systems must be transformed to be able to address and contribute to this aspect of human learning and experience. This whole-brain activation happens when children and adolescents learn to read, count, reason, make decisions and perform acts of kindness. The introduction of social and emotional learning provides a double dividend to learners and society by improving academic achievements and nurturing empathetic and compassionate individuals dedicated to building a kinder world.