We have tried a new action plan this term. Instead of daily visits to different schools we’ve switched to spending a whole week in each school. The rationale was that we would be able to work with more teachers and have a greater impact. Though we were unsure whether the other teachers would be keen to work with us, it was exciting to be trying something new.
Less exciting has been the early mornings this change has led to. 6am and still in darkness I lift my mosquito net to be met by a swarm of the little critters eagerly clinging to the outside, waiting for a stray bit of flesh to press up against the net. Apart from malarial hosts, the morning routine in my house is depressingly similar to my early UK teaching starts, but as soon as I get my motorbike out on the open road and the golden early morning sunlight casts my shadow long onto the road beside me, things begin to look a bit better. Actually it’s pretty cold in the mornings on my bike at the moment. Fleece-tastic all the way!
I’ve had a particularly good week recently at one of the schools. Pulling up to the school was always entertaining as I know the staff quite well now so there were always jokes around testing my Kiswahili, which always leads to a lot of laughter at my expense!
Let’s get this party started with some super fun planning!
Anyway, I digress. I started by having a planning session with a Kiswahili teacher and I asked Esther, one of my ‘focus’ teachers, if she would join us to help with ideas. We worked really well together as a three and soon another teacher was requesting to join us. Clearly Esther and I can make planning so exciting that others feel as though they’re missing out! All the teachers were very positive. The lesson went really well, with the children in the class working hard to fill in the gaps with the correct conjunction and also coming up with their own examples.
A hangman craze sweeps the region
Further to this success I am responsible for a hangman craze that is sweeping through the school in Kineng’ene. I worked with teacher Mr Thomas and we used this game to help his form 1 Geography class with their vocabulary. The children loved it, but Mr Thomas was positively ecstatic. After a little while of leading the game from the front I got the students to come up and do the words. Great fun!
Mr Thomas was so taken with this game that he walked straight into the staff room at break and made his colleagues play. They all loved it too and played all break. Shamefully I was in effect responsible for most of them being late to their next lessons but on the positive side, with any luck, this ‘fun’ might find its way into the classroom.
The future looks brighter for children thanks to Whatsapp
It’s not just little me in Tanzania sharing my skills in schools to improve education; VSO have volunteers all over the world all working towards this common goal. In India, the team have come up with a really innovative way of helping education reach the most rural areas of the country. Although there is an impressively high school enrolment rate there, the amount actually being learned is a cause for concern: 40% of children who complete four years of primary schooling in India still do not learn to read and write.
This learning gap is of course a huge problem – very similarly to Tanzania, many children leaving schools in India face a competitive world and by lacking basic literacy skills, it heartbreakingly excludes them from all but the lowest-paid jobs. The situation in rural districts is particularly bad, where there are fewer resources. What even the remotest communities in India do have, however, is mobile phones.
VSO set out to find out whether sending teachers daily language lesson plans via SMS and Whatsapp could improve the literacy of pupils in the rural district of Bundi, Rajasthan – with astonishing results. The seven-week trial involved 35 instalments in stories of fewer than 160 characters each being sent to teachers, as well as audio and song-based teaching aids through Whatsapp. They were written by fellow VSO volunteer Alison Gee and became gradually more complex with each passing week.
Bright minds ready to learn in India (©VSO/Gitika Saksena)
At the end of the seven-week experiment, 63.1% of children in schools with the new method of teaching could read at word and sentence level, compared to 41.7% in schools which hadn’t been part of the new teaching. These achievements were attained at the cost of just 10 paise (0.1p) per child.
This project was such a success, that it is now being trialled in the rural highlands of Papua New Guinea, and more volunteers are looking at adapting it to share lesson plans and teaching aids for other academic subjects cheaply and efficiently. I look forward to keeping you posted on this exciting new development in VSO’s work – and well done to fellow volunteer Alison for helping so many children in India already!
A very merry Christmas from Tanzania
Thank you so much for your support over 2015, I hope you are enjoying the Jennings’ adventure! Being away from my family over the festive season has meant your wonderful messages have brought even more support, which I have shared with the other VSO volunteers here as we celebrate Christmas. You all make me realise how important my time here is, so thank you. I hope you have a very happy New Year, and look forward to catching up soon.
Best wishes,
Paul
