Work

I am working for the Gondar Teacher Education College and my job is to set up a structure for ensuring in-service teacher training for 52 1st cycle and 36 2nd cycle schools and….

The newly springing up ABE schools that are an attempt to help the Ethiopian government meet it’s target of primary education for all by 2012.

I work in the Cluster Co-ordinating Unit which has two full time workers: Meleshew who is the hub of the whole thing and Mulageta who makes resources from nothing so that schools can set up ‘model classrooms’ and encourage active learning methodology.

My predecessor put in an enormous amount of work in developing a CCU committee made up of Teacher Trainers from the College and they are going to run a training day next Friday. This is a very exciting development because if it’s successful then part of the work of VSO will have been achieved e.g. that the input is sustainable. Having only been there a week, it’s much too early for me to comment. I haven’t even visited a school yet.

But a meeting I had with a young woman gave me a sense of the scale of the problem. Gondar Teacher Training College has been at the forefront of trying to redress the gender imbalance in schools and so appointed three very young women, top of their class as lecturers to provide role models for female students. Hiwat, the young woman referred to lectures in chemistry. She came to talk to me about some lesson observations she had done. The science teacher had read from the textbook and the children had written notes. She discussed with him about how he could use active teaching methods in his lesson. He pointed out that the school has a lab but no lab technician – he has no time to prepare even a demonstration experiment and even if he did, he has no idea what the chemicals in the lab are and they are probably out of date and dangerous. Add to that a class of 75 pupils….. and the scale of the problem begins to look insurmountable.

Undaunted, Hiwat has negotiated borrowing a lab technician from the college to accompany her next Friday when she runs a workshop for science teachers so that she can demonstrate using a demonstration experiment.