L’association Morgane
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Assocition Morgane
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L’association Morgane was created in January 2003, one year after Morgane’s accidental death, by her parents and friends in order to keep her project of being a school teacher alive.

During her studies, Morgane did work experience in a Freinet school using modern pedagogy. She was really enthusiastic about this experience and was persuaded that children must be taught using this way of pedagogy that would awaken young minds for the journey ahead. She wished she could have been a teacher in an African country.

Thanks to Jean Le Gal, a French Freinet teacher we met Papa Meissa Hanne, the director of the Senegalese Association for Modern School (ASEM) an organization with 400 Senegalese teachers in 2005. The ASEM has an objective to adapt, use and widen the Freinet’s pedagogy in order to develop a secular, modern and liberal school.

The ASEM is a group where teachers can exchange, work and learn a new form of pedagogy.

In our relationship, the ASEM decides entirely of the use of our funding. At the present time the most important need is the building of a training and documentation centre for their teachers. This building will be their official head quarters. The initial project comprises, in a second step, of the building of an elementary school associated to the training centre.

The development of Senegal will come from a quality education system. Unfortunately, the state cannot support a complete training for its teachers. For financial reasons, the training periods for teachers are shortened with only three month of training experience. The teachers throughout Senegal are placed in a 120 student class, which they find difficult, having to cope with such an overcrowded environment.

The teaching methods from Freinet pedagogy are an answer to this problem. When comparing results for the entry exam in high school between normal public schools and Freinet’s schools, Freinet’s schools results are substantially higher.

The Council from Dagana, (city of 30 000 inhabitants situated in the north of the country) gave a 3 000 m² piece of land to the ASEM to build the Training and Documentation Centre Morgane for teachers. In May 2005, the Council carried on its action by giving another 13 000 m² piece of land to the “Morgane’s Centre” for the building of the school attached to the training centre.

At the end of 2005, 100 000 € have been given from 600 donators for the building of the Morgane Centre. The building process has been fast. It started in September 2003, and the centre was inaugurated on the 29th of October 2005 with a lot of emotion and in the presence of several important personalities, teachers, members of the Association Morgane and citizens of Dagana.

But we now know this is just the first step. This feeling was celebrated in the gravity and the pride that we were all sharing on that particular day.

In partnership with The Association Reunion-Dagana (an association which gathers students, teachers and parents from the primary school Vitruve in Paris), Dagana’s city council and local associations, support the building of the primary school associated to the Morgane’s Centre.

In parallel, with the ASEM, which develop the training courses we give scholarships to the teachers desiring to be trained in Freinet pedagogy.

A large proportion of the money given will be used for the maintenance of the training centre.

These projects are the ones we are working on at this present time and for which we are seeking new funding.

Blandine DEVOUGE,
Chair woman

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