Life is simply a series of moments and events with each one constantly moving us forward to our next adventure. 13 years ago, we were both international teachers and colleagues living and working in Abu Dhabi. We later moved to Dubai and fell in love with the citys “anything is possible,” larger-than-life vision. We decided to take the plunge and 4 years later, we left our teaching jobs and opened our own company, IngeniousEd. This started us down an entrepreneurial path that hasn’t slowed down since!
One of our projects in Dubai was an after-school intervention class for children who struggled with literacy. Many of these children were diagnosed with dyslexia and other learning disabilities but we soon realized that most of these children had been misdiagnosed. Most of them were bilingual or multilingual but this hadn’t been picked up by psychologists or teachers. Many of these children lacked vocabulary and reading comprehension skills and their gaps had simply became wider and wider as they got older. When they came to us, we saw that they improved quickly with focused teaching. We knew things could have been different for so many of these children if there had been better training and support for their teachers. Fast forward a few years. We wrote our book, Bilingual and Multilingual Learners from the Inside-Out: Elevating Expertise in Classrooms and Beyond, and then trialled our teacher-training courses with teachers locally and around the world. We launched our courses at the 2016 IB Conference of the Americas in Toronto. Our Institute was born shortly afterwards. Since then, we transformed our business into a “social enterprise.” A social enterprise designs their business to create social impact. They are more sustainable than a charity and are not only concerned with “the bottom line.” In fact, many social enterprises work from a “triple-bottom line” where they strategically focus on the 3Ps: people, planet and profit. The success of a social enterprise means that society is also benefiting!
As we look forward to the future of our Institute, we see exciting partnerships and collaborations with people, organizations and associations which can help us further our social goals. Most importantly, we know that our organization’s success means that more teachers are being empowered and more BMLs are thriving in their schools.
We are a UK-based, social enterprise on a mission to spread knowledge and best practises about bilingual & multilingual learners (BMLs, ESL, ELLs) to teachers around the world.