On May, the Office of Safeguarding, Catholic Archdiocese of Tamale (OSCAT) had a virtual face-to-face meeting with the new batch of students enrolled this year for the online safeguarding certificate course, in partnership with the IADC Blended E-learning program at the Gregorian University.
This batch is the highest number of seventy-eight students to ever be enrolled. Majority of them are Sunday school animators, teachers, parish and association leaders. Few are priests, religious sisters and brothers and social workers.
This kind of meeting and presentation is a key component to the course. It brings trainees together after every so often, to put into perspective the units covered. Worth noting is that the new IADC Blended E-learning program appeals more to the students for its content and forms of interactions.
his is the fifth batch since our collaboration with the IADC Blended E-learning certificate course began in 2022, to train pastoral agents in the archdiocese of Tamale, Ghana. After two successful batches we opened the training to people from other dioceses mainly for priests, religious sisters and brothers, catechists and Sunday school animators within the country.
Currently, our training program has moved beyond Ghana’s shores, enrolling students from
other African countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Rwanda, Cameroon, Liberia and Sierra Leone. We still target priests, religious men and women, administrators, teachers and other pastoral agents within parishes.
One of the strengths in the program is that, we have people from different places but sharing common issues and experiences about safeguarding. The contexts may be different but similar dynamisms in relation to power and abuse. Hence, creating solidarity and support within the group becomes an important value.
As a team we acknowledge the complexities and the challenge to really combine face-to-face and by virtual due to the different locations of our participants. We continue however, to explore creative ways to provide good and safer platforms for trainees to share and learn best practices from one another in the light of the E-learning resources.