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BBC News - African-Caribbean boys 'would rather hustle than learn' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...education-15387444

boys gender masculinity education learning Jamaica schools UK

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Black schoolboys can choose to perform poorly to avoid undermining their masculinity, the head of the Jamaican Teachers' Association has said. Adolph Cameron said that in Jamaica, where homophobia was a big issue, school success was often seen as feminine or "gay". He was concerned the same cultural attitude was affecting African-Caribbean male students in the UK.
  • He noted that in Jamaica boys were at least 10 percentage points behind girls in national tests. Misplaced views about masculinity needed to be tackled in schools.
  • In an interview with the BBC News website, Mr Cameron said: "That notion of masculinity says that if as a male you aspire to perform highly it means you are feminine, even to the extent of saying you are gay. "But in the context of Jamaica, which is so homophobic, male students don't want to be categorised in that way so that they would deliberately underperform in order that they are not."
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  • He said research had suggested that boys in Jamaica deliberately underperformed in literacy tests because the tests were carried out in standard English, and "to speak in standard English is considered a woman's activity". He went on to suggest the same cultural attitudes affected the learning of African-Caribbean boys in England.
  • "Boys are more interested in hustling, which is a quick way of making a living, rather than making the commitment to study. This is a supposed to be a street thing which is a male thing. "The influence of this attitude towards masculinity seems to be having a tremendous impact on how well African-Caribbean and Jamaican males do.
Teachers Without Borders

UNESCO Uses Souktel Mobile Alerts System to Keep Gaza Schools and Students Safe - 0 views

app.e2ma.net/...9b82426f537d3c1f1d4e1cce4ff985

Souktel SMS mobile phones education schools Gaza

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • UNESCO staff in Gaza recruited Souktel to create an SMS alert/survey system that warns parents and their children of any danger happening near local schools. The service forms a key part of UNESCO’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Reduction project, which aims to ensure that schools are secure community spaces.
  • "In conflict zones, when it's not safe to leave your house to get information, mobile phones can bridge the gap and keep everyone connected," says Souktel co-founder Jacob Korenblum. "This basic technology allows aid workers, educators and local families to stay in contact at all times." 
  • Here’s how it works: At each school, principals and teachers are given password-protected access to a web interface, where they can send SMS alerts to all parents’ mobile phones. In an emergency, they could write, "Attack near school today, please keep your children at home." Once the violence has ended, another message could go out saying, "Shelling has stopped; please come to school this morning."
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  • So far, 29 schools have been targeted for this project, with more than 11,700 students benefitting from the service.
Teachers Without Borders

Countries struggling to meet rising demand for secondary education - UN - 0 views

www.un.org/...story.asp

UNESCO report education UN Africa

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 25 October 2011 – The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest, released today by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of children who want to enrol in secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • “There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. “This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today’s globalized world.”
  • Yet, the agency adds, a child in the last grade of primary school only has at best a 75 per cent chance of making the transition to lower secondary school in about 20 countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The region also has a shortage of secondary school teachers.
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  • “Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never even spend a day in school,” states UNESCO. Girls are the first to suffer from this inequality, the report says. In sub-Saharan Africa, the enrolment ratio for girls in lower secondary education is 39 per cent compared to 48 per cent for boys. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in which the gender disparities against girls are getting worse at the upper secondary level, with 8 million boys enrolled compared to only 6 million girls, according to the report.
  • “All of these data underscore a central message: secondary education is the next great challenge,” states Hendrik van der Pol, Director of UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics. “According to the Digest, about one third of the world’s children live in countries where lower secondary education is formally considered to be compulsory but the laws are not respected. We need to translate the commitment into reality.”
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