Disability Training for Visionary School Leaders in Liberia

Society laments the plight of children wounded by war or disaster or disease, but what do we do to help them become the solution givers? How can they and their teachers improvise ideas and strengthen relationships, to apply both radical love and rudimentary technologies as part of a holistic societal transformation? Weighed down with the wounds they have inherited, how does a generation move beyond resilience toward connectivity?

Liberian children with physical and psycho-social needs have access to few resources in a country whose health care team shrank during years of Ebola and conflict, even before the lockdowns of Covid.  Over the past half century, the nation reached the point where forty percent of the population had visible physical disabilities and sixty percent manifest signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Meanwhile, poor job opportunities affected this sector of the population, leaving them vulnerable to poverty, often stigmatized for their problems. Special Education resources seldom reached the children, especially in rural areas, and overcrowded schools left administrators and teachers too overwhelmed to address the specialized needs and social stigmas surfacing among learners. A generation that accepted its own disabilities as largely unmet had trouble suddenly caring for the exceptional needs of the coming generation.

Our solution creates what you might consider nested support groups as learners, teachers, administrators and national facilitators connect with peers across borders to share their ideas and “wisdom,” -- to strengthen their sense of purpose and learn by teaching and sharing with others. This solution seizes new capacities in technologies such as Zoom and WhatsApp and introduces a new technology, an online course on reaching the exceptional learner. However, the technologies do not replace the value of role models who initiate face to face contact. Rather, internet-based technologies serve as reinforcement for inspiring onsite professional development discussions. Combining both online and onsite experience, educators receive continuous support for the challenges they face in meeting their wide-ranging classroom needs.

The onsite aspect of the solution for narrowing the gap for learners with physical and psychosocial disabilities, therefore, includes a life-changing visit from Dr. Rodney-Hume Dawson, a disabled professor from the Cal State who emigrated from Sierra Leone. He will travel to introduce his radical love theory to educators, and to demonstrate how he has turned a disability into a pattern for success in the field of education.

The school leaders will have a chance to compare new and existing uses of technology as they inspire the teachers to apply these theories to school-based community impact projects (Share it and Send it projects) and to teacher training workshops. They will introduce tools and strategies that:

1. Encourage appreciation of diversity and reduce stigmas in inclusive classrooms;

2. Implement Science/Technology/Engineering/Arts/Math (STEAM) challenges that improve life and learning for classmates with physical challenges; and  

3. Enhance tiered wisdom exchanges across local, regional or national borders, using zoom and WhatsApp to increase communications and and information sharing between trainers, principals, educators and learners about ways to not only include but embrace under-served members of the disabled community. 

This solution targets three groups:

1.Teachers seeking new tools and technologies for reaching the most vulnerable children in society;

2. Special need learners invited into the inclusive classroom although they are crippled or blind or deaf or autistic or displaying signs of depression or evincing PTSD or any other learning challenge;

3. Classmates striving to honor resilience, appreciate diversity, and to help design physical innovations and social solutions that unite all and simplify learning for all.

Full-Circle Learning Africa (FCL) has spent thirty years researching a holistic, interdisciplinary learning model.

has ramped up the solutions as it enhances the technologies.  An organization that began with its first grassroots projects in Los Angeles in 1992, it offered Liberian teachers holistic, multidisciplinary learning a decade before the Covid -19 pandemic hit. Liberia, in fact, now has more participating FCL schools than any other nation in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

In recent years, the model of delivery has responded to the need for adaptive delivery models. The pandemic initiated the exploration of new technologies to promote distance learning, perhaps still out of reach for most students but newly relevant for teachers and principals across borders. With the use of Zoom and WhatsApp on the rise among our African trainers, they soon found ways to share concepts that teachers ultimately translated into projects in communities, adapting school activities to the level of technological access. The resulting improvements in educator collegiality across nations filtered down to improved insights or capacities among teachers, and ultimately, expanded learning motivation and social cohesion among learners. Still, one frustration expressed by school principals was the challenge of fully including learners with disabilities. 

Internal research (Likert surveys for educators) will help us compare the impact of:

• Rodney Hume Dawson’s educator visits about physical disability, enhanced by an online course featuring Dr. Kathryn de Planque’s research on psycho-social disorders and inclusivity.
• The combination of both tools, applied between September 2022 and February 2024.

2.    Continuous educator-to-educator dialogue about best practices, conducted through Zoom and WhatsApp, focused on classroom activities that include technological innovations and social cohesion strategies.

Full-Circle Learning exists to help young people embrace their role as the change agents and humanitarians of their generation. We teach students to see hardships as problem-solving opportunities for the benefit of the human family and the family of living beings.

Our first line of activity is capacity building among the educators who teach them. These educators look to us for strategies that will help them implement a vision that addresses a succession of community issues that often revolve around basic sustainable development goals such as equity, poverty, peace, and reduction of health disparities, food security, and climate change impacts. We teach learners to integrate a character and service goal with their creativity and intellectual strengths, to solve the intended community challenge, thus regenerating the earth or contributing to the broader society. Unity is one of their primary themes. Solving this inclusivity challenge will help them to continue to appreciate diversity in all its forms. 

This solution views technological tools as assets to fan the flame of human potentialities, from the capacity of the most visionary school leader to that of the most vulnerable child. The solution celebrates not only human connections, but the connection between online and onsite learning as a spigot for sharing life-changing wisdom.

The elements of our solution have already been used in Liberia to address climate change impacts, poverty, food insecurity, health disparities and other challenges. We have no doubt that the innovations arising from this new project will have a great impact on children with disabilities.

We anticipate that the school leaders will hear the inspiring stories of a role model, then will share their own success stories with one another informally and formally through their exchanges. They will learn new skills in an online course. The administrators will demonstrate new classroom strategies and suggest new innovations for particular teachers and students. 

Perhaps a student in a wheelchair will create a crude but innovative technology by punching holes in cardboard to make a Braille reader for a classmate, moving beyond her own challenges and realizing her potential to help others. When the teacher then brings in a cell phone and invites her to teach classmates in another county the process, suddenly her innovation serves a wider segment of the human family. Her thirst not only to connect but to develop more elaborate innovations increases. She sees herself as capable and imagines the cell phone as a tool not for stigmatizing but for true wisdom exchange among equals and a platform for radical love.

This Disabilities Training project will extend from September 2022 – February 2024,

Including the preparation phase, the foreign guest visits, the online course, the community impact projects and the evaluation phase to evaluate the balance of tools that best generates positive community impacts.

Meanwhile, concurrent Full-Circle Learning training and community impact projects will continue, based on the needs identified by individual schools.

We hope to make the results of this project known, as a case study to inform inclusivity training across Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions where similar innovations are needed. It may also have relevance in addressing any capacity building project in which Visionary School Leaders help their children take the lead in addressing conflict, climate change, social issues, health, or economic disparities.

We anticipate that each year the number of regional facilitators and training sites in Liberia will continue to grow, as it will across Africa. Perhaps the demand will increase by 10 percent between now and 2027. Having a plan for delivery of information that retains the importance of human connection and mains targeted use of technology will be increasingly important.

The pattern of onsite Share It and Send It steps in local curricular approaches and in staff gatherings will continue to challenge all levels to solve problems through online technologies that enhance the wisdom exchanges and yet that create indissoluble bonds among educators and learners alike as we welcome the next generation of compassionate problem solvers. 

Two months before the end of the grant period, Full-Circle Learning will collect a Likert Study to all educators participating in the program to discern:

• Answers to an introductory question with boxes to check indicating which technology tools they used and whether they participated in onsite visits and professional development workshops
  • Heightened their own motivation to care for all learners
  • Improved student learning in specific cases or in general
  • Generated a positive shift in their own classroom strategies or supervisory strategies or student interventions or family consultations
  • Resulted in best-practices conversations or plans among their colleagues (adult wisdom exchanges)
  • Initiated innovative school-wide trends
  • Triggered positive interactions between disabled students and classmates
  • Reduced social stigmas
  • Applied technology as a tool for sharing:

b.    Multiple choice questions (very true/true/somewhat true/not true) and comment sections applied to the tools they marked, to indicate specific ways in which those tools have:

       i.    innovative social concepts, advanced orally   by the whole class

       ii.    engineering problem solving, applied to help disabled students

       iii.    messages about inclusivity created through music and art

       iv.    personal expressions of inclusivity created through literacy

       v.    wisdom exchanges (formal idea exchanges with students in a

              classroom in another school)

We theorize that change occurs not only on the push and pull of the interlocking systems of climate, of crisis, of economic need and political unrest and of advancing technologies, but also with the constancy of the human heartbeat and its call for connection. People long to see their innovative practices and inventions applied for the common good--to enjoy a peak learning experience reduces suffering or brings joy to others. Today’s technologies can broaden their possibilities for doing so when used as the means rather than as the end, the how instead of the why. The value of the tools, swells in proportion to the wave of their altruistic purpose.

We posit that human beings bring innate talents, perspectives, and potential to the world. They also share a desire to connect as they discover the uses of their inner and outer strengths. This is why we learn. Educators stumble upon their own sense of vision and purpose as they move beyond literacy and numeracy, matching community problem-solving dilemmas to grade-level requirements and character goals.

For example, the Society Builders Class might aspire to complete four units throughout the year, each unit with a separate habit-of-heart: Vision Seeking, Patience, Awareness and Advocacy. In August, they might develop a vision by using recycled materials to create light in the homes of elders who lack electricity. In October, they might apply patience by growing a school garden to feed local orphans. They may become aware of climate impacts such as flooding in February and design innovative water filtration systems for local families suffering from dysentery. They might advocate for tribal unification in April and offer to teach conflict resolution among tribes resisting water sanitation. Their school will need technology to share these community projects with wisdom exchange partners in another region, who then replicate their processes for community engagement and consult about additional approaches.  (Each of these examples were based on past school projects.)

Change then comes as a generation of learners relies on authentic experience to embrace their role as transformers. It occurs to the extent that they apply their resources—both external and internal—as tools for uplifting the wellbeing, health, and tranquility of humanity and the rejuvenation of the planet.

We are introducing a new online course, best utilized via computer or, if not, cell phone. A cohort of colleagues in three counties of Liberia will use this technology, by invitation. 

Existing technologies include Zoom, used among School Leaders, by invitation, across ten countries, and WhatsApp, used continuously and voluntarily. 

All the educational participants live in Liberia, one of the ten countries with the lowest ranking for educational resources for children. Ranked by the UN as 174 out of 187 for general poverty, Liberia also struggles to provide basic needs for many of its teachers and parents. This project targets three rural counties, where access to schools for the disabled are particularly rare. As one of only two nations with a female leader, Liberians do have a model for gender inclusivity, so we anticipate that the students served will provide gender balance and, of course, value diverse capacities. In general, FCL’s philosophy statement ennobles those of every race, creed, gender, nationality and religion. Dr. Rodney Hume Dawson was born in Sierra Leone, a country neighboring Liberia, even though he transcended his challenges to gain an education in the US and become a professor in California. 

Full-Circle Africa has served Liberia since 2009, currently offering five lines of activity:

1. Capacity building for educators;

2. Community impact grants for schools;

3. Wisdom exchanges among schools;

4. Scholarships; and

5. Humanitarian funds for learning communities in extreme crises.

Christopher Swen serves as the continental director for Africa, providing logistical coordination and program support for the regional facilitators across ten nations.

Each nation’s facilitator supervises the work of other staff or volunteers, who conduct onsite teacher training workshops, Visionary School Leaders sessions, and school site visits.

The parent org, Full-Circle Learning, is a 501-C-3 charitable organization with an unpaid board of 13 people, diverse in gender and in ethnic, religious and national background, reliant on small grants and donations. A team of it volunteers consult with Africa’s facilitators as needed.

Full-Circle Learning Africa is currently strengthening its sustainability through:

• Targeted Giving: By submitting project successes targeted to specific types of donors, we are expanding the possibilities for contributions through social media.
• Subsidizing Non-profit Through For-profit Trainings: New courses will hopefully attract paying participants to subsidize FCL’s free training for specific groups of educators.   

-       In-Country Capacity Building: We are helping each nation develop its capacity for internal fundraising. We are also training student representatives of Liberia’s afterschool Girls United Clubs in fiscal planning, to prepare them to design sustainable community impact projects.

We have begun to see increases based on our plan, in the following ways:

• Targeting Giving: A successful health disparities school project in Nigeria generated results among many thousands of families. It is starting to increase interest among potential donors from the health community.
• Subsidizing Non-Profit Through For-Profit: We incur expenses for training venues, food, the transportation, and materials. To educate teachers. Technology has reduced some of these expenses in countries where IT is available. These sessions are now accessible with a possible fee for locations where a teacher’s contribution may subsidize training in vulnerable regions.

2.    In-Country Capacity Building: An online session for global school leaders allowed the management team to encourage economic capacity building within nations. Since then, some schools have enhanced their parent support. Others have offered to pay uniform costs to reduce the cost of tuition for scholarships. Some facilitators have begun to independently seek grant opportunities for their new projects.