Fiza Shah, the Executive Director of Developments in Literacy (DIL), has just returned from a site visit to the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where DIL is working to enroll and provide a quality education to over 1000 girls. When she speaks about her recent trip, her voice immediately becomes animated. “You should see the difference in these girls,” she says. “Six months ago, they were too shy to show me their faces. Now they are running up to me with their homework to show me what they have learned. They are so proud of their accomplishments that each girl wanted to be the first to show me her notebook.”
For the past year, DIL has been opening schools, often in such humble settings as the rooftops of community members’ houses, while also training teachers and establishing local committees to manage the new schools. Throughout the year, communities in the North West Frontier Province have become increasingly committed to their children’s education, and like their students, the teachers have gained confidence as well. With training provided by DIL, teachers now have the tools they need to provide engaging and interactive lessons to their young students.
One of the main components of the initial training sessions included refocusing lesson plans and coursework, attendance monitoring, and classroom management. Additional sessions featured lessons on using games to foster learning and teaching children about hygiene and health.
Returning to their classrooms, the teachers have become more involved in their work and excited about implementing the new ideas and methods they learned. Their infectious enthusiasm has been demonstrated in many ways, fueling--and challenging--their students’ creativity.
At a community-based school (CBS) in Qadir Abad, one teacher who participated in the training sessions fashioned cloth bags for her students to carry their books in, hoping to encourage increased class involvement and spark creative thinking. She now conducts drawing classes twice weekly, and displays her students’ work using homemade wheat flour glue to tack them securely to the wall. Inspired by her new perspective, the teacher wrote a poem in Pushto (a local language of the region) about a girl who is late for school and eager to attend class.
Other teachers have also exhibited innovative ways to improve their classroom environment and foster learning. A teacher at another CBS in Nishan Banda used her own money to buy an educational tool to help her students learn math. Another teacher at CBS Minglawar has prepared flash cards in Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) and Pushto to help her students learn more effectively. These initiatives are a clear indication of a change in the educators’ perspective: that effective student learning involves active, caring teaching.
Students have truly benefited from these changes. Through the implementation of arts-related activities such skits, role-play games, poetry and drawing, students have exhibited better social skills and attitudes, and teacher-student relationships have vastly improved.
For people living in these communities, that one year ago they did not even have schools for girls, let alone trained teachers, is a reality now far removed from the daily lives of DIL’s confident schoolgirls and educators.
