Duane Watson – Inspiring and promoting change in Education

Welcome to ‘About me’

I’m an ‘EYE’ or Early Years Educator, and I’ve been collecting, building, and developing my knowledge and skills for over 25 years. For most of the last 10 years, I have been dedicated to facilitating the learning of a few under 5-year-olds involving language learning, cultural awareness, social interaction, physical prowess, maths, reading etc etc, and all the rest that goes into early education. So, over this time and through these experiences, I have developed some specific theories and pedagogies.

Over the years, my wife Di and I have explored and journeyed down many avenues to enhance and improve early years education, including, creating curricula, writing children’s books, designing educational toys, teaching teachers, managing kindergartens, designing language programs, creating and facilitating outdoor discovery programs, and even running our own kindergarten.

Wadudi Education……

Our next game changer!

2020, will go down in history as a time when we all had the opportunity to stop, breathe and reflect on many important aspects of our lives.

With many workers working remotely as well as gyms, restaurants, and schools closed, many of us were forced to rethink how we worked, socialised, relaxed, exercised, and traveled. The basic social and daily routines became a challenge, especially to families that had to prepare themselves to work from home as well as prepare their children for online learning.

It soon became clear that online teaching was fun for the children, but the immersive atmosphere and interactive engagements with other kids were missing as well as learning within an environment that provided context. (Read more….).

About me

Never underestimate the influence of fun

I’ve been an early year’s educator working with children aged from 0 to 8 for over 20 years now so stories and imaginative scenarios are part of my every workday. Stories make teaching interesting, engaging, and emotional.

To tell you about me, it is best to introduce you to my experiences and the people that have shaped who I am throughout my life. I am a collection of everything and everyone that I admire and love.

My experiences are a collection of choices and decisions that my wife and I have made together.
They represent how we wanted to interact with the world and some of the awesome opportunities that we have been offered and have taken along our journey.

“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners”. John Holt.

“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life”. Plato.

It is in the beginning of early years education that the pedagogies employed form the foundations of the learning pathways that will be used throughout our life. In these early years our introduction to various pedagogies will also influence the level of desire and motivation for learning to grow and further their learning.

Young children learn by doing, by being engaged and involved and ‘experiencing’ content. Add emotional support and connection, mostly in the form of a fun and positive environment and you have a winning strategy to facilitate long term learning. This is what Wadudi EdTech will deliver.

As the current Education providers and facilitators, it is our responsibility and privilege to design and implement the very best education and learning opportunities that we can imagine using the current best tech available to us.

At Wadudi Education we will combine the latest technology with our specifically designed language applications to implement a learning program for early years learners. We intend on modifying current hardware to suite early learners and we are already in the process of writing the language programs, so far, we have one multi-layer orientation app and 22 language apps.

At Wadudi Education, we are designing educational programs that can improve the opportunities for learning over time by providing the ‘experience’ necessary that engages and captivates young learners and facilitates forming long-term learning. To us as Education facilitators, this is efficient learning and effective learning and to the young learners it is the ‘Joy’ of learning.

We can’t always take the child to the volcano but we can bring the volcano to the child! We have the technology and we have the opportunity.

My Books

My focus is on nature and conservation and how we can bring awareness and interest in nature to our early learners.

I also feel very strongly about providing our early learners with an awareness of their capabilities and showing them how they can be adventurous and explore and have fun learning. I will always present a positive perspective and a supportive environment.

I love ‘trees’, so I have taken a static ‘object’ and brought it to life by using rhyming poetry, this was the topic of my first 4 rhyming books.

I love to help our early learners gain a positive perspective, so I wrote “I’m not scared anymore!” which is a story about a boy and girl realizing that they don’t have to see scary things as monsters.

Stories make teaching interesting, engaging, and emotional and there are so many more ways for a child to remember the content when they are actively listening to a well-presented story. When a rhyming verse is added, it can completely change the presentation and the engagement, just like adding singing to music.

My influencers

My greatest influencer would have to be my many purposes in life, one of which is ‘giving back’.

Giving back to this world as one continually takes from it every day, can be a challenge. One of the ways that I ‘give back’ is through ‘early years education’.

The following speech reflects the perspectives and values that I attribute to being a facilitator or learning:

At the closing of this term, we find ourselves reflecting on the wonderful experiences that we have had in such a short period of time.

In a young child’s life, it’s a large period of time but in the long journey of their Education it is a short time, but we hope that it was a significant and memorable time.

All of these children that we have had the pleasure of spending our working days with are the treasures of our learning establishment.

It would be remiss of us not to thank our children’s parents for giving us the opportunity to be a guiding hand in these young people’s lives.

It is our honour to be a part of their future and this forms part of our legacy.

We thank the parents for their trust, and we thank the children for their friendship.

My wife, Di, and I have had many years guiding and facilitating young people’s journeys. And with every new child that we meet we appreciate their uniqueness, significance and their importance now and for the future.

Every child is different, and we have learnt that every child that we meet, needs to be seen with new eyes. In life, we are all teachers and we are all students.

These children are the future, they are the mothers and fathers of the generations to come. They are the cleaners, pilots, designers, architects, doctors, scientists and politicians of the future. We are indeed honoured to be working with them.

What we do with these children today, will affect their children and their grandchildren, so our responsibility is indeed immense. We all have a very important role in Education.

So, let’s not just celebrate the dawn of a new year, let’s celebrate all the people that are around us now, from our drivers and security staff to our teachers, our logistics and administration staff and of course our management team.

Let’s celebrate the honorable and important positions that we all hold in education and let’s celebrate the opportunity that we all have to guide all of our kids to a prosperous and happy future.

Our Nepal Project

Grab a tissue, this is the story:

When my wife, Di, and I were visiting Nepal in February 2017, we had the privilege of meeting some truly wonderful and inspirational local Nepalis making huge changes to the lives of less fortunate families of Nepal.

This is Laxmi, from Padampur village, who does her best to care for between 20 and 43 under 5-year-olds each day.

Raj and Keshab Khanal are two locals Nepali’s residing in Chitwan, south-central Nepal, and they have taken on the humanitarian task of caring for and modernizing four villages in the remote Chitwan hills, villages that didn’t even have running water or schools. As a result of their efforts, Raj and Keshab have sunk wells for water and erected a basic school building. All the kids of the village and one of the parents, (acting as the teacher), gather in this ‘school’ daily, essentially to stay safely away from cliffs, animals, fire etc

Through local efforts and international help from a German Government aid fund, Raj and Keshab have been able to organise for stand-alone single room kindergartens to be built in each village, so each of the villages now has a dedicated hut for a kindergarten.

The focus of the assistance involved 4 small villages in the Chitwan area of south-central Nepal. The villages of Padampur, Manahari, Jinglau and Sapreni.

In the picture above, we see Laxmi, one of the parents from Padampur village, she is acting as carer, caretaker, teacher and mother to kids who were all under 5 years old.

Each ‘school’ averages around 40 children per day. They have a parent as a volunteer teacher, a few over-loved toys, and no educational materials. All of these little guys were under 5 years old with no educational prospects in sight.

Enter Di and I, we utilise our experience as Early Years Educators to create a curriculum for all the 4 villages and we stay long enough so that we can help to teach the parents ‘how to teach’. The kids will learn and within a few years, they will have opportunities to attend a government school and further opportunities to support their family and community.

We’re passionate about Education, it has been our whole lives. These children in Nepal didn’t have the opportunity to commence any form of education so we needed to change the situation. Di and I have over 50 years of experience between us in Early Years Education, so visiting these centres and seeing just what we could do with our experience and some funding gave us the strongest sense of purpose and efficacy.

Some of the older brothers and sisters amazed at seeing themselves on an iPad.

After spending some time with the children, we knew that an educational program and some structure and routines that support and nurture their strengths will make a huge difference not only to their own future opportunities but to the prospects for their families and their community as well. So we raised some funds and we bought toys and educational materials for the little guys and off we went. We delivered the toys, implemented an educational program, created a flexible pedagogy for each village and we look forward to the updates every few months.