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As Southern Sudan looks to nationhood, education is pivotal | Back on Track - 0 views

www.educationandtransition.org/...ationhood-education-is-pivotal sudan education girls' girls' education schools podcast
shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • At the end of this week, Southern Sudan will become an independent nation. Citizens of the newest country in the world, the people of Southern Sudan face immense challenges and immediate threats.
  • They also stand before a unique opportunity to build a country that is free of war, respectful of human rights and prosperous. Education will play a pivotal role in the future stability and economic development of Southern Sudan.
  • more than 100,000 Sudanese civilians have been displaced due to recent clashes over the contested border district of Abyei. About half of them are children who are being exposed to hunger, violence and disease. They are often separated from their parents and out of school due to the conflict.
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  • Southern Sudan ranks second to last when it comes to primary school enrolment, with almost 1.3 million children of primary school age out of school.
  • For the girls, the situation is even worse. Only around 8 per cent of women in Southern Sudan are literate, giving it one of the lowest female literacy rates in the world.
  • “When we first began, there were hardly any girls in the classroom, maybe two or three,” she said. “But now, in a classroom of 60, [there] would be 27 to, sometimes, half” of the class composed of girl students.
  • “The teacher-parent associations are getting stronger,” she said. “We really need to create community awareness.”
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Angola is facing a teaching crisis that seems without end | Alex Duval Smith | Global d... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ovince-angola-teacher-shortage teaching teachers shortage Angola teacher development education
shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.
  • During the war, people with only a grade 3 or 4 education became teachers. Since 2002, the pressure to meet MDG2 and to reduce Angola's 27% teenage illiteracy rate has seen the country recruit thousands of untrained school-leavers into teaching.
  • According to Unicef, less than 10% of five-year-olds have access to preschool. Only 76% of children between six and 11 are in primary school. Overall, more than 1 million six- to 17-year-olds are out of school.
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  • The shortage is so great," he says, "that those who do come into the system choose where they will work. We do not have the resources to pay incentives to place them where they are most needed.''
  • In his office in the provincial capital, Lubango, director of education Américo Chicote, 48, describes a "crisis'' that seems without end. "Our biggest challenge is to get children into school but then we have to find people to teach them. In Huíla province we have about 700,000 children of school age and 19,000 people teaching them. At the end of the war we had 200 schools. We now have 1,714 schools but we are still teaching 40% of our pupils under trees, and the school-age population is growing at a rate of 3% per year. Results are suffering. There are 171 days in the school year but there are not 171 days of good weather. We just have to do our best.''
  • Currently, anyone with a grade 10 education can sit the exam to become a teacher.
  • "We estimate that around 40% of our teachers are not properly qualified. So far, training initiatives have reached about 3,000 teachers in the province. The scheme needs to be expanded to reach more teachers across more subjects,'' he says.
  • "I am doing my best,'' says Florinda, who has a grade 10 education and eight years' experience as a teacher. She hopes in due course to be given on-the-job training. "I would love to learn some methods for animating my teaching. But to tell you the truth, in all this dust and heat, if I can just keep their attention for a whole lesson I feel I have done well.''
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OECD educationtoday: Chinese lessons - 0 views

oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/...chinese-lessons.html China OECD education curriculum reform
shared by Teachers Without Borders on 20 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The previous wave of reforms in Shanghai had focused on professionalising education and disseminating good practice through a system of empowered and networked schools. Those established the capacity of the education system to attracted the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms and the most capable school leaders to the most disadvantaged schools. The new reforms are now intended to produce innovative approaches to pedagogy and personalised learning experiences.
  • The aim is to offer a more flexible curriculum while avoiding the pitfalls that are familiar to students and teachers in the West.
  • This investment, and the ways in which students expressed themselves and discussed their ideas about their education, were very different from what I had seen and heard in Chinese schools before. What is evident now is that the Chinese system is well beyond playing catch-up with world-class standards; quite simply, China is designing its own educational future.
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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.
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