FASTEF: Basics

Just so everyone doesn’t think that my entire life here in Dakar is one big vacation in the sunshine, I decided to do a few blog posts about the work I’m actually doing. So this is the first of these:

(I know I’ve mentioned some of this briefly in other posts, but I wanted to have this all in one place, so bear with me.)

I teach at the Faculté des Sciences et Technologies de l’Éducation et de la Formation (FASTEF) which is the teacher training college of Senegal connected to the local university (UCAD). Historically, any teacher that is certified went through FASTEF to get their certification because it is the only recognized teaching certification in the country. That does not mean that all teachers in Senegal are certified (actually, only a small percentage of teachers are trained/certified teachers, but that’s a whole other topic), but if they are, they were here.

We call them trainees more than we call them students because the word ‘student’ is traditionally connected to a younger demographic. Because this is an after-university program, most of the trainees are quite a bit older than the traditional 18-25 yr. old university student. Some of them are actually teachers who have been pulled from their posts and sent to FASTEF to get certified in order to better do what they’re already doing. If this is the case, they continue receiving their teaching salary while they’re in training. Those who have not been placed there for professional training would traditionally be offered a teaching post upon the completion of the program. This is one of the reasons why FASTEF’s programs are so popular (almost guaranteed a job at the end).

There are two different tracks for FASTEF students: those who wish to teach secondary school and those who wish to teach middle school. There are complicated acronyms that go with each of those, but we just call them the B students (for those who want to teach high school) and the C students (for those who want to teach Jr. High). Both programs are 2 years long, so we have the B1 students, B2, C1, and C2 students. The students in the B1 and B2 classes will already have a “Master” degree (equivalent to a BA in the US), while the C1 and C2 students will either only have their high school diploma, or they may have a “License” (equivalent to an associate’s degree in the US).
These distinctions exist for all the departments, whether they’re training to teach math, science or, in the case of the department I work for, English. The B students spend 2 years studying English Language Teaching theory and educational psychology. Because the C students have completed a lower level of education (usually just high school) before starting their program, they do one year of courses in linguistic reinforcement and literature (to make sure their English is as good as it can get in the time they have at FASTEF) before they do a year in pedagogy. Those C-level students who already have their “License” have the option of only doing the second year of training.

This year the number of students went down drastically from previous years. Usually, each of the four levels would have upwards of 70 trainees, but this year it is very different: The B2 class has 21 students, the B1 class 13, the C2 class 3 students, and the C1 class only has one student (as a symbolic gesture by the Ministry of Education so that they can say they kept the C1 level open). Why is this you ask? Because the Ministry of Education has stopped hiring the majority teachers when they finish their certification at FASTEF. It is not that Senegal is not in desperate need of qualified teachers, but that the money to pay for teachers has gone elsewhere (don’t know where, but that’s a topic for a more politically savvy person than myself). The problem with this is that tradition plays a very important role here. As I said before, trainees who get certified at FASTEF have almost always finished with a teaching position somewhere in Senegal (rarely do they have a choice as to where) because they are literally the best trained teachers in the country. Then that stopped, and there was a huge uproar by the trainees.

Burned bus from the FASTEF strike

They staged a strike: burned buses, occupied the administrative offices for months, etc. The solution thought up by the Ministry of Education was not to fund having actual teachers in their schools, but to cut the number of teachers that get training to the bare minimum. That way, they’re able to hire most of them even if they only hire 20 new teachers per year. Hence the huge difference in class size between last year and this year. The entire English department consists of 38 trainees (last year it was more like 200).

Because the classes are so small, it’s not worth the time/money to have all the professors teaching the same number of hours as they were when there were more students. This means that professors are sharing classes, teaching every other week instead of every week. They teach courses such as: Teaching Reading, Teaching Culture, Issues in ELT, Intro to research, Lesson Planning, Teaching Listening, etc.

All about education!

 I, on the other hand, am paid by the US government, and therefore have no such restrictions. This means that while the other professors see each level either once a week (if they teach two different modules) or once every two weeks, I see all but one level twice a week (the other one I see once a week) for two hours each time. For the first semester, the two courses I taught were: Fluency Development/American Culture and Communicative Language Activities. What I did for those classes is the subject of my next blog. This was getting too long :)