Mariam AliUAE
Every certificate. Except the one that counted.
Adding the one qualification a career was missing.
- Now
- Inclusion leader at a school in the UAE
- Before
- A master’s degree, workshops and certificates, but no teaching licence
- Programme
- PgCTL, started in 2019, with classes delivered at her workplace
- Next
- A post in the United States, documents in process at recording
Mariam had a master's degree, workshops and certificates, but no teaching licence, and the UAE kept raising its standards for teachers. PgCTL closed the gap; she has since grown into an inclusion leader and accepted a post in the United States.
A profile with one gap.
Mariam Ali can place the moment she noticed the gap. “The moment I stepped into a school job, I realised that the teaching certification is something that I’m missing,” she says. She started looking for one and, by her own account, had no idea where to go.
It weighed on her. She had planned a PhD that she had not been able to complete, and she found herself working out whether she could take some leave, go back to her home country to do some of it and come back. “There was a lot in my head going on,” she says. She started with Suraasa in 2019. “Suraasa happened to my life at the right time.”
Suraasa certification and being a Suraasa learner, it has actually completed my profile.
Sitting with the teachers.
COVID arrived partway through, and some of the classes moved online. “Honestly, there were no gaps,” she says.
Those sessions put her in groups with classroom teachers, and Mariam did not teach a class. When tasks were assigned she would turn to the faculty member: “But I don’t teach in the class, so how do I?” The answer, as she recalls it, was that she was teaching there for a set of learners, so what would she do in that case. She would look to the teachers beside her and ask what they did in that case. “It has filled the gaps, honestly, sitting with those teachers.”
The pedagogical skills a teacher needs, she says, she learnt from Suraasa, and working in the same group as teachers showed her how she could help them. As an inclusion leader, she says, her professionalism has strengthened in a way her line managers and supervisors have seen over time.
Suraasa has delivered the classes at our workplace. So you work and you study at the same time together.
A call not taken seriously.
For two years Mariam and her family had been planning to move to another country. They would try, get busy with their lives and stop. Her husband would ask when they were going to pursue the application, and she would point to the winter break, then the summer break. One day she counted the years her son had left at school in the UAE and thought about his college education. “I said better we all move to another country,” she says.
Suraasa had called her before about opportunities, regularly, and she had not taken them up because she was already doing well in one job. Then came a call asking whether she was interested in an opportunity in the US. “Honestly, I did not take it very serious. And I just said yes.” She told no one until another call asked if she was ready for the interview. Then she told her husband, who said she should give it.
Prepared for the interview.
The next call was an offer to prepare her for it. “Who goes to those limits, that they want to prepare me for the interview?” she says. On the preparation call she saw many other Suraasa graduates, and her confidence grew. During the interview itself, a member of the Suraasa team she knew was on the call. “Just seeing her on the call was very encouraging for me.” Within a few days she was told she had been selected.
The move was not complete when she recorded her story. Since the offer letter, a member of the Suraasa team has been going through her documents with her, proofreading them, and has submitted her application. “I’m one step further every day,” she says. Her sister, meanwhile, “started following my path” and had phoned an hour earlier to say she wanted to submit her last assignment that weekend.
