Studying

In our newsletter in November we promised we would explain a little more about our study plans for this year. Since they begin, formally for one of us, tomorrow we thought we better do this now before our time gets consumed by books and libraries!

Tomorrow I (Matt) will return to the classroom to begin/continue (I’ll explain about this later) studying for a Masters degree. Whilst I have very much enjoyed, and hopefully been of some use in, the work I have been doing in the Wycliffe UK office for the last few months, I am looking forward to this new challenge.

Ever since we agreed (over 12 months ago now!) to aim towards taking up new positions in Uganda, I have felt that I would like to get some further training to allow me to be better equipped when I take up this new role. The role in Uganda will have me building partnerships with other organisations, working together to try to help improve children’s access to education in the language they understand the best.

To do this work effectively I wanted to get a bit more background on the basics of linguistic analysis (to understand how orthographies/alphabets are arrived at and some of the challenges that surround creating a good writing system), some training in partnership building and programme planning, and some specific study of current/best practice multi-lingual education (MLE) methods (where more than one language is used in a child’s education environment/process).

Since we left the UK for Tanzania in January 2008 some of the training programmes here at the Wycliffe Centre have been assembled into accredited Masters degrees. The teaching is still delivered here at the centre, but the degree is accredited and awarded by Middlesex University. One of the Masters is entitled ‘MA Literacy Programme Development’ and, in a nutshell, covers all of the keys areas I had highlighted as training needs I wanted to cover!

Our training in 2007, before we left the UK, counts as credit towards this masters, and so this is why I am joining the programme in January and will be studying until the end of May when I will then need to start work on a dissertation. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss and so I have enrolled to start classes tomorrow! Just as our accommodation and living costs here in the UK still need to be covered by our support network, the training costs (which we all know are getting more and more expensive here in the UK) also need to be covered by our support. Liz’s health is still not good enough for us to return to East Africa currently and so we believe this is the right step for us to be taking at this time.

And finally, I am not the only one who will be studying again this year! Liz has also enrolled on a distance-learning course on ‘Proofreading and Editorial Skills’. This will help her improve her skills in this area as she is increasingly playing an important role in the production of printed materials in Tanzania. This mode of study suits her well as she will be able to be flexible with the work and study, fitting it around her continuing fluctuation of wellness!

We will try and find time to keep feeding-back our progress over the next few months! Watch this space…