Hello! More than 600 high school STEM teachers and students in Rwanda can experience Pivot Academy Rwanda 2017. We need you to help us finish up our fundraising...
. . . We are three high school teachers (photo left) from East Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte, NC: Samantha Freiberg (Math), Deb Semmler (Physics and Engineering) and Connie Wood (Biology). Middle school teacher (photo right) Amanda Eskildsen (General Science) teaches in East Palo Alto, CA).
Our plans this summer call for us to travel to Rwanda together and deliver Pivot Academy 2017 - a hands-on, problem-based Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) program with an additional Computer education component. Nearly 600 high school students at five high schools in a rural area about 90 minutes from the capital of Kigali will participate and benefit. Together, we'll spend more than a month delivering Pivot Academy training and mentoring to the students and about 40 high school STEM teachers, as well as observing teachers in the high schools and local "feeder" schools. We'll introduce and provider training for an online Learning Management System (LMS) with lesson plans aligned to the Rwandan national curriculum and inspired by International Baccalaureate standards. Many lessons will focus on hands-on experiments that relate to agriculture, water and sanitation.
We've Already Received $6,500 in Grants - We Need Your Support to Finish Fundraising and Share Our Story
As teachers, this volunteer project is only possible when we receive donations to support travel, accommodations, etc. We were able to plan this amazing contribution to education and keep costs low through nonprofit Mothering Across Continents (MAC). The MAC team in Rwanda organizes everything on the ground, and in the US the MAC nonprofit status makes donations to our trip tax-deductible. We're excited that Deb Semmler has been awarded a $2,500 World Affairs Council Scholar award to travel to Rwanda and study solar energy and work with Pivot Academy Rwanda. Samantha Freiberg received a $4,000 grant from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. This is all great! . . . it means that as a team (Deb, Samantha and Connie), we only need to raise an additional $5,600 in total to cover the rest of travel, accommodations, and-in country expenses. We're humbly asking you to contribute with a tax-deductible donation and then share our Pivot Academy 2017 story via social media buttons located on the side of this page. (If you want to donate specifically to help with one individual teacher's goal, you can do so with the Select Pull Down Menu in the donation block above).
Any questions or ideas are also welcome:
debra.semmler@cms.k12.nc.us
samanthak.freiberg@cms.k12.nc.us
Building on Pivot Academy's Past Success!
We have a lot of confidence in our ability to make a difference. This is the third year that Deb Semmler is traveling to Rwanda; a lot of teachers and students there even call her "Mama Science." In 2015, Deb visited two all-girls high schools and met with Rwandan education officials to explore what STEM programs would be meaningful to Rwanda's vision and goals for competency-based STEM education. In 2016, Deb and Connie piloted Pivot Academy with 150 students at "Byimana," a STEM-focused rural high school for more than 800 girls. Jean-Marie Nshimiyimana, who will also be on our team this summer and be heading to grad school for Computer Science studies in Fall 2017, introduced the use of "Tablets" last year. This summer, he will greatly expand the Tablets initiative to support access to lesson plans in the online LMS that we'll train teachers to use.
The Big Picture - Expanding Pivot Academy
When you generously help us deliver Pivot Academy Rwanda 2017, you're doing something even bigger. Rwanda has moved beyond the genocide of 1994 but is still a poor country. Rwanda doesn't have enough managers, teachers and high school students with STEM and ICT practice working on real problems. The gap is especially wide in rural areas and for girls. Pivot Academy Rwanda 2017 is designed to start with first-year high school students this year (in Rwanda, that's 10th grade), continue and become more challenging in the second year (11th grade), and culminate with meaningful social enterprise project ideas in the third and last year of high school (12th grade). Pivot Academy is also designed to be replicated beyond the District where we will work in Rwanda this summer. To consider how and make plans to do this, Pivot Academy observers will be with us from Rwanda, as well as Burundi, South Sudan and Zambia.
Thank you in advance for helping us and Pivot Academy Rwanda 2017.