education
At a special school in Kenya, the classrooms look like few others.
Instead of standing and lecturing at Rare Gem Talent School, teachers use hands-on lessons focused on sights, sounds, and feelings designed for a unique type of learner: students with dyslexia.
In the classroom everything is taught step by step with a multitude of props to help youngsters understand, whether the subject involves numbers or letters.
There’s no lecturing at the Rare Gem Talent School lessons are very structured and teachers sight and sound to support learning.
The staff here say despite increasing access to public education in Kenya, students with learning disabilities are frequently left behind.
Teacher Dorothy Kioko explains: “In teaching reading we usually use structured literacy, which is a systematic way of teaching. You teach step by step until the learner gets what you are teaching. Not a lecture method where the teacher stands in front and starts explaining. Here we usually do individualized learning.”
She says sometimes the parents simply don’t understand the difficulties their children face and they pressure them to keep up with the academic attainment of other children without dyslexia.
“Most parents do not understand that their learners need a lot of support. So they may come with a lot of expectations from the learner, which may put pressure on the learner. So that is the first challenge. The other challenge is that you find that some learners with dyslexia, they can reach a point where breaking through in reading is so difficult so as a teacher you have to find many, many other methods to support the learning,” says Kioko.
Dyslexia affects around 10% of learners and represents a stumbling block to literacy.
A lack of accommodation threatens to leave behind a vast swathe of a booming youth population in Kenya — and across the continent.
“If they are identified early and intervention is given early, they improve their skills, they actually learn to identify their talents, and they find they complete school,” says Phyllis Munyi, the founder of Rare Gem.
“However, if it is not identified early, you find they are the ones who suffer a lot by being called names, by being compared with others, and so it brings their self-esteem very low, and sometimes even they drop out of school.”
She says: “The biggest barrier to supporting children with dyslexia across board is lack of awareness for teachers and parents.”
Munyi founded the school after her son faced unaddressed learning challenges from dyslexia.
Art teacher Geoffrey Karani, a former student at the school, says there is a lot of stigma attached to dyslexia.
He says: “In other normal schools there is a lot of discrimination, there is a lot of bullying, a lot of bullying because you can imagine yourself seated in a class whereby there are 50 students, and you are the only slow learner there who is not performing, who is not reading, who is not writing, so there is a lot of things going on at the same time, and coming to this school, all of that changed.”
Student Jason Malak Atati is a prime example of what Karani is talking about.
Atati remembers how at his old school, “teachers didn’t understand me, they usually caned me because when they gave me assignments I wouldn’t do it, because I can’t say that it was laziness, I didn’t understand anything about what they were teaching, because they were teaching fast, so since I came to this school, teachers teach me slowly until I understand.”
Common issues for children with dyslexia are mixing up letters like “b” and “p” or even the number “9 according to Dennis Omari, a special needs educator.
He says parents should also look out for are problems with being able to replicate exact sounds.
Rare Gem addresses these problems with a multi-sensorial approach, using colours, patterns or tactile objects to aid reading.
“All the learners, they have different learning styles, so when you bring all the multi-sensorial approach, it helps learners now learn differently. If a learner is a visual learner, then they benefit from it. If they are strong in auditory, then they are going to benefit. If they are good with movement, then they are all going to benefit. So if we employ the multi-sensorial way of learning, then we take care of most learners,” says Omari.
Kenya has been successful in increasing access to education in recent decades, with the number of students enrolled in primary school rising from 5.9 million in 2002 to 10.2 million in 2023—outpacing population growth.
Yet education access for those with disabilities has lagged.
While 11.4% of Kenyan children have special needs, just 250,000 such students are enrolled in the country’s educational institutions, according to So They Can, a nonprofit focused on increasing education access in Africa.
Rare Gem may offer a model to increasing access without dramatic overhauls to curriculums.
The curriculum at the school is not bespoke, but rather a version of Kenya’s core curriculum tweaked to meet the learning needs of students with dyslexia and other difficulties, said Munyi.
Rare Gem was set up in 2012 through the Dyslexia Organisation Kenya and opened with fewer than 10 learners.
Today the school hosts some 210 students, mostly with dyslexia, but also accommodates those with other learning challenges like autism.
The school charges tuition fees of $180 a term, less than the cost of popular high-end private schools but significantly higher than the government schools attended by most Kenyan children.
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