My LiA this summer consisted of seven weeks of teaching intensive maths, based in Kigali, at a boarding school for Afghan girls. I directly taught around 40 students in total, whose mathematical abilities and educational needs varied considerably, and I also was able to play a role through other tasks for the school, including chaperoning trips to a book shop, and helping to facilitate football and cricket training.

I arrived in Rwanda with no formal teaching experience, and a lot of uncertainty regarding how effective I would actually be as a teacher, while entering a cultural and institutional environment which was vastly different to that which I am used to. I thought at first that my role would consist predominantly of delivering lessons from a set curriculum to classes, and outside of mathematics my role around the school would be rather minimal. To this end, I initially believed ‘leadership’ in my LiA would be focussed on effective communication and support in the classroom. However, over my time at the school, I came to understand leadership as more relational and reciprocal, and I believe my impact at the school grew to be more significant as I engaged in more aspects of boarding school life. I was forced to (and relished the chance to) greatly develop my adaptability skills while learning the balance of when to take an active leadership role and when to step back. By learning from cultural difference and my own experiences with the students and advice from fellow volunteers and other teachers, I was able to become a part of the school community, and feel that I was able to make a tangible impact, which I feel exceptionally proud of.

The Societal Impact: How your actions concretely contributed to the partner NGO, community, or sustainable development goal (SDG) on the ground. 

The students I taught had been forced to leave Afghanistan in order to pursue an education, meaning that many of them had undergone traumatic journeys to even find themselves at the school. While the advice to volunteers was that we could listen to the girls’ stories, so long as we didn’t raise the topic of conversation or directly ask them, many girls were more than eager to discuss how they had found themselves in Rwanda, and the impact of leaving their families behind, with the ultimate goal of pursuing education. Without disclosing details of their stories, I did feel great pain and anger to learn the plight of these girls, yet I felt overwhelmingly inspired to see the passionate motivation they boasted to improve their own lives. Some had already been away from their families for a number of years before coming to Rwanda, and the amount of mental fortitude they possessed was remarkable. For the first 4 weeks that I was teaching, lessons consisted of 2 blocks lasting 70 minutes, with a 15-minute break in between, yet many students chose to stay in the classroom during this break, asking questions about myself and my life, or looking for further guidance on how to solve certain problems – often ones that they had independently sought after school.

To this end, my actions of teaching these students was (naturally) a huge privilege, but I was able to help contribute to the school community. I was able to support SDG 4 – Quality Education, and SDG 5 – Gender Equality by teaching these girls, whose opportunities to learn in Afghanistan would have been severely limited, or non-existent. 

As a maths teacher, my actions can be seen to have concretely contributed to the school, as I daily created varied worksheets of different difficulties for the students, learning how to do so, and effectively communicate concepts to the class. I structured my lessons by:

• Quickly going over concepts from the previous lesson
• Introducing a new idea
• Working through multiple examples on the whiteboard
• Taking any questions and slowly, clearly talking them through
• Handing out worksheets for the girls to complete
• Remaining diligent to answer any questions the girls might have, supporting their problem solving without handing them an easy solution

I could see the impact of my actions via student response. I heard from many other volunteers that the girls had enjoyed my classes and been talking about them, students from other classes joined my lessons, and at the end of my time at the school, the girls independently organised an assembly to thank me for my teaching and my impact on them. I was particularly proud to read the personal thank you messages written by the girls in a notebook they gifted me, where some students thanked me as their first ever maths teacher at the school, and they picked out individual moments or things I did that they especially appreciated. Furthermore, simply seeing students who had initially been unable to grasp a concept get excited when I helped to ‘make it click’ was so unbelievably rewarding, and on many occasions I could see how through my tutelage, students who had been previously been wholly unfamiliar with a topic were now able to explain it to their peers.

Additionally, during my time at the school, the institution was in a transition phase – both through the school’s relocation to a new site, and as they were looking to introduce a formal ‘grade’ system, so that the girls could receive certified qualifications at the end of their time there. This posed challenges of what grades to place each of the students in, given they are of different ages and educational abilities, and given some had been out of an education for longer than others. I co-ordinated with another maths teacher to organise an assessment for the students, which was used as some supporting evidence for which grades to put students in. However, I was especially proud of the fact that I had learned from the girls’ abilities and ambitions to see where a designated grade (or test result) did not align with what I knew of the student. Therefore, at a large meeting with the school’s senior leadership and teachers, I was very pleased to be able to meaningfully contribute, and advise when designated grades did not seem right, and oftentimes this led to my recommendation being taken on board. Consequently, I can confidently say that my impact as a maths teacher exceeds the students simply enjoying my teaching, rather my work actively contributed to their progression through the school. 

My contributions did also go beyond the classroom and my role as a maths teacher. I volunteered to take on additional responsibilities, such as facilitating football and cricket training with the students, which were organised activities that the girls were very excited for. As someone who is a good footballer, the girls were very eager to be taught how to do things like keepy uppies and rabonas, so I was able to make some impact there, while also maintaining the position of responsibility, looking out for the students as we crossed the road and walked to and from the football pitch. Other designated activities I did with the students included a trip to a bookshop, and going to the track in the city centre for 5 kilometres of walking or running.

Outside of these designated activities, I also became an informed mentor. For example, one student interviewed me about university applications, and how to decide on a course and university. This was a moment where I was especially proud of the impact I could make, as her worries and uncertainties mirrored those which I had had just 4 years prior. I was then able to give advice that was very well received, not giving her a direct answer on what she should do, but helping her to be comfortable in ways to find out what is right for her as someone else who has a broad range of interests and high ambition.

I also thoroughly enjoyed spending my evenings talking to the girls and engaging with their hobbies, which I could see had a really positive impact, and also helped to take away some of the responsibilities of other teachers and volunteers, allowing them to plan lessons and complete some marking, as I was very involved in evening entertainment. I played a lot of football informally on the school site, as well as playing chess, cards, badminton, basketball, and table tennis with the girls, talking through moves in chess and having a lot of fun.

 Finally, on the last few days I had with the school, the institution had moved to a new site, where I put in considerable effort to help with the moving and unpacking process, volunteering my time to carry heavy items up the large hill the school is now situated on.

Ethical Leadership Application: A self-aware analysis of how you managed friction, ambiguity, and cultural nuances in an unfamiliar setting.

I arrived solo in Kigali – the first time I have been away in the world by myself, in a setting where I was in a continent I had never visited, to volunteer in a role I had never done before, with a community with major differences in nationality, gender, age, and lived experience. The most significant primary challenge I faced was that of uncertainty – I did not know how I would be as a teacher and had not been told where my classroom would be, who my students were, and where key things like the printer were until the first morning that I was teaching. I was very worried about not providing adequate teaching for the girls, or not operating in the way that the school wanted me to, so I raised some of these concerns with staff members, who told me that over summer it was typically very informal, and I had a lot of freedom. This was naturally both liberating and terrifying – without clearly defined boundaries of what I should be doing, I was able to be highly adaptable in lessons, and in my role on campus. I managed to overcome this through open and honest conversation with the students – giving them a diagnostic test, before asking them the specific topics they felt they wanted covered, and caveating from there through the weeks.

Many problems did arise in the teaching setting, with printers being moved to the new site, unclear timetables, general uncertainty around classrooms, as well as the vast range of student abilities. I realised that adaptability meant being prepared to fully abandon my original method, and to come up with something new. After designing worksheets that I couldn’t print, I had to quickly switch my teaching to amore lecture-based style, using the whiteboard and worked examples, instead of assigning questions. Additionally, under time pressure to mark assessments, and come up with comments and grade recommendations for the students, I was able to put other tasks on hold and plough through the large number of long tests I had to mark, despite still being ill. This took a great deal of resilience but was so worth it to know that my hard work had a tangible impact on the girls’ student lives, and many of them were very happy to hear they had been put in, or moved to, the grade level which they wanted.

I did feel that illness was a major challenge for me during my time, and I learnt that resilience could consist of more than just pushing through, but rather encompasses accepting help when it is offered to me.

Through my experiences in both classroom and sport settings, I learnt the nuance of when to actively lead, and when not to. I was able to develop a friendly and conversational relationship in lessons, while maintaining sufficient authority to have control over my class when necessary. Primarily, I was leading in lessons, explaining concepts on the board, but I also gave students the freedom to come up and talk things through to their class, occasionally in Dari when some students were struggling with the language barrier. This was also relevant when watching world cup matches with the students – we were having friendly conversations and I was answering questions during the game, but when it ended and some control was needed to send them to their dorms, I could assume that position.

However, in sport settings I took a more passive role. The school has team captains, who were remarkable at organising teams, and determining what they wanted to do with practice, so my role became more one of facilitating that in whatever ways I could. I did join in with playing sport with them during training, but I reduced my own involvement, so as to not take away from their enjoyment – choosing to allow people to sometimes run past me, and passing to teammates instead of shooting (sometimes to their annoyance).

Overall I do not feel that I experienced major cultural conflict – I had worried that I would potentially make some mistakes that may make students uncomfortable, but in practice, cultural differences became a subject of curiosity and conversation rather than conflict. I had many insightful conversations about life in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Bangladesh, the UK, and all of the major differences and similarities between them, which were especially eye-opening. I was also invited by a school security guard to visit his home in a very different part of Kigali to where I had previously seen, in a large residential area that was largely less developed. Nevertheless, I experienced exceptional hospitality and was welcomed by both his family, and other members of the local community who looked to have conversations with me.

I talk a lot in my final blog post about being conscious of my positionality as a straight, white, British man in Rwanda, whereby I was in the minority, but did not face the same challenges that other minorities do. I suppose I learned predominantly that despite major differences in culture, human goodness is the most uniting global feature, and I was able to ask questions, listen, and share experiences in spite of entirely different backgrounds, with many different people. As a consequence, rather than just providing the service of teaching to the students, I received so much in return too, they taught me so much about a part of the world and a way of life that I was previously unaware of. At the farewell assembly, students thanked me for the impact I had on them, and I became emotional as I considered the substantial impact that they had had on me in return. 

The Research Connection: Where applicable, any connections you can draw with your Summer 1 research project. Scholars typically detail how their theoretical findings were applied, refined, or challenged by real-world field conditions

I did not see many major connections with the work that I completed in the Summer 1 research project. While both concerned education, last summer’s project was focussed on a large-scale, collaborative project of building a co-curricular programme with the ultimate goal of building character and reducing inequalities. I did observe the significance of character development on these girls who have experienced major challenges and faced so much difficulty and yet remain resilient and motivated. However, this felt more like less of a research project looking at the theory of character development, and more one of lived experience and shared human connection.

Overall, I feel I did have a major impact on the students that I taught, as I was able to provide stimulating questions and give support with solving them, across a range of different abilities. Then, through extracurricular activities, I spent time with even more students, helping to facilitate fun games, and providing some informal mentoring, and sharing lots of my own experiences while learning from them. In terms of leadership, my understanding of what the term means shifted from one of responsibility, to a more situational approach involving a fine balance, in the form friendliness while being an established authority, taking an active role and stepping back where appropriate, and being able to accept support from others as much as providing it myself.

The leaving assembly the girls organised, and the notebook containing personalised messages were the most powerful, and completely unexpected takeaway for me. I arrived uncertain of the impact I would have, the challenges I would face, and worried that I would have a minimal impact on the girls. Then after seven incredible weeks, the students co-ordinated to talk about the impact I had on them, and giving me a gift containing lovely personal messages. I realised that through this LiA, I was able to impact an inspirational group of people, while they affected me just as profoundly.