Written by Dr Mungai Njoroge

The Ministry of Education mandates CEMASTEA to provide continuous professional development of teachers in STEM education. Among recent initiatives put in place by CEMASTEA includes mentoring teachers into practitioner authorship. Guided by transformative praxis, the mentoring initiative intends to attain two outputs. Firstly, provide teachers with decolonized spaces for documenting their lived contextual experiences as practitioners and secondly, encourage sharing of lived experiences among practitioners in communities of practice. The transformative praxis initiative by CEMASTEA came at a reasonable time given the many challenges posed to the education sector by the COVID-19 pandemic. As practitioners, teachers have valuable stories to share towards enhancing the teaching and learning process. During the three weeks mentoring experience provided by CEMASTEA, participants shared lived experiences and scholarly pursuits for social change via reflexive research and practice. Some of the stories were handy towards supporting the continuity of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. CEMASTEA, through the Research & Development Knowledge Management (R&D KM) Department, is in the process of actualizing documentation and sharing of these lived experiences and stories through the establishment of a practitioner journal. The R&D KM department shared this mentorship initiative at The Centre for Leadership & Diversity International Conference, held online from December 10^th to 11^th, 2021, by the University of Toronto. Conference participants lauded the initiative by CEMASTEA, which was deemed a timely intervention to mitigate the dearth of literature on quality education from sub-Saharan Africa. 

Dr. Mungai Njoroge presenting a paper on behalf of CEMASTEA at the CLD Conference – University of Toronto