How can I facilitate the personal development of my students as I live my educational values

Abstract

The title of our Conference leads me to reflect briefly on how I understand transformative education for development. If we look at development from an African perspective we usually understand this to refer to the socio-economic, political and other forms of development of a country. In this context there would be many ways of implementing innovative education techniques which could foster such development. However, in my experience, it is very difficult to bring about socio-economic development in a country even through education, when we look at the matter in general, third person terms. I am convinced that to foster development in Africa we need to educate our students in transformative, innovative ways, which facilitate personal growth and development. If our educational practice focuses on helping each student to transform themselves personally it is more likely that s/he will be able to bring about further change in our society. For these developments at the personal or social level to be genuine they need to have a solid foundation.