Level Up Village Zimbabwe-From The Pilot Study to the First Class

Level Up Village in Zimbabwe

The year was 2017, in the month of March when I got the first appreciation of what Level Up Village is all about. From that Monday morning, until this day, I have been involved in every Level Up Village event and activity. With my team here in Harare Zimbabwe and with the support of our head office in the United States of America, we have managed to transform and grow the organisation in a very passionate way. Many people have been asking about Level Up Village. Is it a social media networking site? Is it a music download site? These are some of the questions we always answered day in and day out as we took Level Up Village to the schools.  Level Up Village is more than just a social networking site, more than an educational platform. It is best known as Level Up Village and in this article, you will hear more of its operations, strides, breakthrough and challenges as experienced by the people of Zimbabwe. This article will explore the experience of Level Up Village as a new concept in Zimbabwe from March 2017 when it started operating as a pilot project until December 2019 when it we took our first official classes, the LuvToCode boot camp.

……..Well….What is it?

Level Up Village is a global platform which provides an array of learning and sharing opportunities for children across the world to pair and learn together. It allows children from various parts of the world to partner and work on a project together through the guidance of a teacher. These are virtually online classes which allows and permits for cultural exchanges, a very powerful tool for building tolerance of cultural dynamism and variations. The most important aspects of Level Up Village is that children interact and learn from each other as it allows and promotes the softer skills such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, creativity and communication. This sounds like Glocalisation of the classroom (Bringing international learning to our local students) of learning under one platform and learning the same things and the same time.

This is a project based curriculum where students send each other video letters as introduction to each other through their global classrooms. It operates in the same way the now defunct Pen Pal used to operate. The whole idea is to facilitate seamless collaborations across students from around the world by offering STEM-ARTS(STEAM) project related learning.

…….Level Up Village Zimbabwe.

Level Up Village is a global organization who’s Head office is in the United States of America. It started operating in America around the year 2012 and found its first activities in Zimbabwe in 2017 as a pilot project. Among the pioneering schools in Zimbabwe are Petra, Wise Owl and Tynwald Primary School. As an online version of the now defunct Pen Pal system, modern kids were not aware that such an arrangement could really happen. The only positive is that their teachers and their parents lived during the era of the Pen Pal hype and have seen or have connected to global friends and shared a number of issues together. The greatest positive is that Level Up Village came into Zimbabwe at a time when the government had just restructured it curriculum and ICT has been put forward as a key pillar in the new curriculum. In other words, the supporting infrastructure for the successful launching of the project was well in place and most kids especially in the upmarket and mostly private schools were very much prepared for anything related to ICT.

The adoption of the programme was higher in private schools than in government and council schools. From 2017 to December 2019, I have  learnt a lot especially issues related to the potential that kids have in providing solutions to the problems communities and countries are facing. As I first embarked in the Level Up Village, I realised that there is more in the programmes that could benefit the children. In a small enquiry I undertook to understand the impact of the Level Up Village project on the children and the schools, I was more than impressed to know that it is an exciting package that has made the community realise the great untapped potential of children. The zeal and the passion to provide solutions to the problems their country as well as their communities are facing, the eagerness to share with both colleagues abroad and parents as well as community members have been the transforming part which qualifies them as global citizens.

As Level Up Village Zimbabwe, I could best describe the whole programme as a challenge that is exciting .In every direction we take with Level Up Village, we felt drown closer to the kids and we began to appreciate the dynamism and potential inherent in them and the richness of their global networks. At Level Up Village we exist to impart into students the necessary skills they need to remain relevant and to thrive in this global village

After almost 2 years of building confidence in the market, the project started shaping up in the designed frame and by the time of writing of this article, over 1000 children have signed up for a course each term and are connected to an international student. LuvToCode holiday program is what they are taking right now and to describe the experiences and breathtaking outcomes from this week only, one would need a William Shakespeare and a Charles Dickens to help with the vocabulary because some of it is not within the conventional dictionaries.

…Taking it to the schools…the challenges

As I previously indicated, Level Up Village in Zimbabwe was, is and will always be a great exciting challenge that doesn’t give you the option to quit. Once you are in, you will love to be challenged by its nature and potential. In our first engagements with schools, our efforts were met by a mixed bag of reactions. Some schools were a bit skeptical about the whole programme whilst in other cases, the schools would be very keen but the teachers would be rigid and non-cooperative.

…of the reluctant Schools.

As most schools were hearing of this concept for the first time, they lacked understanding on how it functions and how this could benefit the children. Depending on the vision of the school and its leaders, some schools were very receptive to the concept and opened their facilities to the team to interact with the kids. The team realised that the extent to which the school would be receptive dependent on a number of factors. These include but are not limited to the vision of the school, the vision of their school administrators as well as their ages and the age of the schools.

In general, schools that support and provide a platform for extra-curricular activities

Most of the decisions to take up the program was based on the number of hours required to be dedicated to the courses, the requirements in terms of ICT infrastructure and the cost if any it will attract for it to be rolled out in their schools.

…of the receptive schools.

There were various reasons why certain schools were very receptive than others. Some schools are always looking for the best value to give to their students as they are compelled to justify why they are called the best in society. So they are those who choose to partner with us mainly because they wanted to extract value out of our courses and take it as a marketing strength for new students enrolment. There are however many others who choose to subscribe their schools for the sake of the exposure the kids will get from Level Up Village Courses. These took their time to understand the benefits of the programme to kids and once they had grasped the concept, they subscribed without haste. Most importantly, they become our ambassadors to the other schools, their children as well as parents.

…the teachers’ perspective.

Level Up Village courses were a threat to their profession and relevance within the school. They felt if kids would learn on their own with global partners, this will in the medium to long term threaten their own existence as teachers. They felt that the courses will evolve with time to eradicate the physical classroom and thus making them obsolete. This appeared to them as some sort of a disruptive innovation from Level Up Village.

                                                However, there were others on the money side of the whole project. They felt that the Level Up Village courses would bring them unnecessary extra and unpaid labour. They wanted to understand how they would benefit from their participation as teachers or facilitators. Once they realised that there was no direct financial benefit, some sought to block the programme whilst others were reluctant to take it up.

                                                So surprisingly that some of the teachers were very skeptical about online learning and they feared the whole programme would expose them of their skills deficiencies. It is true that in some of these schools, some teachers learned when the computer era had not overtaken teaching and learning. As a result they seemed unwilling to accept the programme.

As the team has worked with a number of schools mainly in Harare and mostly private schools, a lot of positives have been said about the Level Up Village. The team managed to interview formally and also causally the experiences and feelings of the kids who have participated and they praised the programme. They pointed out a number of benefits such as learning in pairs with global partners and how they have established friends and shared knowledge through the platform.

Tatenda from Tynwald Primary School was more enthusiastic about learning together with an overseas partner in global partners. In her own word…it’s so exciting to learn that others in America are also learning at the same time in their classroom. No one in our generation will be left out and it builds a virtual online LUV Alumnus which could help us as we seek to explore the world later in life”.

Bradley from Lusitania couldn’t contain his excitement about the pleasure of solving local problems with the help of overseas partners in the same class at the same time. He expressed it in this way:

….well, I never knew that climate change is a global problem until I joined LUV. That’s when I realised the problem of clean and safe water is a realistic global problem and when we worked together to find a solution, which was so exciting…

Tafadzwa parents in Northwood primary school peached up at one of our lessons and were short of words to describe how their daughter was transformed. Her father was the most excited and this is how he explained it all:

…ever since Tafadzwa joined the LUV classes, she has become more inquisitive about global issues and making it a better place. She now loves to solve problems that are found in the home. From a girl who used to love playing, Tafadzwa is now more concerned about putting things in order, solving problems and working as a team…

It was one of those unforgettable afternoons for me as I received these testimonies from parents themselves. As if this was not enough, impressed parents were the once who communicated and spread the word to their fellow friends and family about LUV and today, we are have become the talk of the town. When Zimbabwe’s leading daily paper, the Herald covered our story, we were very impressed and this gave us the impetus even to try out the December 2019 LuvToCode lessons. We are now looking beyond Harare and the sky is the limit.

…Bountiful future within the African landscape.

As Level Up Village Zimbabwe, we are not seeing ourselves stopping now. In fact, what we see is a glorious opportunity to grow this exciting challenge across Africa. As Zimbabwe has always been the nucleus of educational growth in Africa for many years and also holding the top position in literacy level across the continent, we are a voice to reckon with in issues to do with education. Even our ICT infrastructure and internet penetration rate gives us an edge over others.

We are more than geared up to see this vision being absorbed in all African countries and within the next 2 decades, the world would be one through the LUV initiatives. We will talk of a world whose leaders are more connected. A world whose leaders believe in global networking and collaborative partnerships. A world with more tolerance to cultural diversity hence reduced racism. We see the world becoming one global village full of LUV. We also aim to reach out to the rural areas