Teachers Without Borders

USHANBE -- Tajikistan's Education Ministry has ordered an Iranian school under supervision of the Iranian Embassy in Dushanbe to dismiss all Tajik and Afghan pupils, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports.

Tanzania and Burundi, for instance, have recorded a 99 per cent enrolment rate into the first grade of primary school.The pertinent question is: How effective are these funds in retaining children in school? Once enrolled, how long can the pupils be expected to last in the education system, and how many years of schooling, on average, are actually attained by East African pupils?

However, East Africa is faring badly a 9.1 years, equivalent to a pupil completing primary school, but dropping out of high school. The average number of school years actually completed regionally was a mere 4.7 years. The scenario is particularly dismal in Burundi, where on average pupils completed only 2.7 years of school.

According to the Global Education Digest 2010 published by Unesco, in the late 1990s, developing countries began to recover some of the educational ground lost in the 1980s, when enrolments stagnated or even declined in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In fact, the pace of progress accelerated since 2000 and if trends between 2000 and 2008 continue, the increase in school life expectancy in the current decade will be three times the level achieved in the 1970s.In sub-Saharan Africa, school life expectancy nearly doubled from 4.4 years to 8.4 years in the past 30 years. Despite this progress, the region has the lowest number of school years — almost half of the number of years in North America and Western Europe (16.0 years).

What factors influence whether or not teachers trained in peace education actually teach about peace?

It involves getting the adult students to express their concerns about violence in their lives, presenting an analysis of different peace strategies, and arguing that teaching about alternatives to violence is an effective way to deal with the threats of violence both in schools and in the broader community.

The objectives of the course are to explore the role of violence in the lives of students, to consider the effect of violence upon educational practices, to examine how peace education can help deal with violence, and to provide examples of peace education activities and curricular ideas.

Nairobi — The Ministry of Education lost some Sh318 million meant for free primary education from 2005 to 2009 through dubious imprests and outright fraud, a government audit report says.

Initially, Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta said the Internal Audit Department (IAD) had determined that Sh8.4 billion did not meet the forensic audit test, but the figure has since been scaled down after the Education ministry provided documentation for Sh3.5 billion.

The IAD revelations have prompted the international development groups that were funding the Free Primary Education Programme to call for prosecution of those responsible.

OECD’s influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which gathers information on education systems, schools, families and students through surveys of school leaders, students and parents is launched, but where – asks EI – is the voice of teachers? Despite the triennial report claiming ‘good educational policy is informed educational policy in which all responsible actors (policy makers, school principals, teachers, students and parents), are provided with the knowledge that they need to make good educational decisions,’ EI cannot understand why the perspective of teachers, who are the first actors to be called upon to implement education policy in schools, continues to be ignored. EI has long argued that a questionnaire to survey the views of teachers in those schools that are sampled for the study will generate data that can augment the views of students and parents, and provide a robust understanding of the learning context in which findings can be interpreted.

The continuing exclusion of teacher voice from this report is a missed opportunity and undermines PISA’s aim of offering informed policy guidance to governments, or using the results to show what countries can learn from each other to set and achieve measurable goals.”

Yet despite its overwhelming success with exams, China’s education system still lags in a number of areas, not the least of which is its ability to teach analytical thinking. Focusing almost solely on preparation for benchmarking tests and entrance exams, the Chinese classrooms I visited in my previous work in China offered few interactive learning and problem-solving opportunities, and student-led extra-curricular activities remain relatively rare. Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.

Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.

The program’s innovative curriculum provides a fresh departure from conventional lecture-based learning, yet it also builds upon the requirements of Chinese university entrance exams to ensure buy-in from students and teachers who know their success depends on exam performance. Within the collaborative atmosphere of these student newsrooms – in which student writing is not graded by the teacher, but is critiqued in peer discussions – students are gaining a rare opportunity to be a part of a cooperative and interactive learning environment and to voice their own opinions about issues in their community.

GANVIE, Benin, 16 December 2010 – In the past two months, Benin has experienced some of its worst floods since the 1960s. And now, students in the flood zone are returning to school under harsh conditions.

"In this classroom, we have children from two classrooms. Each of them had already around 90 children before the floods, " explains David Houngbadji, the Ganvie school's director. "Now in this very room, we teach a class of 185 children. We don't even have the benches to seat them all."

Most of the floodwaters have now receded and the United Nations, along with the government of Benin, is putting in place a long-term response to the crisis. Yet 105,000 school children across Benin are still unable to attend school on a regular basis. In some places, the classrooms are still unreachable.