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During the last decades it became a ‘must’ to spend some time as a volunteer especially among the youth. Who would dare to argue that it is not a great idea give something to others who are in need – time, skills and experiences. On another hand how many times do we hear after time spent volunteering that the person received a lot in return; got to know different cultures, learnt social skills, had a chance to help and made a footprint in changing the world into a better place to live. In this essay I would like to take a focus on the responsibility of a voluntary teacher in developing countries. First of all, in my personal opinion everyone deserves the best access to education, but the reality sadly is not the same all over the world. If we would just look at some statistics then we would see that in many developing countries around the world, probably mostly in Africa, many kids don’t have a chance to access good, or often any, education. There are several reasons for that, including that schools simply might not exist in the communities. When there is a school in any place, especially in rural areas of a developing country, I believe that the students deserve the best possible education. Volunteering as a teacher is a huge support for the schools and communities in these areas and I believe anyone taking up this role should pay attention carefully about the responsibilities they will carry out. Although there are many volunteering projects in the area of teaching abroad, I would doubt if all of them are really concerned with the actual needs of the learners. Why? Let’s say there is a need for an English teacher in rural Malawi, teaching young age students. A voluntary teacher comes along with a strong passion to be a volunteer and decides to take up the role. Is the passion enough? No, it is not. Why? Because to be a good person with passion does not mean that you have enough knowledge about how to be a good teacher. It is important to know about stages of child development, it is important to know which methods and techniques you could use, how to work with materials, how to create new materials. You need to have some basic class management skills, communication skills, to know how to engage. I could add more and more to the list but the main point would still be the same. That if you come as a voluntary teacher you should have a basic knowledge of teaching/learning and to know that it is not just about spending time with kids, that it is an education process. It is not enough just to have fun and laugh, to play games without educational purpose. The voluntary teacher might be the only one possible means for these kids to access this knowledge and the students will be open to this. In the same way voluntary teachers can’t just take a teaching role, they must be open to learning too. It is important to be open, to be tolerant and prepared for the local culture. Learning by doing or learning by facing situations is great, but guests should have an awareness of and not forget the local traditions, rules and beliefs. Knowing these things will bring respect, while making some major cultural mistakes could cause big problems and make it hard to gain respect as a teacher, which is so important. Nowadays it is not difficult to find information about different traditions around the world as well as rules. Many voluntary teachers skip these preparation steps and that might easily lead to difficulties. To summarise, voluntary teachers in developing countries are, in my opinion, essential at the moment. They have access to the best teaching/learning methods as well as a basic access to the information. So taking a stand and becoming a voluntary teacher is great, but it would just not be fair not to take responsibility of giving the best learning possibility to the ones in need. To be able to do this it is important to gain at least a basic knowledge of how to actually be a teacher. That doesn’t take much effort. There are lots of courses, books, articles, etc. and it is not a difficult task to do some research on the internet by finding useful information about teaching/learning, as well as the traditions and beliefs in your chosen volunteering country..
