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Teachers Without Borders

CARE: "Going to school should not be a luxury" - 0 views

  • "Going to school should not be a luxury, especially for the children in Dadaab. On the opposite, this is a powerful way to make their lives safer," emphasizes Stephen Gwynne-Vaughan, country director for CARE Kenya. "If children are left idle in the camps, they are most vulnerable to abuse, drugs and other threats."
  • When attending classes, children do not only learn how to read and write, but also build up their self-confidence by learning about their rights, good hygiene practices and other matters related to life in the camps. While schools are closed during the month of August, CARE has started an accelerated learning program for newly-arrived children, many of whom have never been to school before. In the first two days of the program, 1,100 children were admitted to class and are now getting up to speed to participate in regular school programs after the break. However, once classes resume in September, the schools' capacity to provide quality primary education for the growing number of children may be an impossible task.
  • CARE currently manages five regular schools in Dagahaley camp, reaching more than 15,100 children. Adults from the refugee population are trained as teachers and receive teaching material. Many of those teachers have been living in Dadaab since their early childhood themselves and were educated in the camps before becoming educators themselves.
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    DADAAB, Kenya (August 11, 2011) - As the influx of Somali refugees across the border to Kenya is increasing every day, CARE draws attention to the lack of sufficient primary education for children living in the refugee camps of Dadaab. The latest numbers of officially registered refugees issued by the United Nations on August 8, 2011, list 399,346 people currently living in Dadaab, a number that is expected to keep growing. Amongst the total refugee population, approximately 114,000 are children at the age of 5 to 13, and only 38 percent are currently enrolled in school.
Teachers Without Borders

Annotated Bibliography: Early Childhood Care and Development in Emergency Situations | ... - 0 views

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    This annotated bibliography reflects the findings from a scoping exercise to identify the published research about young children in emergency and crisis. Every year, emergenices place millions of children at risk worldwide affecting young children's security, health, emotional and psychosocial development. Early Childhood care and development (ECCD) in emergencies provides immediate, life-saving, multi-sectoral support for children from conception to eight years during times of crisis. The scope of the literature includes aspects of the need for ECCD in emergencies; interventions in ECCD in different types of emergency; and curricula, resources, training and dissemination of information for ECCD in emergencies. To suggest additional articles to be included in the annotated bibliography or for further information, please contact minimumstandards@ineesite.org or earlychildhoodtaskteam@ineesite.org.
Teachers Without Borders

Why America's teachers are enraged - CNN.com - 2 views

  • Thousands of teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public sector workers have camped out at the Wisconsin Capitol, protesting Republican Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to reduce their take-home pay -- by increasing their contribution to their pension plans and health care benefits -- and restrict their collective bargaining rights.
  • Public schools in Madison and a dozen other districts in Wisconsin closed as teachers joined the protest. Although Walker claims he was forced to impose cutbacks because the state is broke, teachers noticed that he offered generous tax breaks to businesses that were equivalent to the value of their givebacks.
  • The uprising in Madison is symptomatic of a simmering rage among the nation's teachers. They have grown angry and demoralized over the past two years as attacks on their profession escalated.
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  • Teachers across the nation reacted with alarm when the leaders of the Central Falls district in Rhode Island threatened to fire the entire staff of the small town's only high school. What got their attention was that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama thought this was a fine idea, even though no one at the high school had been evaluated.
  • The Obama administration's Race to the Top program intensified the demonizing of teachers, because it encouraged states to evaluate teachers in relation to student scores. There are many reasons why students do well or poorly on tests, and teachers felt they were being unfairly blamed when students got low scores, while the crucial role of families and the students themselves was overlooked.
  • Teachers' despair deepened last August when The Los Angeles Times rated 6,000 teachers in Los Angeles as effective or ineffective, based on their students' test scores, and posted these ratings online.
  • The real story in Madison is not just about unions trying to protect their members' hard-won rights. It is about teachers who are fed up with attacks on their profession. A large group of National Board Certified teachers -- teachers from many states who have passed rigorous examinations by an independent national board -- is organizing a march on Washington in July. The events in Madison are sure to multiply their numbers.
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    Thousands of teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public sector workers have camped out at the Wisconsin Capitol, protesting Republican Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to reduce their take-home pay -- by increasing their contribution to their pension plans and health care benefits -- and restrict their collective bargaining rights.
Teachers Without Borders

Child Earthquake Survivors Relive Trauma as Radiation Fears Add to Stress - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • As the tsunami hit her school in Sendai, kindergarten teacher Junko Kamada stood in the window of a second story hall to block the children from seeing the destruction caused by the 1.5-meter wave. Amid dirt-caked chairs, soiled books and damaged equipment, Kamada, 60, is preparing to bring the students back to the school, about a mile inland from the coast. The children will also need counseling to deal with the trauma they have experienced, psychologists say.
  • Schools resumed two days ago in northeastern Japan, the epicenter of the March 11 magnitude-9 earthquake. Classes --some held in homes and makeshift spaces -- are providing a safe place for children to reunite with friends and a semblance of familiarity amid the nation’s worst disaster since World War II.
  • While adolescents attuned to the reality of death may act out their trauma, younger ones find it harder to articulate their distress, she said. People who suffer psychological ailments such as depression in childhood are 10 to 20 times more likely than others to experience those problems in adulthood, according to a 2010 study in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Affected individuals tend to leave school earlier and earn about 20 percent less over their lifetime, the authors found.
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  • “When children suffer from an acute fear, they tend to depend on their mothers more for their safety, and display regressive and immature behavior,” said Naotaka Shinfuku, professor of psychiatry at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, who studied the impact of the 1995 earthquake in the Japanese city of Kobe. “It’s good for children’s mental health to learn and play in a safe environment if they wish to do so.”
  • “Kids saw their friends for the first time in days,” Saijo, 53, said. “They were very happy, hugging each other -- something we hadn’t seen in a while.”
  • At the Sakuragi Hanazono kindergarten, where Junko Kamada began her teaching career almost 40 years ago, that means not succumbing to grief. “The teachers are incredibly sad,” Kamada said. “They know children they have cared for have died, but they are trying to get the school back on its feet.”
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    "The teachers are incredibly sad," Kamada said. "They know children they have cared for have died, but they are trying to get the school back on its feet."
Teachers Without Borders

What Can the Teaching Profession Learn from High Performing High Poverty and High Minor... - 1 views

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    The author has spend the last six years identifying and visiting high performing schools with significant populations of children living in poverty and children of color. What she has found is that although teachers in these schools work hard, they find their work invigorating because they are successful. And they are successful because their schools are organized with care to ensure that they do everything right, from discipline to curriculum.
Meghan Flaherty

Beijing Declaration - 0 views

  • goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere in the interest of all humanity
  • the status of women has advanced in some important respects in the past decade but that progress has been uneven, inequalities between women and men have persisted and major obstacles remain, with serious consequences for the well-being of all people
  • Women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace
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  • Equal rights, opportunities and access to resources, equal sharing of responsibilities for the family by men and women, and a harmonious partnership between them are critical to their well-being and that of their families as well as to the consolidation of democracy
  • Local, national, regional and global peace is attainable and is inextricably linked with the advancement of women, who are a fundamental force for leadership, conflict resolution and the promotion of lasting peace at all levels
  • Promote people-centred sustainable development, including sustained economic growth, through the provision of basic education, life-long education, literacy and training, and primary health care for girls and women
  • Take positive steps to ensure peace for the advancement of women and,recognizing the leading role that women have played in the peace movement,work actively towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and support negotiations on the conclusion, without delay, of a universal and multilaterally and effectively verifiable comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty which contributes to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects
  • Prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls
  • Ensure equal access to and equal treatment of women and men in education and health care and enhance women's sexual and reproductive health as well as education
Teachers Without Borders

Coburn Primary School's Anti-Bullying Program - 0 views

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    Hundreds of schools throughout Australia take part in the program, which is designed to create caring primary schools and help prevent bullying. ''Our grade five and six students and newly welcomed preps will be buddied up for the year to learn off each other and support each other in what can be a difficult community with a number of social issues,'' says grade 6 teacher Stephen Carlton. He says while bullying has not been an inherent problem at Coburn Primary, the school wanted to take a proactive approach, which would also equip the older students with leadership skills and confidence for high school.
Teachers Without Borders

Education doesn't save lives, so why should we care? « World Education Blog - 1 views

  • Education is one of the hidden costs of conflict and violence. Almost 750,000 people die as a result of armed conflict each year, and there are more than 20 million displaced people in the world. Violent conflict kills and injures people, destroys capital and infrastructure, damages the social fabric, endangers civil liberties, and creates health and famine crises. What is less known or talked about is how violent conflict denies million of children across the world their right to education.
  • Armed violence often targets schools and teachers as symbols of community leadership or bastions of the type of social order that some armed factions want to see destroyed. Children are useful in armies as soldiers, as well as to perform a myriad of daily tasks from cooking and cleaning to sexual favours. Children need to work when members of their family die or are unable to make a living, and families remove children from school fearing for their lives and security.
  • profound long-term effects of educational losses among those exposed to conflict.
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  • In particular, relatively minor shocks to educational access – even as small as one less year of schooling – can have long-lasting detrimental effects on the children that are out of school, as well as on the human capital of whole generations.
  • But human capital – the stock of skills and knowledge we gain through education and experience – is the backbone of successful economic and social recovery. Ignoring these long-term consequences will endanger any attempts to rebuild peace, social justice and stability.
stephknox24

Cultivating Peace - 1 views

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    The tragic events of September 2001 and the escalation of conflicts around the world have focused attention on the urgent issues of world peace and human security. The seeds of the Cultivating Peace project were sown out of these events and the belief that long-term solutions require substantial shifts in how people of all cultures view global citizenship, conflict resolution, respect for human rights and care for the earth. Cultivating Peace is also founded on the belief that the strongest force available to shape cultural change is education.
Teach Hub

18 Inclusion Strategies for Student Success - 3 views

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    If you are a teacher of students within an inclusion classroom, then you are probably a creative, caring, patient, innovative, resourceful, structured, and flexible person. Whew!
Teachers Without Borders

Using technology in the classroom requires experience and guidance, report finds - The ... - 2 views

  • It’s older, more experienced teachers – not younger, so-called digital natives – who are experimenting more with new technology in the classroom, a new report suggests.And although Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices have infiltrated Canadian classrooms, the study finds that educators have serious concerns that students are “not-so-savvy surfers” – too prone to accept information published online as fact and be led astray.
  • “At the ground level, across the country, our impression is that teaching how to use technology takes precedence over the key critical thinking and ethical skills that youth really need,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education at Media Awareness Network, the not-for-profit group that conducted the research.
  • The report’s scope is small, involving just 10 elementary and high school teachers from across the country, but detailed. Titled Young Canadians in a Wired World, it is the third phase in an ongoing examination by Media Awareness Network of youth online. It takes a narrow focus on how teachers are using technology in the classroom and what barriers exist to maximizing these newest teaching tools.
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  • n order to teach students how to be better digital citizens, the teachers surveyed said the training wheels have to come off the Internet: The filters schools use to block unverified websites prevent students from learning how to exercise good judgment.One elementary school teacher described a learning opportunity that arose when his students stumbled across a website sympathetic to the Nazis. The site’s racism, which was cloaked in careful prose, wasn’t obvious to the students.
  • The Ottawa-based group will use the findings to shape a larger national survey it hopes to conduct next year.
  • The teachers said filters are also problematic because they prevent access to useful teaching aids. Teachers in Quebec and Ontario described not being able to show videos in class because YouTube was blocked. And one teacher in Atlantic Canada described a failed campaign to get Twitter unblocked so her students could collaborate on math questions.
  • “I don’t see a lot of new teachers coming in knowing how to apply technology,” said Zhi Su, a teacher and technology director at John Oliver Secondary School in Vancouver.Fresh out of college, few new teachers experiment with new technologies because they have the potential to be disruptive. It’s experience, and the confidence that comes with it, that is allowing teachers in their 40s and 50s to lead the way, according to the report.
Teachers Without Borders

Chinese children endure 'world's most dangerous school run' - Telegraph - 0 views

  • Four times a year, 80 children from a remote village in the Pamir mountains set off on a school run that would make most parents blanch, scaling 1000ft-high cliffs and fording swollen rivers to get to class.
  • "There is only one way to get to the village, and you have to climb up in the mountains," said Su Qin, the head teacher at Taxkorgan Town boarding school, where the children study. "The village is completely cut off. The roads only take you further away," she added.
  • The most dangerous part of the route is a path, which narrows to just a few inches wide, that has been cut into a cliff face some 1,000ft above the valley beneath. Without safety harnesses, the teachers gingerly shepherd their charges along.
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  • "Actually the parents think it toughens the kids up, and gives them good experience," said Ms Su. "However, some of the parents are reluctant to let their children go to school. They are so cut off from the world they do not appreciate the importance that having knowledge will play in their children's lives."
  • Guo Yukun, the local Communist party secretary, told China Central Television (CCTV) that a road is now under construction to the village. However, because of the difficulty of the terrain, it is not expected to be finished until late 2013.
  • "Our main task is to get these 80 primary and middle schoolchildren out of Pili village [and bring them to the school] safely. Our national policy is to make sure children have a free education. So the teachers take good care of them," he said.
Teachers Without Borders

Vietnam demands English language teaching 'miracle' | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

  • More than 80,000 English language teachers in Vietnam's state schools are expected to be confident, intermediate-level users of English, and to pass a test to prove it, as part of an ambitious initiative by the ministry of education to ensure that all young people leaving school by 2020 have a good grasp of the language.
  • But the initiative is worrying many teachers, who are uncertain about their future if they fail to achieve grades in tests such as Ielts and Toefl."All teachers in primary school feel very nervous," said Nguyen Thi La, 29, an English teacher at Kim Dong Primary School in Hanoi."It's difficult for teachers to pass this exam, especially those in rural provinces. B2 is a high score.""All we know is that if we pass we are OK. If we don't we can still continue teaching, then take another test, then if we fail that, we don't know."
  • "No teachers will be sacked if they are not qualified because we already know most of them are not qualified. No teachers will be left behind and the government will take care of them. But if the teachers don't want to improve, then parents will reject them because only qualified teachers will be able to run new training programmes."
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  • The state media recently reported that in the Mekong Delta's Ben Tre province, of 700 teachers who had been tested, only 61 reached the required score. In Hue, in central Vietnam, one in five scored B2 or higher when 500 primary and secondary teachers were screened with tests tailored by the British Council.
  • "B2 is achievable enough. The teachers I know want to improve their English but want their salaries to be higher so that they can have an incentive to try harder to meet the standard," said Tran Thi Qua, a teacher trainer from the education department in Hue.
  • A new languages-focused curriculum delivered by retrained teachers should be in place in 70% of grade-three classes by 2015, according to ministry plans, and available nationwide by 2019. English teaching hours are set to double and maths will be taught in a foreign language in 30% of high schools in major cities by 2015.
  • "The government needs to fund courses to help improve the quality of the teachers, and pay them more money, but I think if teachers don't want to improve, then they should change jobs," she said.
  • Rebecca Hales, a former senior ELT development manager at British Council Vietnam, said: "The ministry is taking a phased approach, which is commendable, but there are issues with supply and demand. They don't have the trained primary English teachers. The targets are completely unachievable at the moment."
  • "The teacher trainers we trained up are now at the mercy of the individual education departments. There's no evidence at this stage of a large-scale teacher training plan," Hales said.
  • "There are many challenges. We are dealing with everything, from training, salaries and policy, to promotion, how to train [teachers] then keep them in the system. I'm not sure if [Project 2020] will be successful. Other countries have spent billions on English language teaching in the private sector but still governments have been very unhappy with the outcomes."
Gwen Stamm

Roots of Empathy -- Welcome - 1 views

  • Roots of Empathy is a powerful idea whose time has come. An evidenced-based charitable organization, its mission is to build caring, peaceful, and civil societies through the development of empathy in children and adults. Its vision is to change the world - one child at a time.
  • Roots of Empathy is considered a model of social innovation and has two evidence-based programs: a flagship program of the same name for children in elementary school (Roots of Empathy) and its "younger sibling," a program for children ages three to five in childcare settings Seeds of Empathy.
  • Independent evaluations consistently show children who receive Roots of Empathy experience dramatic and lasting effects in terms of increased positive social behaviour (sharing, helping and including) and decreased aggression.
Teachers Without Borders

AFGHANISTAN: Avoid using schools in elections, say agencies - 0 views

  • KABUL, 17 June 2010 (IRIN) - Putting a polling station in a school would be run-of-the-mill in most countries, but in Afghanistan it can be an invitation to an attack by Taliban insurgents, opposed to the government and western-style democracy. Taliban rocket, grenade, gun and arson attacks on schools averaged about 50 a month last year. During the August 2009 elections, which the Taliban vowed to disrupt, the number hit 250 in that month alone, according to data compiled by aid agencies.
  • Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, student numbers have surged from less than one million in 2001 to about seven million in 2010. More than 30 percent of the students are female, according to the Ministry of Education (MoE).
  • According to research by Care International, in 2006-2008 about 1,153 attacks on educational facilities were reported. Some 230 people were killed in armed attacks on schools in 2006-2007, according to the MoE. Schools are an easy target for the Taliban, looking to demonstrate the government's impotence. "Girls' education is clearly targeted more than boys," stated Care's report of September 2009, which blamed the insurgents and other community members for the attacks.
Teachers Without Borders

AFGHANISTAN: Struggling to improve education - 0 views

  • KABUL, 29 August 2010 (IRIN) - Education in Faryab Province, northern Afghanistan, has never been as good as it is now thanks to the dozens of new schools built by Norway.
  • Faryab is a success story in a country where almost half of the 12,600 schools nationwide do not have a building (classes are held in the open or in tents), officials said.
  • Norway’s flag and other official symbols are not used on the schools which, according to some experts, have helped keep them immune from armed attacks. Schools, students and teachers have often been attacked and harassed by gunmen allegedly associated with Taliban insurgents.
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  • n terms of education, the southern province of Helmand, severely affected by the insurgency, appears to lag far behind Faryab Province.
  • Though it has roughly the same population as Faryab, Helmand has only 282 schools of which over 150 have been closed due to insecurity and lack of teachers, provincial officials said.
  • “Building schools does not mean improving education - any more than building a hospital means improving health care,” adding that the focus on education was good but not at the cost of other important issues.
  • Up to seven million students are currently enrolled at schools across Afghanistan, according to the Education Ministry, indicating significant progress since 2001 when only two million (boys only) were enrolled.
  • However, about five million school-age children, mostly girls in the insecure southern and eastern provinces, are still being deprived of an education due to war, poverty, lack of schools and social restrictions, the Education Ministry said.
Teachers Without Borders

Dying in Haiti: Aids and the Earthquake - 0 views

  • With more than a million people taking refuge in temporary shelters, they are at greater risk of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, Sidibé said. "Programmes are urgently needed to reduce vulnerabilities to HIV and ensure protection."
  • As Haiti experiences a critical interruption of HIV services and programmes, stepped up support is vital for the country to allow it to regain momentum towards reaching universal access goals for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.
  • Haiti’s annual AIDS budget was $132 million prior to the earthquake, and UNAIDS believes that a further $70 million will be necessary to meet the country’s immediate response needs over the next six months.The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that about 285 000 houses had been damaged or destroyed in the earthquake, and government and humanitarian organisations, as well as engineers, are working to register the displaced and plan relocation sites for those who cannot return to their homes.
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  • The UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) and its partners are setting up provisional schoolrooms in Port-au-Prince and other areas, as schools destroyed in the quake are being rebuilt.
  • Haiti’s educational system, said Marc Vergara of the agency, virtually ceased to function in affected areas, leaving about 2.5 million children out of school after the earthquake.Together with the ministry of education, Unicef is helping to establish more than 150 tent schools to get children back to school before April.With more than half of school-age children not attending classes prior to the quake, the agency’s goal is to "build back better" to create conditions to allow many young Haitians to attend school for the first time.
Teachers Without Borders

Notes from the Field | Not again! - 0 views

  • And yet, there's an additional heartache for Haiti in hearing this news. Why was it so much worse here? Chile's quake registered at 8.8, about 500 times more powerful than Haiti's. But the numbers of Haitian dead have already surpassed 220,000 – close to the horrendous toll of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Chile's dead, at last report, number some 700 – a tragic loss, but orders of magnitude fewer than Haiti's. What explains this deadly disparity?
  • Where Chile had strict building codes, Haiti suffered from haphazard construction. Poor, rural people had for years flooded into the capital, living in precariously built shantytowns. Lack of enforcement, corruption and weak governance all contributed to grossly magnify the proportions of the catastrophe. It's easy enough to see the exceptions here, which might have been the rule if earthquake-resistant building codes had been enforced: a few solid structures still tower above the rubble – scarred and cracked, to be sure, but standing all the same.
  • I worry that, as so many times in the past, Haiti will quickly fade from public consciousness, once the world's TV screens are no longer broadcasting terrifying pictures from Port-au-Prince. All the more important that those of us who are working hand in hand with the Haitian people maintain our commitment for the long term, not just with material support but with the determination to rebuild safely and prudently.
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