American Students to Spend One Month Teaching Kids in Eastern Kazakhstan

ASTANA – Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will spend 26 days teaching schoolchildren at the secondary school named after Seitkamzy Lastayev in the Katon-Karagai village in the East Kazakhstan Region, the Fund for Sustainable Development of Education (FSDE) reported on Jan. 8.

Alexander-Eduard Shertsnev and Hanna Park will lead workshops for schoolchildren on programming, physics, and IT. Photo credit: Fund for Sustainable Development of Education.

Alexander-Eduard Shertsnev and Hanna Park will lead workshops for schoolchildren on programming, physics and IT. 

The arrival of American students takes place under the Global Teaching Labs (GTL) program, which encourages learning through teaching, promoting knowledge synthesis, team collaboration, and interaction with peers from different cultures. The Katon-Karagai school is the first rural public school to participate in the program.

The Kazakh fund submitted an application for the 2024 GTL program in May 2022. The Katon-Karagai school, a participant in the Rural School Powered by Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) project, was shortlisted alongside other institutions such as Tamos Education, Haileybury, and Shoqan School.

Once selected, the fund signed a memorandum with MIT GTL.

The Fund for Sustainable Development of Education, which exists on private sponsorship, implements projects in the field of education that help to ensure access to quality education of varying degrees regardless of the status, age and territorial affiliation of a person.


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