UNIVERSE OF CARE

SHEF aims to create an environment where everyone – teachers, students and parents – feel supported, cared for and respected. We understand that teaching and learning are extremely creative and complex processes, requiring much imagination, continuous thinking, reflection, learning, caring, and commitment. Our pedagogy, teaching methodology, curricula, organizational structure, teacher-student relationship, policies and rules are all designed to actualize the SHEF vision of schooling and education, to use it as an instrument of change bringing about individual and social development. Each and every classroom, every school, every initiative, is constructed as a Universe of Care, where caring itself becomes a vehicle for empowerment and classrooms honour every individual and voice. Here, teachers and students empower each other.

Furthermore, care is an integral part of SHEF’s work and key to its success. None of our programs can succeed in their goals if they are not caring institutions. We began because we cared about women and children, and we grew because we cared and taught others to care. Our ethic of care is the bedrock of SHEF’s educational philosophy, its pedagogy, and its programs and operations. It forms part of the deep structure of values and organising principles, and applies equally to all team members, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders. Our critical pedagogy, central to our work, is rooted in an ethic of care. While being guided to critically examine their social realities, children must feel secure in the knowledge that their teachers care about them as persons, and care enough to understand the lived reality of their worlds empathetically. Teachers must pay attention to the lived realities of students’ lives, earn their trust, and inculcate in them the firm belief that they care deeply about their students, their students’ feelings and their student’s lives. In this setting, teachers become more than teachers. They become mothers, mentors, counselors, advocates, and educators to their students. All of SHEF’s teachers are trained to deliver this combination of roles via regular workshops, critical dialogues, and training videos that model the same pedagogy.

We have cultivated this capacity for care in all the members of our organization and in the leadership team, consciously and deliberately, right from our inception. Most of the individuals in our leadership team have risen from the ranks, are trained on an ongoing basis, and have imbibed the caring spirit. They care passionately about SHEF and its mission. They know that the ethic of care that pervades SHEF is a key component of who we are and the driver of our success.