Hamid Challak

It was in 2012, during my university training at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Tetuan to become a teacher of history and geography that I met Tamkeen and experienced a new approach to teacher training cocreated with the students. We were learning to learn to co-create the conditions with our pupils for their learning process. The first question asked in the first session was “why are you here?” It took me to the story of my eagerness to study and how very young I left my mountainous village for the town to do so. I was the first to get a university degree in my community. I graduated as a teacher but became a community facilitator.

As a Tamkeen Community Facilitator for almost 8 years, I have experienced self-growth and learned to grow my trust to work with unconditional love. I co-create the conditions with our community partners (neighborhoods, education and higher education systems) and co-facilitate the emergence of community pedagogical models and community-based learning ecosystems. 

I am honored to facilitate the self-facilitated community of practice, rooted in the love of teaching, of over 350 teachers from all over Morocco, and called the “Kafila (Caravan) of the Teacher of the Future”. In the neighborhoods, I co-facilitate “Jisr Madrasa Wal Mostakba” (Bridge to School and the Future) a cocreated community model where children who dropped out of school and/or are experiencing challenges become authors and actors of their own process of learning, the family ecology transforms and the community supports. Co-facilitating “Model United Nations Ecosystem”, I am humbled to further witness how schools, university faculties and neighborhoods are “becoming one”, manifesting the emergence of community-based learning ecosystems embedded in the trust in our human potential.

My Tamkeen experience is a “life watering of the soul” and I learned that in a similar way our humanity connects us in our essence, our human flourishing is delicately intertwined in the soil of the garden called a humanizing society. I am blessed to have my baby girl Yasmine, a precious flower in that beautiful garden.