Profile on Nathalie Duval-Seychelles Partners in Learning Forum winner |23 May 2012

The social sciences teacher has been teaching since 2011 after completing her diploma in secondary education at the University of Seychelles.  She teaches History and Geography at the Beau Vallon secondary school to students from secondary one to secondary three.

Although she was never interested in teaching, Nathalie says she is now developing a love for what she is doing and feels she has this ability to impart the knowledge she has acquired to others, and she enjoys working with children.

She feels at ease to use new technology in her classroom, but has rarely had the opportunity to use it with her students.  Nathalie says that once she started doing the project and got students to use ICT in the lessons, she found that they were more interested in working on their own rather than always depending on the teacher. She has come to realise therefore that students feel more at ease learning with technology than using text books or having her teach them something.

Her project entitled Piracy: historical past; present threat; future impact looks at the history of piracy in the Seychelles waters, how pirates used the trade routes to pillage the merchant ships coming to the islands and she compares this to present day piracy. She got her students to compare and understand the differences during these two periods – how the weapons used and the technology have improved, but also what are the similarities.

The project also gave her students the opportunity to discuss what they had learnt about the present threat of piracy and think ahead about the economical and social impacts that it could have on our country.

Nathalie says she is thankful for all the support she has received from her family and friends and colleagues at school as she did not think she had a winning project.

She also received two other awards for her project.  There was evidence that the learning activities provided students with the opportunities to work with minimal supervision, and the outcomes created by learners showed that they were engaged in the learning process which involved ground-breaking use of ICT. 

The project also provided students with learning activities and opportunities to build knowledge and explore information or ideas that were new to them and to connect to information.