As children donned their backpacks and prepared to head back to school for a new term, the Nuru education team prepared to resume outreach efforts; unbeknownst to us the Kenya National Union of Teachers quietly prepared to launch a countrywide strike. September 5^th, teachers mounted a strike demanding the government respond to issues of understaffing in schools and the lack of full-time, contract employment. In an article for AfricaNews, a representative of the Kenya National Union of Teachers said, “Treasury says it’s looking for over six billion shillings in a week’s time to solve the teachers standoff. We know the Government has asked for a week to look for money, they should work very fast. Our main aim is to withdraw labour and let it bite.”

The strike affected all public schools across the country and was particularly disruptive to the older students who should be preparing for their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exams on October 18th and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations which are scheduled for November. Instead of reviewing the syllabus in preparation for the exams, those students were sitting idly in classrooms.

In our district, many teachers showed up to schools and required pupils to be present, though they refused to teach until the terms of the strike were met. Other teachers did not show up to schools and left students to study on their own. Some teachers tried to stay and teach, but were threatened by lorry loads of teachers who would come in to chase the teachers out of school. Our team stalled all programs so as not to jeopardize our relationships with teachers. The Ministry advised us that running Learning Center programs in our district would be perceived as undermining the potency of the strike and could create tension for our team as well as hostility when schools reopened.

Teachers’ demands for improved student teacher ratios in the classrooms have become more insistent since the introduction of universal free primary school in 2003 and the steady rise in enrollment since. An article in the Washington Post addressed the understaffing issue by saying, “The union wants the government to give full-time jobs to 18,000 teachers hired on temporary contracts and hire an additional 9,040 teachers.” It also said, “Some 79,000 teachers are needed to reach the internationally recommended teacher to student ratio of one teacher to 35 students. Kenya’s public schools see an average of 50 students for every teacher, though some classes have only one teacher for 100 pupils. The union projects a shortfall of 115,000 teachers in the next couple of years as the population increases.”

The issue is compounded by allegations that money intended to alleviate these strains on the education system has been reallocated to defense. The Washinton Post quoted Head of the Kenya National Union for Teachers, Wilson Sossion, as saying, “Parliament had allocated around $53 million for hiring more teachers last week, but the ministry of finance diverted the money to the ministry of defense, even though the ministry had not requested it.” In the article, they also indicated that “’…taxes will have to be increased if the teachers are to be hired,’ said Joseph Kinyua, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Finance. ‘Spiraling food and fuel prices are already causing great hardship for many Kenyans.’”

A week after the strike was initiated, the government is said to have made a deal with the union to move more than 18,000 contract tutors to permanent positions and hire an additional 5,000 or more permanent teachers in January. According to an article on AllAfrica.com, “The agreement says the government will come up with a long-term strategy to address the shortage of teachers in the country. It is estimated that there is a shortage of about 75,000 teachers countrywide in public primary and secondary schools. The development of a long-term strategy, together with the employment of nursery school teachers, will be factored in the 2012/13 budget.”

As a result of the resolution brokered on September 9th, teachers will return to schools and we can resume our outreach programs. We hope that in January, the promised teachers will be hired and will help to establish a more manageable student/teacher ratio in the schools. This solution will not be a silver bullet though and we will need to continue our push to strengthen literacy.

During the lull caused by the strike, we were able meet with the local chiefs and secure their support of our plan to scale to two new sub-locations in the coming weeks. They have also committed to rally the elders and help us reach the families that do not send their children to school. Our goal is to work on educating those parents and families on the value of education and encourage them to send their children to the Learning Center to take advantage of programs and tutoring there.

We are also preparing for the upcoming transition of western staff. The education team will welcome in a new fellow next week and after a month of training and transition, she will take over things here on the ground and I will head back to the States to support the program from afar. I will also be transitioning our income generating activity, the dairy farm. In the next post, I’ll fill you in on what the transition entails and provide an introduction to our fellow. I’ll also update you on our progress with the outreach and learning center programs and provide you with some exciting updates about the dairy project. Stay tuned…

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Since opening, attendance at the learning center has steadily hovered around 300 – 350 youth. Schools are preparing to reopen in September, and they have just opened their doors to offer students remedial attention in the form of “ tuition.” This week many of the kids from the learning center returned to school for tuition, leaving us with about 145 kids per day at the center. Based on our interactions, we have found these kids to be among the most vulnerable. They are the ones whose parents cannot afford the minimal fee for tuition and are often in and out of school depending on the demand for school fees or exam fees. As a result, their literacy levels are very low in both KiSwahili and English.

In this group, we have found many 9 – 10 year olds who are unable to tell you the sound that goes with a certain letter. They have trouble reading 3 letter words and seriously struggle with reading comprehension. To address the severity of these issues, the team has emphasized phonics in concert with experiential learning and writing workshops. Reinforcing concepts using these different approaches has proven effective so far and we are working with the Monitoring and Evaluation team to schedule a baseline of literacy at the learning center so we can track the change made over time.

Experiential learning has been a great tool to engage youth in active learning. The team members have conducted several activities that have inspired new curiosity among the students and have clearly helped with retention, while accelerating learning for those youth who seldom or never go to school.

This the past week, Sabora led an activity centered on plants and flowers. He read a book about leaves and flowers with the students and then took them for a walk down the path outside the learning center and asked them to find their own interesting flowers. When each child had a flower in hand, they returned to the center and learned about the different parts – leaves, stem, petals, etc. They learned the various words and talked about the sounds that the letters in each word make. This exercise was really focused on learning vowel sounds, but when done in such a creative way, became a much more dynamic activity.

Munsi also tried his hand at this type of experiential learning. He was using a chart to teach the kids about insects and mammals. He had them focus on the grasshopper and each catch one in the bushes surrounding the center. I was surprised how quickly and effortlessly the grasshoppers were found and caught. With a grasshopper in each small hand, the kids embarked on learning to identify and spell the parts of the grasshopper – legs, eyes, etc. After releasing the panicked but intact grasshoppers, the kids went to the chalkboards and drew their own grasshoppers and identified the different parts of their drawing using their new words.

The team joined forces on Wednesday and surprised the kids with paper planes as they returned from lunch. As kids crowded around to learn how to fold their own planes, others launched a chaotic dogfight that raged outside the learning center until the lunch period came to an end. The facilitators immediately moved the kids into writing workshops focused on airplanes and the sky. The kids wrote new words on their planes and left at the end of the day with their planes in hand and beaming smiles on their faces.

The power of these activities lies not just in connecting an experience with a concept or learning opportunity. Equally powerful is the engaging these kids in the learning process – making learning fun. For many, the repetitive teaching style employed here deadens their interest and loses their attention. Overcrowded classrooms, poor student/teacher ratios and a lack of resources compound that problem, enabling the students to easily fall through the cracks.

The vulnerable kids we’re seeing at the learning center right now – those not attending tuition and those who are likely to miss many days throughout the term – are responding especially well to this experiential and creative learning style. Their curiosity and energy is being harnessed and we’re already seeing them shed their shy, inhibited and self-conscious layers in favor of confidence, inquisitiveness and willingness to contribute. Their trust for the team is also enabling this shift.

The other day it rained heavily right at the end of the day. The kids all took shelter in the learning center and as they waited in the hall for the rain to subside, Vicky and I listened as they pointed to the pictures of the team members on the wall and went from one to the other commenting on their strengths. Sabora smiles as he teachers, they said. The teachers never cane us. George reads with you and helps you learn new words using the dictionary. Pamela, Vicky, Munsi, Moses, Naomi, Esther… they went through the facilitators one by one pointing and adding their own thoughts about the strengths of each.

Watching the kids bridge the gap between learner and teacher was pretty amazing. There is such a divide between those two groups in the schools and it often prevents students from feeling comfortable asking questions, expressing new or creative ideas, or admitting that a concept is not clear or fully understood. Our ability to bridge that gap will help us be a true resource for these kids, during our outreach programs and at the learning center. Hopefully we will be able to demonstrate the impact of this approach to the teachers here and help them as they make the shift to be more accessible to their students. In the meantime, we will continue to work on inspiring a passion for learning, reading and writing by infusing our lessons with creativity and supportive attention.

Monday, August 1^st marked the grand opening of the Nuru learning center. Schools are currently closed for break and usually youth are idle or put to work during this time. Our goal is to harness that idle time and provide a productive, engaging learning environment.

53 children arrived early that Monday morning curious to see what the learning center had to offer. The team conducted a series of programs throughout the day including writing workshops, creative workshops and free tutoring. The children’s library was also open and staffed with facilitators who circulated throughout the room helping youth deconstruct words and understand concepts, reading to and with them, and teaching them how to use a children’s dictionary to find words they weren’t familiar with.

By Tuesday, the attendance had already risen to 143. The group was diverse, with youth representing a number of villages, ages and learning abilities. Wednesday’s attendance grew to over 200 children, and Thursday’s attendance peaked at 304.

Though the team has been busy responding to the volume of demand, we are also focused on continuous innovation and development. We are working to ensure the team does not fall into old teaching habits – those that emphasize repetition, memory, dictation and create a distance between teacher and student. We want to maintain momentum and continue to hold the attention of the youth as these programs become more familiar.

A main source of this momentum is the creativity that is infused into the workshops. Participants are writing and illustrating their own stories, they are doing role plays to act out new words, and they are using clay to model new concepts. This type of participation coupled with adult attention is foreign to the students and their enthusiasm is evident in the way they concentrate on their writing and reading, ask for help and acknowledgement from the teachers, and proudly display their work on the walls, to their friends and to parents at the end of the day.

Four days in, the team already reported seeing progress in the children’s retention of words and concepts. To better understand where youth are when they first come to us and what type of progress they are making as they participate in our programs, we are preparing to conduct an assessment of a number of youth who frequent the center using the Uwezo literacy assessment tool. This assessment will provide us with a baseline from which to monitor change and progress over time.  We are using the same tool to assess change that stems from our outreach program. So far, we have assessed 100% of students in 4 of the 6 schools engaged in our outreach program. Once we have completed the assessments, we will compile the results and share our baseline findings.

Parents, teachers and schools administrators have also voiced their support for the learning center. We are rallying the parents to help with daily chores like bringing water from the well for use in the latrines and hand washing station. We are also asking for their support in planting a demonstration garden that we can use to provide lunch for the children participating in full day programs. Teachers will be coming next week to make use of the teacher resource library, a small collection of books ranging from lesson planning guides to books on child development and psychology. We hope that access to these resources and observation of student focused teaching methods will help fuel a transition in pedagogy over time.

The learning center has introduced new challenges for our team. Some of those include:

• High number of kids with little to no ability to read or write in need of significant personal attention and a limited number of staff to respond to this need.
• Logistical issues such as heavy use of latrines by young children who are not used to using a facility and the need to maintain cleanliness and sanitation of the facility without a staff member leaving a workshop to mop or bring water from the well.
• Loss of supplies due to students inadvertently or intentionally pocketing them.
• Very young children attending with older siblings and us wanting to avoid becoming a babysitting facility; there is a need to reiterate the parameters of the center to the parents and children.
• Preventing children and parents from treating the center as a replacement for the schools once they reopen in September.
• Challenging staff capacity as they manage the daily operation of the learning center and face the need to prepare for outreach and scaling in September.

The team is working to find sustainable solutions to these challenges while anticipating future challenges. We are incorporating and testing solutions daily but will need to continue this process to prevent stagnation and keep the center and its programs dynamic and engaging.

Schools are on break for the whole of August and when they reopen, we will resume outreach efforts. The learning center will be available to out-of-school youth and will be an after school resource and tutoring center for others. We are also considering opening the center on the weekends when schools are in session. Our goal is to provide as much literacy-focused saturation to youth as possible by going to them (outreach) and providing a platform for them to come to us (learning center).

I look forward to updating you on our progress and the center’s evolution as well as fill you in on our plans to grow the outreach programs and reach the remaining 7 schools in our area this September. Stay tuned.

The Education Team has successfully launched the outreach program in 6 schools throughout Nyametaburo and Nyangiti sub-locations. For the first few weeks, the outreach efforts consisted of reading hours – a program designed to stimulate listening comprehension, increase vocabulary, establish a love of reading and create an open environment in which the kids can explore books. Continue Reading…

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

May has found me back in the project on the brink of launching the outreach program. We have finalized a schedule that takes the outreach programs to every grade level in every public school in our area twice monthly. We will have a consistent presence in the schools without causing any interruptions in the school schedules or curricula. Continue Reading…

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.