WUNRN
AFGHANISTAN: Training Female Teachers to
Increase Girls’ Enrollment in Afghanistan. BESST Program ( USAID and Creative
Associates International)
In
a small room, just off the main hallway of classrooms, five young girls whisper
to one another. Dressed in black and enveloped in white head scarves, these
students represent the first position-holders in grades 4 through 12 of Aqcha
Girls School in Afghanistan, which serves more than 2,300 girls. As they
recollected their experiences from a year earlier, before the Building
Education Support Systems for Teachers (BESST) project got underway, all the
students pointed out how vastly different their learning experience is now that
BESST has trained their teachers.
Although in some parts of Afghan society educating girls is condemned, BESST is
helping these teachers to support and encourage the girls to follow their
ambitions and goals. Mawlooda, a seventh grader, said that last year, “many
times when I would tell my teacher that I wanted to be a doctor, she would tell
me, ‘That is not possible.’ But teachers need to be more supportive of our
goals or we will stop believing in them too.”
Last winter, the teachers and principal at Aqcha Girls School participated in a
training carried out under BESST which introduced them to alternative ways of
instruction and interacting with students. Funded by the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) and implemented by Creative Associates
International, Inc., BESST trainings emphasizes pedagogy and methods that
encourage teachers to foster child-centered and flexible educational
environments. Since one of the project’s primary long-term goals is to increase
the number of Afghan girls in schools, BESST’s teacher training package was
designed to promote gender equity in the classroom – in part by increasing the
number of qualified female teachers and raising girls’ school attendance.
The innovations in BESST training methodology are meant to improve the quality
of education of every student. Given the experiences articulated by students
like Mawlooda — and the limited prospects often faced by females in Afghanistan
— these Afghan girls stand to gain a great deal from teachers employing these
teaching methods. Working with the Ministry of Education to improve the quality
of education throughout the country, the BESST project is taking steps to
ensure that Afghan girls benefit from its current interventions and that the
educational environment being created fosters the confidence and supports the
ambitions of future generations of Afghan women as well.
BESST was designed so that the proportion of trainers hired within a district
is roughly equal to the proportion of female teachers in that district. Dwight
Lloyd, Teacher Education advisor to BESST, explained: “We want more Afghan
girls receiving a quality education. That means, among other things, there
needs to be more female teachers—to make both girls and their families more
comfortable sending them to school,” he said. “And to make sure there are more
female teachers, we need to hire more female trainers.”
The BESST project, designed to train and support more than 50,000 teachers by
2010, works in three main areas: teacher education through district-level
trainings in methodology, development of national credentialing systems for
both teacher and school managers, and distance
================================================================
To leave the list, send your request by email to: wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com.
Thank you.