• Work at understaffed schools and mentor South African youths – Utilize your teaching skills to positively influence the lives of children and adolescents. Many public schools in Cape Town are not adequately staffed and administrators appreciate all the additional help they can get from interns.

• You will learn to optimize the classroom – In many schools, the infrastructure is poor, the student-to-teach ratios are high and the resources are few. These settings provide unique opportunities to develop teaching skills that you simply can’t learn through theoretical study. With limited teaching resources, you’ll learn to create ingenious new ways to connect with your students. By challenging yourself in this way, you will learn resilience, compassion and adaptability – three qualities that all effective teachers have in common.

• Immerse yourself in the local culture through afterschool programs – Our student teaching internships in Cape Townwill give you the opportunity to participate in afterschool programs. Previous interns have coached sports teams, taught dance classes and managed community garden projects. Through interaction with your students outside of the classroom, you’ll gain valuable insight into the community that you serve. Many of our program alumni have commented that is a priceless experience.

Consider the importance of bringing your unique energy and knowledge into these situations, and imagine how you could grow as an educator and a person. At VACorps, you can be sure that we will help you find a meaningful student teaching internship at a local school.

Contact us for more information about the diverse range of Cape Town student teaching internship placements that we offer our program participants.

“The school system here emphasizes a fierce discipline and is much more like an urban school in the United States than the suburban high school in Pennsylvania, USA where I completed a portion of my student teaching. Some of the students viewed me as the “easy teacher” in comparison with my mentor teacher, and all of them were initially confused by the activities I designed for them that veered away from a lecture format. One of my greatest moments was when I gave the seniors a carousel activity, and my mentor teacher turned to me and said, “Look at them! Each one of them is engaged in the work!” I actually found it easy to engage all of my students because I discovered that they were eager for discussion and clarity. I even named them, because I name everything I love: my grade 9s were my Big Cats, and I was Chief Cat Herder; my grade 10s were my Babies, because they were always so easy to teach and so eager to learn; my grade 11s were my Underdogs, because they received more criticism than they deserved; and my grade 12s were my Gold Stars, because they so easily slipped into intellectual, thoughtful discussion when given the opportunity.” — Kristin Cole.