teachers

The situation is grave: 12 million children in Pakistan have never attended school (two-thirds of them girls), Pakistani teachers killed for educating young women, and the bombing of girls’ schools. Female students have been targeted for attacks including the well-known shooting of Malala Yousafzai and her peers.

The Rights and Wrongs of Early Literacy Efforts in One Developing Country

Guest blog by Amy Awbrey Pallangyo

Forty-three years ago, IREX was created to help advance exchanges, not just of people, but of ideas. As we celebrate IREX’s founding, we honor its original charge by continuing to bring people together, to link institutions both within and across countries and regions, and to host events where the latest thinking and research is shared with the world.

Language transcends borders. That’s why I began studying Arabic six years ago.

But when I met with female activists in a café in Fez yesterday, we used three (plus) languages to discuss challenges facing youth in Morocco. I asked questions in classical Arabic or fus-ha, and they answered in French with interludes in the local Moroccan dialect — an amalgam of Berber, fus-ha, and French. I summarized in fus-ha what I had pieced together, and they confirmed my accuracy with nods and giggles.

Trends in education, or education fads, come and go with each school year: block schedules, the small schools movement, character education, et cetera. Some trends are hot for a few years and then fizzle; others become an authentic and essential component of everyday teaching and learning.

Individual initiative is often the small spark that incites change within a school community. Raphael Aidoo-Taylor of Ghana is an alumnus of the Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (TEA), which equips teachers with teaching methodologies, strategies for classroom management, and a broader understanding of the culture and people of the United States.

I arrived in Jakarta late last week for an alumni conference for the Indonesian and Malaysian teachers who have completed the International Leaders in Education Program. All of these teachers studied at US universities for a semester, learning new student-centered teaching methodologies to implement in their home classrooms.

During September-November 2010, sixty-four teachers from 21 different countries came to the US for a six-week professional development program.

During  2009, I volunteered as an English and computer literacy teacher at Louverture Cleary School in Santo, Haiti, through The Haitian Project. I have continued my involvement with Haitian teachers over the past year by working on the Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (TEA) at IREX. Needless to say, last January’s earthquake came as a shock.

This week Secretary Clinton spoke to Balkan youth about the importance of cross-cultural exchange programs. “We should have more exchange programs with…other places in the world so that you can tell the story of Kosovo,” she told students in Pristina. Reports of Clinton's visit to Bosnia and Kosovo appeared alongside accounts of the Chilean miners emerging from their subterranean tunnel.