Nepal School Of The Month Award kicks off.

This month sees the launch of our "school of the month" award in which we donate 1000 exercise books to the school that is trying hardest to implement the tools and techniques learned on our Foundation Course. For April we chose Siddi Mangal school in the village of Siddipur on the outskirts of Kathmandu beyond Lalitpur. This is a rural community with families and culture dominated by farming and brick factories.

Two weeks ago we took some representatives from one of our institutional donors to visit the school and there was no doubt that the Head Teacher and her staff were trying hard to improve the quality of education in the school in a variety of ways. They deserve their award and the picture shows Babita, our Senior Education Consultant, congratulating Indira the school Head Teacher at our offices in Ekhalaku, Patan.

Our first books on improving quality education

There are some ideas which come from other people which are just too good to be ignored or not copied. One such example is the P4C Pocketbook written by Jason Buckley (The Philosophy Man) available from Amazon or via his website at www.thephilosophyman.com 

It is so good we have "copied" the style and format of the booklet in writing two of our own to supplement the teacher training we offer in Kathmandu. The first of these, Values For Children, is a teachers guide to applying the P4C technique to children learning about values, and also encourages a school to create its own set of values representing citizenship of the school. Naturally, although the booklet is in English it is written specifically for a Nepalese audience and supports what we cover on our courses. The second booklet, Facilitation Technique For Child Centred Learning also is for Nepali teachers and supports the learning on our Foundation course. It describes all the essential items of preparation (lesson planning) as well as three steps to facilitating a child centred lesson; 1.Encourage participation, 2.Experience the topic, 3.Review the learning. The booklets are distributed on all of our free courses in Kathmandu.

A miscarriage of support when most needed?

The final day of Foundation 7 was a few minutes from starting when the door opened and in walked a teacher and a very small child. We were all speechless for a few moments for two reasons; firstly that someone had turned up and had brought their 5 year old child with them for the day; and secondly that the previous day we had been concerned that this female teacher had not arrived and that our enquiries had discovered that the lady had suffered a miscarriage!

And now, here she was arriving for the last day of the course, what to do!

We sat her down and gently asked what had happened and why was she here. Overall what she told is is truly shocking; she had suffered a miscarriage but really wanted to complete the course so she could get a certificate, she asked her mother in law to look after her 5 year old son so she could come on the course, but her mother in law refused! So, undeterred she struggled in to the course and brought her son with her to ask if he could stay while she learned, all very tearful too!

(Our solution was to say that she could go home and rest, look after her son for the day, then return on the next Foundation course in a couple of weeks time for the last 2 days to complete it and get her certificate)

This episode unfortunately shows how some women are often treated in Nepal, though there are far worse stories than this from a male dominated society. In the eyes of the mother in law this poor woman has been downgraded because of the miscarriage and is virtually persona-non-grata. That's why her mother in law wouldn't offer any help or support. The least we can do is to publicise what happened.

Quality education comes to Jhapa district

Not too long ago we were asked by Nepal's Ministry of Education to spread our teacher training to remote village areas, a task that we would find absolutely impossible due to our young staff being based in Kathmandu, a clear logistical issue of not being able to do any follow up work with schools, and a donor condition of funding that our work is concentrated in the capital city.

However we have now started to try a small experiment by inviting 2 teachers from any remote village school to attend each Foundation course which they must then take back and cascade to other teachers.

The first two teachers from Noble English School, Jhapa District in far Eastern Nepal have just completed the course and one of them has written some notes for me:

"My name is Kripa Regmi and I am an English teacher in nursery and lower kindergarten. Our school is located in Bistamode, it is very small and up to class 5. We have about 100 students, mostly the children of labourers from tea plantations. Their economic condition is very bad.

Our Principal manages the school on his own without any government support.

I have attended the NSA Foundation course with my friend Gita Sharma Regmi because we both wanted good teacher training. Our Principal found the training on the internet and asked for help.

I have learned many good teaching skills from the course, especially about child centred education which we have never heard of before. I really liked it because it is activity based learning, and we learn about values, quality education and also physical and psychological things.

We will try our best to implement this in our school and we are very thankful to NSA and Brian sir for helping us"