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Teachers Without Borders

In Japan, parents try to go on: 'My child should come home to me' - CNN.com - 0 views

  • "I'm not OK," she says, still smiling as if she's talking about the weather. "Of course I'm not. But I have another son." Naganuma's other son, eight-year-old Koto, is missing. Koto was at Ishinomaki Okawa Elementary School the day the tsunami hit. The 108 students, as they'd practiced before, evacuated when the earthquake struck, says Naganuma.
  • The students had no idea the tsunami was coming. Out of the 108, 77 are presumed dead or missing. Koto is among the missing, his body still not recovered. "Ran saw the tsunami," says Naganuma. "His brother is not coming home. So I think he understands. I can see he's pretending to be happy, so we don't worry about him."
  • From blanket to blanket, families recount their own losses. But it's the deaths of all the children at the elementary school that pains this community most. At the elementary school, young fathers dig with shovels alongside rescuers. The school is a shell, its inside gutted by the force of the tsunami.
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  • Next to the school, backpacks sit in rows, waiting to be identified and retrieved. The piles of school mementos are all mud-covered -- from the school little league team to the bats they used.
  • With so much work to do for these parents, there's no time to think about grieving, says aid organization Save the Children. The nonprofit group hopes to ease the onslaught of trauma, by setting up "child-friendly spaces" at evacuation centers up and down the northern Japan coastline.
  • The purpose, she says, is to give the children "a sense of safety and to actually also work with the parents on how to support them on this process. It's going to be a long recovery process for children who've experienced this extreme devastation."
Teachers Without Borders

Disaster-resilient school communities urged - thenews.com.pk - 0 views

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    Considering the vulnerability of children and the role schools can play in case of any natural or human induced disaster, the speakers of a seminar have stressed for creating disaster-resilient school communities that are better trained and equipped for dealing with any such emergency situation.   They demanded the government to declare May 16 as National School Safety Day and define standard operating procedures (SOPs) for schools which could be followed in case of any disaster. They said that these SOPs should be mounted on school walls and children and teachers be trained to strictly follow them.  
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | ETHIOPIA: Drought, floods hit education | Ethiopia | Children | Education | Environment - 0 views

  • ADDIS ABABA, 18 January 2012 (IRIN) - Parts of Ethiopia are still reeling from the effects of recent drought, flooding, conflict or a combination of the three, resulting in increased numbers of children dropping out of school, say officials. At least 385,000 school-children need "emergency education assistance this school year", Alexandra Westerbeek, the UN children’s Fund (UNICEF) communication manager in Ethiopia, told IRIN. "In addition, 70,000 children among [the] refugee population also need emergency education assistance." 
Teachers Without Borders

Bulgaria: Teachers in Berlin at 'End of Tether' over German-illiterate Roma Kids - Novinite.com - Sofia News Agency - 0 views

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    Since Romania and Bulgaria's accession to the EU, more and more Roma have flocked to Germany, many of whom send their children to school without any knowledge of the language, the Berliner Umschau states. The teachers at the Hermann Schulz primary school in Berlin-Reinickendorf have sent a letter to the authorities to complain about the matter. In one of the classes at the school, 20% of the children are Roma with no knowledge of German. The teachers have complained that they are no longer capable of catering to the needs of the entire classes and are finding it impossible to teach the curriculum.
Teachers Without Borders

One in five children is bullied online - Telegraph - 0 views

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    One in five children aged eight to 11 is a victim of cyberbullying attacks, a new report from charity Beatbullying has found.
Teachers Without Borders

ReliefWeb » P&I » Education Insights: Making education inclusive for all - 1 views

  • Educational inclusion relates to all children accessing and meaningfully participating in quality education, in ways that are responsive to their individual needs. The terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive education’ are often used in relation to children with disabilities and/or special needs and emerged partly out of debates to reduce their segregation from mainstream schooling.In recent years, these terms have been used by the Education for All (EFA) movement in relation to all children who are marginalised and excluded from basic education, not just in terms of initial access to schooling, but access to rights within schooling processes. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) identifies inclusion as “…a process of addressing and responding to the diversity of needs of all learners through increasing participation in learning, cultures and communities, and reducing exclusion within and from education.”
  • According to UNESCO, inclusion “…involves changes and modifications in content, approaches, structures and strategies, with a common vision which covers all children of the appropriate age range and a conviction that it is the responsibility of the regular system to educate all children.”  
Teachers Without Borders

YEMEN: Revenge killings keep children out of school | Yemen | children | Education | Security - 0 views

  • Thousands of children in three of Yemen’s 21 governorates have stopped going to school for fear of being targeted by revenge killings, according to international NGO Partners-Yemen (PY)
  • PY has been getting children in schools that remain open to chant the slogan "To those who deprived me of my father; don't deprive me of my education", but thousands of children have stopped going to school for fear of crossing tribal boundaries.
  • "I haven't gone to school since 2005 when I was in grade six. I fear that armed tribesmen from Hamdan tribe may kill me,"
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  • The three governorates have a high illiteracy rate: "Fifty-six percent of the male population and 70 percent of the female population… are illiterate," he said.
  • Revenge killings have led to the closure of several schools, especially in al-Jawf and Shabwa governorates. The situation is not quite so bad in Marib, said PY.
  • "As many as eight schools in Maraziq and Al Sayda areas have been closed for five years now," he said, adding that thousands of boys and girls had dropped out of education as a result.
  • more than a dozen schools in his governorate have been deserted for several years as a result of revenge killings.
  • Few students have moved to other safer areas to complete their education; most have stopped going to school since then," he said.
Teachers Without Borders

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

  • 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

Conflict takes a huge toll on education « World Education Blog - 0 views

  • Children and education systems are often on the front line of violent conflict. Of the world’s 72 million Children who don’t attend school, about one-third live in only 20 conflict-affected countries.
  • The report will also explore the role of inappropriate education in fostering conflict and explore ways that education can be a force for peace, social cohesion and human dignity.
  • Save the Children, which in 2006 launched its campaign Rewrite the Future to get Children in conflict-affected countries into school, released a report this month called The Future is Now, which points out that “civilians now make up more than 90% of casualties in the world’s conflicts and about half of those are Children.”
Teachers Without Borders

INDIA: 100-Dollar Laptops Bring In Distant Kids - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

  • Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children.
  • UDAAN, however, moved on. A partnership with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University made it possible for the NGO to introduce the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in selected schools in Mukteshwar in May 2010. OLPC’s stated mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to some two billion children in developing countries with little or no access to education.
  • "The XO machine is ideal for children in remote places where the classroom may be no more than the shade of a tree," explains Satish Jha, who heads OLPC in India. The XO laptop’s wireless connectivity and free, open-source "Sugar" operating system allows children to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content. "The laptops grow with the children," Jha said.
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  • Ashish Garg, country director for the United Nations Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative, told IPS that she sees little difference between students emerging from India’s schools today and those who did so 20 years ago when the country first announced plans to introduce ICTE in its 1.2 million schools. "They may as well have been working on typewriters.
  • Nanyang University is already preparing an evaluation report based on tests in three areas of cognitive empowerment - computer self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy, technological literacy and functional literacy.
Teachers Without Borders

South Africa teaching unions criticise HIV testing in schools | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

  • A plan to introduce HIV testing for children as young as 13 at schools in South Africa has been fiercely criticised by student and teacher unions.The government believes that enabling sexually active pupils to know their HIV status could allow early access to life-saving treatment and help prevent the spread of the infection. But opponents of the voluntary programme say children may not be psychologically prepared to deal with a positive result or the stigma likely to follow.The tests are expected to begin at secondary schools next month during weekends and holidays. Allen Thompson, deputy president of the National Teachers' Union, said: "We suspect we may be heading for disaster. Even parents are afraid to take HIV tests, so you can imagine a 13-year-old. Some will be afraid to say no to their teachers."
Teachers Without Borders

UN calls for better protection from attacks on schools « World Education Blog - 0 views

  • A new UN report supplies further evidence of the disturbing trend towards attacks on schools that we documented in the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.
  • The annual report of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, released on May 11, finds that an increasing number of armed forces in conflicts around the world are deliberately attacking schools or forcing them to close. Attacks against schools and hospitals were reported in at least 15 of 22 conflicts that were monitored.
  • Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, stressed that schools must always be safe places of learning for children. “They should be zones of peace. Those who attack schools and hospitals should know that they will be held accountable,” she said.
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  • The report contains detailed information on violations against children in Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar, Nepal, Occupied Palestinian Territories/Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Southern border provinces of Thailand, Uganda and Yemen.
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    A new UN report supplies further evidence of the disturbing trend towards attacks on schools that we documented in the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.
Teachers Without Borders

Senior UN official lauds new initiative to get Haitian children into school - 0 views

  • 14 June 2011 – The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has welcomed the $360 million fund launched by Haiti’s new President to ensure the most disadvantaged children in the country can go to school. The National Fund for Education (FNE), announced two weeks ago by President Michel Martelly is the biggest fund of its kind ever envisaged for out-of-school children in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
  • It is chiefly composed of a five-cent deduction on incoming international phone calls and $1.50 on international money transfers.
  • The resources identified so far should allow around 350,000 children to go to school in the first year, according to UNESCO, and a total of 1.9 million children are expected to benefit overall.
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Pakistan - Pakistan flood crisis, one year on - 0 views

  • PUNJAB, Pakistan, 3 August 2011 – “Before the floods, this village had a one-room Masjid [mosque] school. Most of the children sat under a tree. We now have this beautiful school, and the children love it,” says Mukhtar Ahmad, Headmaster of the Government Primary School in Mullanwala village, located in the Muzaffargarh District of Pakistan’s Punjab Province.
  • Last year’s unprecedented floods in Pakistan forced the bulk of the population in Mullanwala to relocate to safer areas. When the floodwaters receded and people returned, they discovered that not a single structure in the village was standing – not even the one-room Masjid school.
  • Now, a year after the floods, the TLC has turned into a transitional school housed in semi-permanent buildings. As part of its initiative to quickly improve education facilities for flood-affected children in Pakistan, UNICEF plans the construction of 500 such transitional schools by December 2011. Indeed, the process is already under way.
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  • Its teachers use a ‘child-friendly’ approach to schooling that takes the needs of the whole child into account – including needs for protection, recreation, safe water and sanitation, and more.
  • “Before the floods, I used to go to a one-room school,” recalls Shahbaz. “When the floods came, we moved to high ground in Muzaffargarh. When we returned after the floods, our school had been destroyed. Then we got a tent school, books, bags and everything else. Later, they made us this school building.”
  • “Teaching without corporal punishment is something new in this environment,” she notes. “Since children don’t get beaten up in school, parents are also learning that physical punishment is detrimental to a child’s upbringing.”
Teachers Without Borders

Effective policies give children in Angola a second chance to learn  | Back on Track - 0 views

  • Despite recent economic development, Angola remains a society deeply scarred by the still-recent civil war. The conflict caused massive internal displacement and refugee outflows, along with the collapse or destruction of key agricultural, health, education and transportation infrastructures, limiting the government’s ability to provide basic public services. This has resulted in a series of barriers to children enrolling and remaining in school.
  • Children living in emergencies or post-conflict contexts are often excluded from schooling or start school late. Their educational progress suffers and they lack the necessary tools for learning, leading them to drop out of school.
  • Many of today’s adolescents in Angola were born during the prolonged civil war and missed several years of schooling or never had the opportunity to attend primary school at all. These youth often do not fit in the primary school setting, and classrooms are already crowded with much younger children.
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  • UNICEF’s Accelerated Learning Programme, called Programa de Alfabetização e Aceleração Escolar (PAAE) in Angola, provides a second-chance learning opportunity for literacy, numeracy and life skills for adolescents through a condensed and adapted primary school curriculum, which can be completed in two-and-a-half years rather than the full six years of primary schooling. It thus encourages out-of-school adolescents to complete primary education, come back into the school system and continue to the second level.
  • “The Accelerated Learning Programme is a critical national strategy of the Government of Angola but what is more important is that this strategy is translated into a second chance and a renewal of hope for adolescents, and girls especially, to continue to learn and develop,” said Paulina Feijo, UNICEF Angola, Education Project Officer.
Teachers Without Borders

BBC NEWS | South Asia | The 'youngest headmaster in the world' - 0 views

  • At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He's a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.
  • Murshidabad in West Bengal
  • Raj Govinda school is government-run so it is free, all Babar Ali has to pay for is his uniform, his books and the rickshaw ride to get there. But still that means his family has to find around 1,800 rupees a year ($40, £25) to send him to school. In this part of West Bengal that is a lot of money. Many poor families simply can't afford to send their children to school, even when it is free.
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  • But Chumki is now getting an education, thanks to Babar Ali. The 16-year-old has made it his mission to help Chumki and hundreds of other poor children in his village. The minute his lessons are over at Raj Govinda school, Babar Ali doesn't stop to play, he heads off to share what he's learnt with other children from his village. At four o'clock every afternoon after Babar Ali gets back to his family home a bell summons children to his house. They flood through the gate into the yard behind his house, where Babar Ali now acts as headmaster of his own, unofficial school.
  • Now his afternoon school has 800 students, all from poor families, all taught for free. Most of the girls come here after working, like Chumki, as domestic helps in the village, and the boys after they have finished their day's work labouring in the fields.
  • Including Babar Ali there are now 10 teachers at the school, all, like him are students at school or college, who give their time voluntarily. Babar Ali doesn't charge for anything, even books and food are given free, funded by donations. It means even the poorest can come here.
  • The school has been recognised by the local authorities, it has helped increase literacy rates in the area, and Babar Ali has won awards for his work.
Konrad Glogowski

Children need a place to learn - YouTube - 0 views

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    UNICEF correspondent Chris Niles reports on efforts to ensure that Syrian children can continue their education amidst conflict.
Teachers Without Borders

Experts Tackling Education in Africa | Africa | English - 0 views

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    How do you fix education in Africa, where students have far fewer opportunities than their counterparts in other parts of the world? There are two schools of thought on the subject: do you invest bottom up? Or top down? The statistics are hard to ignore.  Sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest-ranked region in the world on the United Nations' education development index. The U.N. education agency (UNESCO) says a quarter of all children in sub-Saharan Africa do not go to school, and account for 43 percent of the world's out-of-school children. Meantime, the African Union (AU) has said the continent will need to recruit more than 2 million new teachers by 2015, just three years from now. While the U.N. and the AU agree on the scope of the education challenges facing the continent, they are from two separate schools of thought on how to remedy the situation.
Teachers Without Borders

Thailand takes first steps on long road to inclusive mainstream education | Global development | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Cultural barriers continue to deny disabled children access to schools, but progress on inclusive education is finally gathering
  • The strict hierarchy of Thai society means the drive for inclusive education needs strong commitment from both politicians and school leaders. In the past decade, there has been significant political progress in moves to implement a system that ensures children with disabilities have access to mainstream schools. However, with cultural barriers and resistance from some headteachers, the journey towards fully inclusive education has only just begun.
  • Some headteachers Lennon spoke to were amenable to the concept of inclusive education, but didn't feel they had the resources or training to implement it effectively. Others, with decades of experience of working in special schools, felt this institutional model was more suitable.
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  • However, many headteachers in Vorapanya's study cited the Buddhist belief in the need for compassion as a reason they support inclusive education. Meanprasat private school in Bangkok, which combines western-style "child-centric" learning with a Buddhist ethos of moral ethics and regular meditation, is recognised as a national leader in integrated educational practices. In total, 130 of its 1,300 students are disabled. The school's philosophy is that children with disabilities "should have the chance to mix with society and be accepted by it". More than 5,000 teachers visit the school annually and attend workshops held to help spread good practice.
  • Nanthaporn (Nuey) Nanthamongkol, a six-year-old girl with Down's syndrome, was due to be sent to a distant boarding school before he intervened. "Without our work, Nuey would have been separated from her parents, sent to a school 80km away," says Lennon. "For kids with Down's syndrome, this is the worst possible thing you could do."
  • State schools, however, which have much less funding, have been described by Vorapanya as having "woefully insufficient resources" to implement inclusive education properly. Headteachers have complained that while schools can now access a minimum of 2,000 baht (approximately £41) funding for each disabled child, this is not enough to cover the required resources or training expenses. Another problem is that this funding can only be given if the child has been officially certified with a disability. Teachers have reported that some parents do not want this social stigma or are fearful that this certification will lead to discrimination.Despite the significant challenges, Lennon is optimistic. "We are making great strides," he says. "If we keep doing good, the results will surely follow."
Teachers Without Borders

Palestinian pupils at UN schools form group image as dove of peace - 0 views

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    25 November 2011 - Hundreds of children from United Nations-run schools in the Jericho area of the occupied Palestinian territory today created a massive aerial image jointly with the renowned artist John Quigley to send out a peace message to the world. The children, who attend schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), gathered at the foot of the Mount of Temptation, outside Jericho, to form the shape of the Peace Dove created by the artist Pablo Picasso. They were directed by Mr. Quigley, who has created mass images from groups of people for over a quarter of a century.
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