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One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent tormen... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...fering-persistent-torment.html

bullies cyber children bullying report UK

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Thousands of children are too frightened to go to school or suffer depression and even attempt suicide after being targeted by ‘cyber bullies’, according to a study.It found 28 per cent of children aged 11 to 16 had experienced bullying on the internet or via a mobile phone.
  • More than half the incidents of ‘cyber bullying’ happen on Facebook, with the MSN messenger service the second most common platform for harassment.
  • The survey of 4,600 children was carried out by the charity Beatbullying and the National Association of Head Teachers, and the issue will be highlighted tonight in a BBC1 Panorama programme called Hunting The Internet Bullies.
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  • The report said: ‘There have been a significant number of child and teenage suicides caused by relentless online aggression.‘In the face of this, it is increasingly difficult to argue that the online world is not “real” when activities there can have such devastating repercussions in the real lives of young people.’
  • Children from an ethnic minority background are more likely to be targeted, with ‘white non-British’ youngsters the most at risk from persistent cyber bullying. The report stated this indicated ‘recent immigrants’ were most at risk.
  • Teachers are also suffering from cyber attacks on a significant scale, according to the study.One in 10 teachers said they experienced technological harassment, 15 per cent said they felt afraid for their safety or that of their family.
  • Teachers also spent an average of six hours a week dealing with cyber bullying cases - costing the taxpayer an estimated £18million a year.
  • Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of Beatbullying, said: ‘Cyber bullying continues to be a dangerous problem for a significant number of young people and we must not ignore its complex and often devastating effects.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 08 Feb 12
     
    UK Report on bullying: One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent torment
Teachers Without Borders

Mobile phones help bring aid to remotest regions - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...-bring-aid-to-remotest-regions

mobile mobile phones Souktel SMS cell phones aid international_development

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • One of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) partners is Souktel, a mobile phone service based in the Middle East.
  • Souktel creates databases, message surveys, and instant alerts that can be sent out and received via mobile phone. The platform tries to better connect job seekers with employers through basic Short Message Service (SMS) texting.
  • More recently, Souktel has applied this system to international development work. By expanding their service into northern and eastern Africa, messaging services are being used to connect mobile phone users in previously impenetrable locations with aid and relief workers.
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  • Souktel’s services are coinciding with the exponential rise of mobile phone use in the developing world. The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union reports that there were 360 million African and 310 million Middle Eastern mobile phone subscribers in 2010. These recent numbers are up from just 87 million and 85 million respective subscribers in 2005.
Teachers Without Borders

Education |P6 in Uganda pupils cannot do fractions - report - 2 views

www.monitor.co.ug/...-

education assessment teachers evaluation professional development Uganda

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 28 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Although the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) has boosted enrollment in primary schools (Uganda boasts 8.3 million children in primary schools compared to 2.3 million before 1997), numerous pupils continue to perform poorly at one of the most important aspects of basic education.
  • The report stated that, “Few primary six pupils demonstrated skills in other competences of ‘measures.’ Only about a third of the pupils (35.2 per cent) could for example tell the time shown on the clock face and merely 4.1 per cent of the pupils could apply the concept of capacity in real life situations.”The tests sampled pupils in 1,098 schools from all the districts in Uganda between the ages of nine and 15 and over.
  • Findings indicate that the main reason why pupils cannot practically apply what is taught in class is the teachers failure to identify the weakness of the pupils in the various areas of study.
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  • The report says: “the cause of this is failure to use assessment to diagnose pupils’ and to guide teaching and inadequate practice as these pupils do their work. Primary Six pupils, whose teachers had a university degree or Grade III teaching certificate, performed better than those whose head teachers had a Grade V teaching certificate. Pupils with head teachers who reside at school performed poorer than those whose head teachers live outside the school.”
  • Mokurai Cherlin on 29 Jul 11
     
    It is evident that the sources of these problems must be sought in earlier grades, and even in the experiences of Ugandan pre-schoolers. Compare them with what I describe at http://replacingtextbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/higher-mathematics-for-children/ for children in the US. There are excellent materials on fractions online. See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources for links to some sites that have as many as 100,000 e-learning resources available. Even if students do not have computers, teachers who can access these lessons can adapt them for the classroom or for individual practice, and share them with teachers who do not have Web access. On the issue of fractions, see also http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials/Fractions for an approach that requires no computers, but will be enhanced with software activities fairly soon. If your students have trouble with these exercises, and you can tell us why, we will work with you and them to develop materials that meet their needs. You will also have to tell us if there are circular Ugandan foods that we can use in lessons for children who are not familiar with European/American cakes, pies, and pizza. ^_^ When you have a 4.1% success rate on a particular topic, and thus a 95.9% failure rate, it cannot be said that individual teachers have failed to recognize individual difficulties. This is evidence that the entire curriculum is misdesigned. I assume that this is some part of the holdover colonial education system from before independence, designed originally for European children, with no relation to the prior experi
Teachers Without Borders

eLearning Africa 2012 / International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and ... - 0 views

www.elearning-africa.com/blications_ela_report_2012.php

report PDF Africa E-learning elearning

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 31 May 12 - No Cached
  • The eLearning Africa 2012 Report Free Download    For more than a decade eLearning has promised a revolution in African education. The opportunity of mass access to world-class learning resources without the barriers of distance or cost has excited educationalists, politicians and learners alike. But has eLearning lived up to this promise? What do African eLearning professionals, practitioners, policymakers, business leaders and teachers think about this? What technologies do they use and which world views inform their work? For the first time ever, the perspectives of eLearning professionals and a range of other stakeholders across 41 different countries on the Continent are reflected in this ground-breaking new publication from eLearning Africa.
Teachers Without Borders

The bullying gender gap: Girls more likely to be targets - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article4456321

bullying gender girls cyberbullying report Canada

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • New research suggests that females such as Ms. Lee may be particularly vulnerable to bullying from other females, even as rates of male bullying decline. It’s a troubling finding that highlights where parents, educators and policy makers may need to focus their efforts to counter the effects of school-related bullying.
  • A comprehensive report released last month by researchers from the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that while overall rates of bullying have remained relatively stable in recent years, some significant gender disparities have emerged.
  • The study found that nearly one-third, or 29 per cent, of students reported being bullied since the start of the school year.
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  • The report, called the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, has been conducted every two years since 1977, making it the longest continuing survey of young people in Canada and one of the longest in the world. Nearly 9,300 students in Grades 7 to 12 from 181 different Ontario schools participated in the most recent survey, which was conducted from October, 2010, to June, 2011.
  • Online or cyber-bullying was also much more common among females, with 28 per cent of girls reporting being targeted by cyber-bullying compared to just 15 per cent of boys.
  • The overall rates haven’t really changed since 2003, the first year CAMH monitored bullying at school. But the survey found that females are more likely to be bullied. Thirty-one per cent of adolescent girls reported being victimized in the most recent survey, compared to 26 per cent for boys.
  • This raises several questions: Do boys get along better than girls? Have programs aimed at curbing bullying failed to reach girls?
  • “The problem is girls do it all underneath the surface,” said Haley Higdon, a facilitator with the SNAP for Schools program.The SNAP (Stop Now and Plan) model is designed to help reach children with behavioural problems or other issues. As a facilitator, Ms. Higdon works in classrooms in the Toronto District School Board. Often, the behavioural problems she encounters stem from bullying.
  • With boys, bullying is typically much easier to detect because male bullies often resort to physical measures, such as fighting. With girls, the behaviour can be much more subtle, making it more difficult for teachers to detect.
  • Bullying can take on many forms. It’s not just one child pushing another in the schoolyard – it is any aggressive or unwanted behaviour that involves a real or perceived imbalance in power, according to StopBullying.gov, a U.S. government website.
Teachers Without Borders

Save the Children releases The Future is Now report - 1 views

www.savethechildren.net/...2010-05-11.html

conflict Education Under Attack children school report Save the Children

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Children and school buildings are increasingly becoming targets in conflicts across the world, warns Save the Children as one of the key findings of a report published today.
  • The organisation finds that the risks of violence to schoolchildren in conflict-blighted areas are on the rise as schools are increasingly used as symbolic, easy targets by armed groups. These risks to children will continue to grow unless the international community takes urgent action to protect them from attack.
  • The report - The Future is Now - points out that civilians now make up more than 90% of casualties in the world's conflicts and about half of those are children. It warns that education is under attack by armed militias, criminal groups and even governments through the bombing of schools and is threatened by military interference in humanitarian work - all of which put children's lives in danger.
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  • Among the most dangerous countries is Afghanistan where between 2006 and 2009 there were 2,450 attacks on schools - in recent weeks, 50 schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan were reportedly left unconscious and sick after poison gas attacks by the Taliban. In the war-torn Helmand and Badghis provinces 80% children are out of school.
  • In Liberia 73%of primary-aged children are out of school. • In Somalia, 81% of school age children have no access to education.
  • They can and must be protected - in Nepal, where schools were being targeted by armed groups, Save the Children's introduction of schools as ‘Zones of Peace' directly led to a rise in attendance.
  • "Children in conflict zones should not have to forgo an education. Their schooling is crucial not only for their personal health and development but for the future peace of their communities - with every additional year of formal schooling, a boy's risk of becoming involved with conflict falls by 20%.
Teachers Without Borders

Mexico's drug gangs aim at new target teachers - World AP - MiamiHerald.com - 1 views

www.miamiherald.com/...cos-drug-gangs-aim-at-new.html

Education Under Attack Mexico teachers violence gangs schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 17 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Now as Christmas approaches, mobsters have chosen a new target, turning their sights on humble schoolteachers. Painted threats scrawled outside numerous public schools demand that teachers hand over their Christmas bonuses or face the possibility of an armed attack on the teachers - and even the children.
  • To make the point clear, assailants set fire to a federal preschool in the San Antonio district a week ago, leaving the director's office in smoldering ruins. Scribbled on the wall in gold paint was the reason: "For not paying."
  • Now with the targets being teachers, parents have pulled thousands of children from schools where heightened security already had turned them into seeming prisons, enclosed with coils of barbed wire atop concrete walls.
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  • "We are scared," admitted Maria de Jesus Casio, principal of the Ramon Lopez Velarde Elementary School. But she also said teachers don't want to pay. "Teachers don't have much money. The salaries are just enough for survival." Teachers in this city earn an average of $650 a month. Christmas bonuses vary but the average is about a month's pay.
  • "The educational system is under threat by criminal groups," Javier Gonzalez, the under secretary for education in northern Chihuahua state, said in an interview. "We're just praying to God that there never is an event of this nature."
  • At the pre-primary school hit by arson Dec. 5, director Norma Pena said her school had been sacked of anything valuable. "They constantly rob from us - the metal bars from the fence, the air conditioners, even the swing sets," Pena said. "The laws are so soft. The laws are no good. When they catch someone, they let them go right away. The criminals threaten the authorities."
  • "We feel the caring and love people have for our school. This is what keeps us going," Casio said. But the crime gangs are sapping hope. "They respect no one. What is there to rob in this school? And we teachers, with our salaries, have even less."
Teachers Without Borders

Can Afghanistan hang on to its newly minted college grads? - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...its-newly-minted-college-grads

afghanistan education university

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • But such focus on the university and its graduates shouldn’t be a surprise. After three decades of war, the country's most talented professionals have fled, leaving behind a nation where 72 percent of the people are now illiterate and the number of universities may not even reach 50.
  • “For a master's degree, yes, it’s tempting to go overseas. But for living, it’s not. Once you’ve got an education, it seems like this is where people need you most,” says Sulieman Hedayat, one of 32 students who graduated on Thursday.
  • AUAF opened its doors in 2006, and everyone from prominent Afghan businessmen to institutions like USAID have invested tens of millions of dollars in the hopes of minting a university that produces students who can help rebuild Afghanistan.
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  • Just last week, three Afghan students bolted for Canada at the conclusion of their study abroad in Midwest. Most famously, the Afghan national soccer team had to temporarily disband in 2004 when nine of the players disappeared during training camp in Italy and later turned up as asylum seekers.
Teachers Without Borders

Bullying and the Brain: Using Cognitive and Emotional Intelligence to Help Kids Cope - 1 views

www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp

bullying research article schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 27 Mar 12
     
    Gary R. Plaford's Bullying and the Brain: Using Cognitive and Emotional Intelligence to Help Kids Cope is aimed at addressing such questions.  "Numerous books have been written about bullying, but most of them deal only with external intervention-those that suggest teaching students more appropriate social skills," asserts the back cover of Plaford's book.  This summary goes on to list important expansions that this work targets including: "internal interventions"; strategies for "monitoring and controlling bullying behaviors"; the "latest research on the brain and emotional intelligence"; new insights into managing "emotional triggers"; as well as cultivating "connections and an outward focus" among students (Plaford, 2006, back cover).
Teachers Without Borders

School Bullying and Current Educational Practice: Re-Imagining Theories of Educational ... - 1 views

www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp

bullying research article schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 27 Mar 12
     
    Background/Context: Bullying within schools continues despite thoughtful and well-researched anti-bullying strategies deployed against it. The bulk of research targeted toward understanding and eradicating bullying within schools is of an empirical nature. In other words, through data collection, questionnaires, interviews, ethnography, observation, case studies, etc., researchers have sought to carefully assess bully/victim characteristics as well as the social processes that fuel bullying within schools. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This project considers educational transformation (i.e., how we might transform those we educate) through a variety of pertinent, yet diverse, lenses. Specifically this paper is situated in the conviction that in order to stop bullying we must affect desire. We ask, then, how philosophical theories of transformation, specifically those regarding changes in dispositions, might contribute to our understanding of school bullying and current strategies aimed at reducing it. In short, the driving question underlying this project simply asks: how can we help the bully to no longer desire to bully?
Teachers Without Borders

Children severely tortured in detention centers / schools used as detention centers - 1 views

www.crin.org/...infodetail.asp

Syria human_rights torture Education Under Attack children detention schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.
  • “Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”
  • Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.
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  • Ala’a,” a 16-year-old boy from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that Syrian security forces detained him for eight months, starting in May 2011, after he participated in and read political poetry at demonstrations. He was released in late January 2012 after his father bribed a prison guard with 25,000 Syrian pounds (US$436). During his detention he was held in seven different detention centres, as well as the Homs Central Prison. Ala’a told Human Rights Watch that at the Military Security branch in Homs: When they started interrogating me, they asked me how many protests I had been to, and I said “none.” Then they took me in handcuffs to another cell and cuffed my left hand to the ceiling. They left me hanging there for about seven hours, with about one-and-a-half to two centimetres between me and the floor – I was standing on my toes. While I was hanging there, they beat me for about two hours with cables and shocked me with cattle prods. Then they threw water on the ground and poured water on me from above. They added an electric current, and I felt the shock. I felt like I was going to die. They did this three times. Then I told them, “I will confess everything, anything you want.” 
  • A number of adult detainees and security force members who had defected and who were interviewed by Human Rights Watch confirmed the presence and torture of child detainees in facilities across Syria. “Samih,” a former adult detainee held in a political security facility in Latakia, told Human Rights Watch that children were subjected to worse treatment than adults, including sexual abuse, because they were children.
  • The government has used schools as detention centres, sniper posts, and military bases or barracks. “Marwan,” from the Insha’at neighborhood in Homs, and other Homs residents told Human Rights Watch that the army attacked Bahithet Al-Badiyah school on Brazil Street on November 4, and that military security forces then turned the school into a detention centre. Local activists also told Human Rights Watch that military security turned Al-Ba’ath elementary school in Joubar, another Homs neighborhood, into a military base and detention center in late December.
  • Children also told Human Rights Watch that their schools closed in 2011 due to violence, or that it was no longer safe for them to go to school. “Mohammed,” a 10-year-old boy from Homs, said, “I went to school for only one day [this year]. The teachers just gave us the books and told us not to come back. The road to school was not safe because of snipers.”
  • “Schools across Syria are closed because it’s too dangerous for students to attend, or because the military thinks schools are better used as detention centres than educational establishments,” said Whitman. “How long will Syrian children pay the price for the violence around them?” 
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | ZIMBABWE: Thousands of girls forced out of education | Zimbabwe | Childre... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

Zimbabwe education school girls girls' education Education Under Attack gender

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 16 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • HARARE, 7 November 2011 (IRIN) - Poverty, abuse and cultural practices are preventing a third of Zimbabwean girls from attending primary school and 67 percent from attending secondary school, denying them a basic education, according to a recent study which found alarming dropout rates for girls. ''Sexual harassment and abuse by even school teachers and parents, cultural issues, lack of school fees, early marriage, parental commitments and early pregnancies are some of the contributing factors to the dropout by the girl child,'' said the authors of "Because I am a Girl" by Plan International, a nonprofit organisation that works to alleviate child poverty.
  • According to the Plan International report, the long distances that children in rural areas have to travel to reach school, and the burden that girl children face because they often have to assume the responsibilities of being head of the household after the death of their parents, are other factors contributing to the high dropout rate for girls.
  • A 2005 government programme of forced evictions, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out Trash), which uprooted some 700,000 people from urban areas across the country, compounded the difficulties of accessing education for girls from affected households. Amnesty International, in its report ''Left Behind: The Impact of Zimbabwe's Forced Evictions on the Right to Education'' released in October 2011, documents the ways in which the evictions disrupted the primary and secondary education of an estimated 222,000 children.
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  • The Amnesty International report notes that many girls at Hopley became sex workers, entered relationships with older men, or married at a young age after eviction from their homes, and the government's failure to support them to re-enrol in school.
  • Zimbabwe's education system, once considered a model for other African countries, has been steadily declining over the last decade due to the economic crisis. Many schools lack text books and other supplies.
Teachers Without Borders

Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack - 0 views

www.protectingeducation.org

Education Under Attack GCPEA education conflict

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 08 Mar 12
     
    The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack is a unique inter-agency coalition formed in 2010 to address the problem of targeted attacks on education during armed conflict.
Teachers Without Borders

ReliefWeb » Document » UN agency calls for more support for its school feedin... - 0 views

www.reliefweb.int/...MUMA-86W29M

WFP school_feeding

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Nancy Walters, the chief of school feeding policy at WFP, told a New York forum on hunger that the programmes have many benefits beyond the immediate goal of ensuring children do not go hungry. They help children stay in class, reduce levels of diseases and other health problems, empower girls, lift education standards and free many youngsters from having to work.
  • Some 66 million schoolchildren in dozens of countries currently receive meals through the programmes, and Ms. Walters said WFP would continue to fund and implement them with the help of its current partners.
  • "We have seen the impact of fortified biscuits on anaemia levels in Bangladesh, for example. We know about the impacts in terms of gender, social protection, stability, income transfer, freed parental labour, combating child labour impacts and how school feeding can be a platform to local production, nutrition, hygiene and HIV information." She also emphasized their value to efforts to reach the social and economic targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have a target date of 2015.
Teachers Without Borders

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

www.alertnet.org/...8f7939469f90606d1e188560ce.htm

Education Under Attack Afghanistan schools violence Taliban

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 18 Jun 10 - Cached
  • 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

Midterm report: Tanzania's educational revolution needs investment | Global development... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mdg2-education-tanzania

Tanzania Africa MDGs education EFA enrollment international_development tuition

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Enrolment at primary schools nationwide has leapt from 59% in 2000 to 95.4% today, putting the impoverished country well on course to achieve the second millennium development goal (MDG) of primary school education for all by 2015.
  • half of pupils will fail to qualify for secondary school, with 3,000 girls a year dropping out due to pregnancy.
  • The progress has come with a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Enrolment has grown so fast in Tanzania that the school system is creaking with overcrowded classrooms, shortages of books, teachers and toilets, and reports of corporal punishment being used to keep order. In short, it seems that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.
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  • 32-year-old Grace Mayemba, who teaches English, Swahili and social studies. "It's so hard because there are so many," she says."They are noisy and can do anything. To make each child understand is very difficult but you have to try your best.
  • Salima Omari, 36, a science and maths teacher, faces classes of 76 pupils. "It's difficult to cope with when you want to give one-to-one support. There are only four toilets for the whole school and two for the teachers, and there is not much water. The MDG has been good for Tanzania overall, but it was rushed."
  • With significant donor support from Britain and others, the government has allocated more than 2tn shillings (£856,000) for education in 2010-11, about double its spending on health. But most schools still lack electricity or water – nine in 10 children cannot wash their hands after using the toilet. Education activists warn that Tanzania, where half the population is below 18, still has a long way to go to achieve the MDG in spirit.
  • "Students will be enrolled, but in a few months, because of no shoes or textbooks, they can easily drop out," says Anthony Mwakibinga, its acting co-ordinator. "Boys often drop out for child labour near diamond mines. Girls drop out because of early pregnancy or marriage in some areas."
  • In Tanzania, parents are still expected to contribute to teaching materials, uniforms and even classroom construction. Still, it's not enough. Mwakibinga says he has come across classes of 200 pupils where quality inevitably suffers. "What do you from expect from a classroom of 200 children, even if the teacher works like a donkey? What if the 200 children have no books?"
  • The national teacher-pupil ratio has climbed from 1:41 in 2000 to 1:51 today. New teacher training colleges, including some in the private sector, have opened in a bid to meet the demand, but some trainees are allegedly rushed through in three or four months. The profession also suffers from low public esteem.
  • One teacher, Florence Katabazi, 37, says: "I chose teaching and to this day people think I'm a failure. People say, 'I want my son to be a doctor or lawyer, not a teacher,' It's shameful to be a teacher. Everyone runs away from the profession. If they want to be an accountant, they just use teaching as a bridge. At the end of the day we've got 10,000 half-baked teachers and only 400 good ones."
  • Struggling to maintain classroom discipline, some of the country's 160,000 primary school teachers resort to corporal punishment. Noel Ihebuzor, Unicef's chief of basic education and life skills, says: "They see it as controlling children and don't feel they are doing anything wrong. They were brought up that way. We've had stories where parents take children to the head and say, 'He's stubborn, cane him for me.'"
  • "Another problem is the provision of decent training services to teachers. The ministry has tried to develop a management strategy this year but it has not been implemented because of scarce resources. It's good to have a target, but a target without resources is a problem."
  • the pass rate for the primary school leaving exam is just 49.4%.
  • One teacher has a class of 166, with some pupils forced to lie on the bare concrete floor during lessons. They keep up spirits in the dusty, tree-lined central courtyard by playing steel instruments on the bandstand. In headteacher Abdallah Mgomi's office, a typed sheet of paper on the wall reminds anyone who reads it: "Quality is never an accident."
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Africa: Abolishing Fees Boosts African Schooling (Page 1 of 2) - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201002181133.html

Africa developing nations schools tuition Kenya education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • UNICEF, the UN children's agency, reports that the abolition of school fees has had the intended effect of vastly increasing access to education. The number of primary students in Kenya has increased by nearly 2 million.
  • Encouragingly, the dropout rate, an important measurement of affordability and educational quality, has also fallen. The share of students completing primary school jumped from 62.8 per cent in 2002, the last year fees were charged, to 76.2 per cent two years later as fewer poor children were forced out for nonpayment.
  • the lifting of fees in Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa has proved to be a giant step forward for access to education by millions of the region's poor. It has helped Africa make progress towards its goal of finding a place in school for all its children. GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); var ACE_AR = {site: '768910', size: '180150'}; Over the last 15 years a number of other countries, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique, have also experienced explosive growth in primary school enrolment following the elimination of fees. The UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that between 2000 and 2007 overall primary school enrolment in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 42 per cent - the greatest rate of increase in the world. As a result, the percentage of African children in primary school increased from 58 to 74 per cent. A few African countries, including Botswana, Cape Verde, Togo and Mauritius, could achieve universal primary enrolment by 2015
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  • But the increase in school attendance is only a start. Despite the surge in enrolment, almost half of the 72 million children out of school worldwide in 2007 lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The UN's MDG Monitor website, which tracks progress towards the goals, estimates that school fees and other mandatory charges, such as uniform costs and dues for parent-teacher associations, consume an average 25 per cent of poor families' household budgets in Africa. But except for the costly fees often assessed on parents in wealthy districts, the sums collected are too small to dramatically improve the quality of learning.
  • Malawi primary school: The abolition of school fees greatly increased school enrolment, but without sufficient teachers or adequate funding, educational quality suffered.
  • Despite the huge increase in students, the number of teachers in Kenyan primary schools has increased slowly amidst government concerns that hiring large numbers of unqualified teachers would lower instructional quality and increase costs. By reassigning teachers from overstaffed areas to understaffed districts and running some schools in double shifts, Kenya kept its national pupil-to-teacher ratio from rising beyond 40 to 1 in 2004. Ratios were much higher in some provinces, however.
  • The government also managed to reach its target of one textbook for every three students in most subjects - an improvement in many poorly performing, largely rural districts that were not given priority for teachers and supplies before 2003
Voytek Bialkowski

breakthrough: educational materials - 0 views

breakthrough.tv/...educational-materials

human_rights_education human_rights OER

shared by Voytek Bialkowski on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Educational Materials
  • ICED Curriculum Download PDF Curriculum | Posted: 02/09/2009 Get your students’ attention with the standards aligned ICED curriculum to teach immigration, due process and human rights lessons. More...
  • Rights Advocates: A Resource Guide on HIV/AIDS Awareness Download PDF Discussion Guide | Posted: 02/05/2009 A colorful guide for youth trainers to implement HIV/STD education programs in schools and organizations. More...
  • Voytek Bialkowski on 01 Mar 10
     
    Sparse but varied education materials dealing with topics such as domestic violence, racism, HIV/AIDS from an educational/institutional perspective. Searchable by issue, campaign & country. PP.
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