Director of Academics – Abdulmugheeth Petersen

Abdulmugeeth has a BA degree from the University of the Western Cape majoring in English and Psychology. Abdulmugheeth says: “My core belief in Education is that each learner must see the relevance in what they are being taught. If this is done empathically and interestingly, a learner is more susceptible to understanding and absorbing curriculum content – in fact, in my experience this fosters a love for the subject, and for learning. I am a scholar of the English Language and understand intimately that we live in worlds constructed by language: the very structures, etymologies, grammatical rules, dialects, and all other facets provide us countless windows into the contexts in which those languages develop. I enjoy investigating these cogs and levers that work within the machine that keeps all of the language families in constant engagement with one another, and I share them regularly with my learners and peers. I like reminding others that as English speakers, we do not exist in isolation from other languages – nay, English is in and of itself a Frankenstein language in which the alphabet bears little relation to the phonetics, the parts so foreign to one another that experts claim that the exceptions outweigh the rules.

You and I, however, find this interesting. Who is to say that teenagers would? It is for this very reason that we, as teachers, must keep our fingers on the pulse of that with which young people are engaging, the interests that make up their subculture – their music, films and social media engagements, and we must actively engage with these materials in class; engaging them in thoughts about how Deadpool breaks the fourth wall and the effect that this has on the viewer in the same way that the literature of Virginia Woolf and Kurt Vonnegut do, or why it has become a convention for every Hollywood Actor to have played Professor X and Magneto in the X-Men franchise to also have portrayed Macbeth in one of the film versions.

Before I do any of this, though, I demonstrate, and thoroughly explain to my learners, scaffolding in the form of creative writing. Before introducing learners, or anyone, to a new and foreign concept, one must establish what they already know. In this way one may follow the shortest route in facilitating the building of new knowledge – building, because knowledge must never just be conveyed; each person understands an idea in a unique way and so new knowledge is being built at every moment, wherever a teacher and learner can be found.”