Cyprian Onyango has been a teacher for over 8 years handling English, sciences and religious studies. In spite of having a visual impairment, he currently teaches at Kibarani Primary School, Kilifi County where he handles both regular learners and integrated learners i.e. learners who have a disability but are integrated with learners without disability in the classroom. He has also undergone training as a facilitator of the Youth First Kenya (YFK) personal resilience and health curriculum that seeks to impart learners with requisite skills to be able to bounce back and thrive in the midst of tough challenges that life throws at them. The YFK program was developed by WorldBeing and adapted for Kenya and is being implemented by Basic Needs Basic Rights Kenya with support from the Echidna Giving Fund and Fondation d’Harcourt.

Cyprian shares with us his perspective on the YFK curriculum. 

Learners have become very active in class

I believe the YFK curriculum is great for our learners because the sessions address multiple aspects for instance how the learners view themselves and understand their personalities and how these influence their interactions with each other, their teachers and the wider society.

Some of the changes I am already noting with my learners is the increase in class participation. Before I started facilitating YFK sessions in our school, my learners rarely spoke in class. Anytime I asked a question in class, they would wait on each other, with none of them willing to go first.

Today, thanks to the interactive nature of the YFK curriculum, my learners have now become very active participants. My job is just to facilitate the sessions as my learners actively engage with the content.

There is need to adapt YFK for learners and facilitators with disabilities

It was not easy for me to learn the YFK curriculum because the learning material was not adapted for persons with disabilities. I am visually impaired and fortunately or unfortunately, I was trained together with teachers who had vision.

I had to rely on my colleagues to explain to me what they were seeing on the learning material so that I could keep up with the training sessions. I can’t fault the instructors because initially, they were not aware I had a disability.

Once they learnt that I was visually impaired, the facilitators immediately adjusted how they were delivering the sessions by primarily verbalizing everything. Anytime they made reference to something that was written on the board, they would verbalise it for my benefit. They also slowed down the pace so that I could keep up.

It would be great if the learning material was made adaptable to learners and facilitators with disabilities for instance having them in braille for those with no vision like me and having larger fonts for learners with low vision.

My class is integrated so I teach learners who have low vision and no vision alongside learners who have no disability. Learners with low vision are a bit better off because they can use their magnifiers to interact with the content of the books. It will however be easier for them if the fonts were larger even as they use their magnifiers. The learners with no vision would benefit more if the material was in braille.

All learners need resilience skills

People often wonder how learners with visual impairment are able to learn in the same classroom as those with no impairment. The answer is usually simple, the only difference between them is vision. As far as their brains are concerned, they are equally capable of learning and excelling. I also learnt in integrated schools and also trained as a teacher in college with other trainees who had no disabilities. Today I am teacher and a good one at that. All I required were my learning material in braille.

Resilience skills are currently necessary for all learners as they are all exposed to multiple sociocultural and socioeconomic factors that influence stress levels, which in turn affect these adolescents’ health and behaviors. I can therefore confidently say that adapting the YFK material to learners with disabilities will enable them to interact better with the curriculum just as their counterparts without disabilities and reap the fruits of resilience skills.