TWICE® – Tissi

Teaching With Inclusion & Culture Embedded (TWICE®) is a professional development workshop designed by Estelle Baroung Hughes and Estelle Bougna Fomeju, two Cameroonian educators and researchers. This online or in-person training focuses on culturally-inclusive teaching. It is particularly tailored for international schools.

How culturally-inclusive is your school?

Our focus with TWICE is to create a safe space where teachers can get real and deep about cultural inclusion in all areas of school life. This research-based course aims to initiate a shift of perspectives from cultural responsiveness in education to cultural inclusiveness.

What is unique in what we do?

Our training uses community-building approaches;
We support you in decolonizing the curriculum;
Our offer is scalable from a 1-hour introduction to an 8-hour full course;
We are fluent in French and English and offer monolingual or bilingual sessions;
We also offer individual coaching to educators and school leaders on implementing impactful culturally inclusive strategies.

We nurture cultural literacy and self-reflection when assisting international schools in their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work. Hence our motto: think TWICE when it comes to culture and teaching.

TWICE at your school!

We trained over 600 educators from all five continents who teach in primary, middle, or secondary international schools in Abidjan, Bamako, Dakar, Douala, Geneva, Maastricht, Leysin, Ouagadougou, Singapore, Suzhou, Seoul, and Yaounde. Schedule a TWICE session at your school today, in just a few clicks:

Educators believe in TWICE!

I believe that training for cultural literacy is crucial to intentionally influence change. We also always like to learn things we can quickly put into practice. Bravo to Tissi and Africa Learning International for this professional development workshop.

Thierry Adams

Principal at Enko Ouaga Campus, Enko Education

I thought Estelle Bougna Fomeju was absolutely superb… Excellent content, self-possessed and powerful delivery. I’d be glad to listen to her again.

Head of Performing Arts

La Grande Boissière Secondary School, International School of Geneva (Ecolint)

It was so powerful and interesting and will form the beginning of a much deeper ongoing reflection and action here.

Shona Wright

Principal at La Grande Boissière Middle School, International School of Geneva (Ecolint)

What I enjoyed the most about the program was seeing the conversations that erupted for days after completing the training. It really had teachers thinking about how culture affects every aspect of their lives and every perception and interaction that they had with students.

Ariane Baer-Harper

Country Director at Enko Education Senegal

About the creators & instructors

Estelle Baroung Hughes, Founder of ALI

Changing education, one teacher at the time

Estelle created Africa Learning International (ALI), a transnational network for teacher professional development based on UNESCO’s teaching and learning competencies for the 21st century. She is a Consultant and Teacher coach who has worked for the largest networks of international schools: United World Colleges (UWC), GEMS Education, the Foundation of the International School of Geneva, and Enko Education. Estelle specializes in the Africanization of pedagogy. With ALI, she focuses on projects around Education for All (SGD #4) on the African continent, and culturally-inclusive professional development for international schools worldwide.

Estelle Bougna Fomeju, Founder of Tissi

Educating for social change

Estelle Bougna Fomeju is a pan-African Consultant in Education, passionate about history, geopolitics, cultural inclusion, antiracism, and indigenous worldviews. She founded Tissi, a consultancy in education for social change based in Mali, that works with schools and organizations worldwide. Her areas of expertise are education project management, culturally-inclusive and antiracist capacity building for educators and students, decolonial curriculum development, and instructional design. Before founding Tissi, Estelle worked as a Senior Project Manager for a network of African international schools, where she managed the creation of IB schools in Mali and Botswana. She graduated from Sciences Po Paris with a Master’s in International Development in 2015. In 2021, she obtained an M.Ed. in Advanced Teaching from the University of People in partnership with the International Baccalaureate®. With her work, she hopes to help fulfill the promise of education, that of equipping young people with adequate tools to analyze, question, and transform their environment.