Description
"Chew and pour, pass and forget" is the phrase Ghanaian students use to describe their schooling - they memorize facts, spit them out on the exams, and move on with their lives. Their education fails to engage them, build skills, and connect facts to local realities. Sustainable development is directly dependent on the availability of a technical workforce who can engage meaningfully in problem-solving, and that is best cultivated through experiential K-12 STEM education.
PEN’s vision is to see practical education become the new normal mode of teaching and learning in STEM classrooms across West Africa. We take a human-capital building approach, empowering teachers to be change agents. PEN’s content leverages low-cost, locally-available materials and aligns them to national curricular standards.
Over the last 4 years, PEN has trained 3,000+ Ghanaian teachers, 100 local-level trainers, and more than half a million students in this experiential approach. Our approach has been measured to enable significant gains in student attitudes and learning outcomes. PEN collaborated with the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum arm to revise the national primary school science curriculum in 2019, infusing hands-on content directly into the framework. PEN’s partners include MIT, Ashesi University, ExxonMobil Exploration & Production Ghana (Deepwater) Ltd, Ghana Association of Science Teachers (GAST) and others.
