Lifelong, stone-strong legacies

Mar 23, 2020 | Mubuso Zamchiya | In the News, Second Chance

Mubuso Zamchiya is Managing Director of the Luminos Fund

The Luminos Fund has discovered something special in “joyful learning.” That is the name we have given to our pedagogy – our approach to teaching and learning. At the core of joyful learning is the mission to help children acquire foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Especially marginalized children, who have missed out on an education because of poverty, crisis, or discrimination. But the magic of joyful learning lies in how skills acquisition actually takes place. It’s all in the relationship.

You see, the joyful learning journey is not primarily about amassing facts and details. It is instead a process of discovery that occurs through holistic connections. By connections, I mean that joyful learning is far from an abstract exercise. It truly invites children to engage. They engage with their own hearts and minds, with their peers and learning facilitators, with their families and communities, and with the broader environment and world around them.

By holistic, I mean that joyful learning invites children to muster, master, and mobilize all their faculties as they connect and engage. They bring their consciousness, their physical presence, their attributes, and their strengths. They marshal their emotional intelligence and they harness their cognitive competencies. They draw upon their social acumen and they share the fruit of their creative flair.

When discovery is fueled by holistic connections, as children act and respond to the stimulus of relationship, joy is both inevitable and automatic. They, of course, appreciate the fun in Luminos’ Second Chance program. But their joy is the product of that special “aha” moment when they realize that the ability to learn has been inside all along. What they needed was a little help to unlock the light within them. And that is precisely what joyful learning does. It helps children make holistic connections with their intrinsic power to learn.

We see this in so many profound examples of learning and life at Luminos. In my opinion, most resonant among these is the way our classrooms in Lebanon use psycho-social support and art therapy to help Syrian refugee Second Chance students work through the incredible trauma of their dislocation. There is great power in the act of using one’s own creative flair to make connections between the past, the present, and the future; great freedom in finding expression for one’s thoughts and emotions. Our students do so, not only through spoken and written words, but also through the much more communicative dialogue of markers, Crayons, and paint. As a testament to their resilience, artwork by some of our Syrian refugee students was celebrated recently at Christie’s, a pinnacle platform for global art.

Elsewhere recently, there was a different-yet-connected celebration of the arts. Just this week, global newspapers announced that certain iconic statues of the Zimbabwe Bird, which had been stolen during colonialism, are now being returned home. As a person of Zimbabwean heritage, who, among other things, also writes about Zimbabwean history, this news was a source of joy for me. There is no deep comparison between the trauma experienced by Syrian children and the journey of my early childhood. However, there is some small connection in our stories. I was born in exile as my parents, members of Africa’s formidable freedom generation, worked with their peers to bring independence to Zimbabwe. I therefore have a modicum of experience – not equivalent to our students in Lebanon, but a modicum nevertheless – of what it feels like to be dislocated.

The joy I have regarding the return of the Zimbabwe Bird statues is intertwined with my appreciation for the reconciliation the gesture forges with the past. Their repatriation provides Zimbabweans some degree of closure on a historical puzzle board that still has many missing pieces. In my thankfulness, as I absorb the significance of this moment, I find myself thinking about the eleventh-century artists who chiseled, shaped, and shined formless slabs of soapstone into these magnificent sculptures. I marvel at what thoughts, plans, ideas, hopes, and aspirations they might have sought to reconcile for themselves through the expression of their incredible art. These sculptures have provided an entire nation a great gift lasting many centuries. It makes me wonder what sort of education these sculptors would have experienced as children to make their work so brilliant.

I think that is why I feel so privileged to work at the Luminos Fund. In personal terms, Luminos is a place where I can contribute to the work of reconciling Africa’s past with its future. In broader terms, Luminos is also a platform upon which I can participate in helping children across the world unlock the light of learning in their lives. I derive pride that, in joyful learning, Luminos unashamedly embraces the arts as essential connective fiber in the holistic tapestry of relational discovery. I am also glad that in some small way, Luminos is playing a part in helping our Syrian refugee children build lifelong, stone-strong legacies that – like the Zimbabwe Bird – will similarly stand the test of time.