Communication in Education

From SOUL BEAT AFRICA - where communication and media are central to AFRICA's social and economic development

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Welcome to the first Soul Beat newsletter of 2009. We look forward to supporting the work of your organisation by sharing information and encouraging interaction and debate around issues related to communication and media for development.

The Soul Beat newsletter currently has 14,042 subscribers from across Africa and globally. Over the past twelve months (January 5 2008 - January 4 2009), there were 2,529,192 user sessions across The CI network of websites (these include the Soul Beat Africa website, The Communication Initiative global website and the Communication Initiative-Latin America website).

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This issue of The Soul Beat contains summaries of programme experiences, strategic thinking documents, evaluations, and materials related to promoting access to and improving the quality of schools and education in Africa.

If you would like your organisation's communication work or research and resource documents to be featured on the Soul Beat Africa website and in The Soul Beat newsletters, please contact soulbeat@comminit.com

To subscribe to The Soul Beat, click here or send an email to soulbeat@comminit.com with a subject of "subscribe".

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SUPPORTING TEACHERS

1. Teacher Training in Africa - Africa
Working with BBC African Productions, BBC Swahili Service, and Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA), this media campaign broadcast two weeks of radio news reports, documentaries, and discussion programmes about the importance of teacher training in Africa. The programmes, which were broadcast during June 2007, were designed to promote informed debate among teachers, educationalists, parents, policy makers, and the wider community on teaching, and how the goal of "Education for All" can be achieved in Africa by 2015. In addition to radio programming, a special Teachers in Africa website was created on the BBC Network Africa website, containing stories and views from the programmes.
Contact BBC World Service Trust through their website.

2. Our Future: Preparing to Teach Sexuality and Life-skills: An Awareness Training Manual for Teachers and Community Workers
This manual is part of the "Our Future" series of pupils' and teachers' books. These resources are designed for teachers and anyone else interested in teaching sexuality and life skills in the community, such as peer educators, health practitioners, traditional and religious leaders, and parents. This manual is designed to equip teachers with a stronger understanding of sexuality, gender, sexual and reproductive health, and HIV and AIDS, and to equip them with the self-awareness, values, and skills required to play an effective role in HIV prevention, care, and impact mitigation in their schools and in the community.

3. Fundamental Quality and Equity Levels (FQEL) Project - Guinea
Initiated in 1997 by the Education Development Centre (EDC) with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID.), this school reform project works to improve literacy instruction by providing teacher training and using strategies such as song and storytelling to encourage reading for pleasure and personal writing. A radio component helps to support the teachers' instruction in the classroom. The FQEL project is an attempt to incorporate Guinea’s rich tradition of storytelling and song into literacy education and encourage students to read and write French for fun.
Contact Education Development Centre (EDC) acohen@edc.org

4. Teachers Matter: Baseline Findings on the HIV-Related Needs of Kenyan Teachers
by Karusa Kiragu, Murungaru Kimani, Changu Manathoko, and Caroline Mackenzie
This 10-page report summarises the findings of a 2004 Horizons baseline survey that looked at the HIV intervention needs of teachers in Kenya. According to the report, most school-based HIV interventions in sub-Saharan Africa rely on teachers as behaviour-information and behaviour-change agents to deliver messages to children. Few interventions are designed for teachers as direct beneficiaries even though teachers themselves are at risk of HIV infection. The report states that in Kenya, the number of teacher deaths tripled between 1995 and 1999, with HIV/AIDS thought to be the largest contributor to teacher mortality.

5. Siniko: Towards a Human Rights Culture in Africa
This manual is written for teachers and educators in the Africa region who work with young people both in the formal and non-formal educational environments who want to introduce human rights in their teaching practices. The manual is designed as a basic introduction, with advice on methodology, activities for older and younger children, and ideas for action. The approach, as stated in the introduction, stresses the practical rather than the theoretical. The intention is that educators can take this material and adapt it to suit their own circumstances and context.

6. Straight Talk Campaign in Uganda: Evaluation of the School Environment Program
by Karusa Kiragu, Tobey Nelson, Cathy Watson, Ann Akia-Fiedler, Medard Muhwezi, Patrick Walugembe, and Richard Kibombo
This 55-page report documents the impact of Uganda Straight Talk Foundation' School Environment Program (SEP). In the early 2000s, STF expanded the SEP programme to encapsulate a full-fledged training effort designed to help teachers appreciate the problems adolescents experience, and create an empathetic school setting. During 2-day training sessions, teachers are exposed to information about adolescent sexual and reproductive health and child-friendliness (i.e. comfort discussing puberty, sexual harassment, etc.), and learn how to respond to adolescents. After the training, teachers return to their schools to implement activities such as starting Straight Talk (ST) or Young Talk (YT) clubs, supporting guidance and counseling activities, and fostering an adolescent-friendly environment. In 2002 STF developed the teacher-centred newspaper Teacher Talk, which is written for educators in primary schools.

CREATING BETTER SCHOOLS

7. Tanzanian Children’s Perceptions of Education and Their Role in Society: Views of the Children 2007
This 51-page study was published by Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA) and the Research and Analysis Working Group of the MKUKUTA Monitoring System of the Ministry of Finance And Economic Affairs, and funded by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Tanzania. It is the result of participatory research with children in Tanzania. According to the authors, as the "consumers" of education, children provide useful information for those working for and with children – from policy makers to teachers. This report contains children’s opinions on a range of issues related to education, such as school services (including healthcare, water supply, and food), textbooks, performance by teachers, discipline, extra charges, and their desired improvements to education.

8. Creating Safer Schools: Lessons Learned; Strategies for Action
In October 2006 Raising Voices, in collaboration with The Ford Foundation, hosted a dialogue on what is a safe school and how to create one. This publication presents the discussion and ideas that emerged from that forum. The report is divided into chapters according to the dialogue sessions, and discusses five key topics: what makes a school unsafe; what needs to happen to change that; how organisations, government, and civil society should be responding; developing a vision for safer schools; and next steps. The report found that there are many factors that make schools unsafe, including under-investment in school infrastructure, authoritarian teaching methods, under-valuing of children's voices, corporal punishment, poverty, and a lack of accountability and collective ownership.

9. Teacher Identities and Empowerment of Girls Against Sexual Violence
by Fatuma Chege
This 13-page study looks at how the construction of teacher's identities influences the way teachers and learners interact and behave, both in terms of the teacher-learner relationship, and relationships between learners, specifically around sexual identity, concepts of masculinity and femininity, and sexual abuse. It also examines memory work as a strategy for conscientising and empowering teachers to empower learners to stop sexual violence. The study focused on schools in Kenya and found that boys and girls are often disempowered by their teachers, although this manifests in different ways.

10. Stealing the Future: Corruption in the Classroom
by Bettina Meier and Michael Griffin (eds.)
This booklet by Transparency International (TI) addresses corruption in the education sector. It cites the need for instruments to curb corrupt practices to ensure that funds allocated are contributing to achieving goals in the current context of decentralisation, privatisation, globalisation, and diversification of educational services. The organisation's approach to analysing situations and instruments for achieving transparency is the presentation of 10 studies carried out by TI Chapters in 2004 and 2005 in Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Georgia, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The studies assess the forms and extent of corruption at schools, in universities, and in education administration, providing examples of how civil society can help curb corrupt practices in education.

ICTS AND MEDIA FOR EDUCATION

11. Education Makes News: An Education for All (EFA) News Media Training Resource Kit
From the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this media training resource kit is for journalists and media practitioners, to help them understand the international Education For All (EFA) initiative. It is designed to give a wide range of information to assist in writing items on educational issues for newspapers, magazines, or radio/television stations. It can be used on an individual basis or to hold a one-day workshop on the subject of EFA. Trainers will find materials, including ready-made presentations, among others.

12. Wireless School Connectivity Project - Zimbabwe
This initiative has connected a secondary school in an economically poor township of Harare to the internet using wireless technologies. The wireless technology itself is a bundle of solutions that use the licence-exempt Industrial Scientific and Medical (SM) 2.4GHz frequency band for connecting both the "first mile" to the internet service provider (ISP) and distributing the internet using WiFi in the classroom. According to the organisers, building up and rolling out the project required collaborative efforts from various stakeholders whose inputs were crucial in making the school connectivity project work. The project established relationships with four main stakeholders who helped to deliver internet to the school: the internet service provider, the backbone service provider, the regulator, and a school training organisation, World Links Zimbabwe - to conduct training.
Contact Muroro Dziruni muroro@connectafrica.org.zw

13. Support Technology for Educators and Parents (STEP) - Madagascar
The International Education Systems (IES) Division of the Education Development Centre (EDC) is piloting their Support Technology for Educators and Parents (STEP) programme in Madagascar. STEP works with the Ministry of Education National and Scientific Research (MENRS) to build the capacity of its personnel to offer high-quality training and support to Madagascar's growing numbers of teachers and schools. The project involves the nationwide broadcasting of radio programmes intended to invigorate teaching and learning in Madagascar. The STEP radio programmes consist of thirty-minute segments featuring a cast of local characters engaging in games, stories, songs, and group work. Through the radio programmes, first and second-graders learn Malagasy, mathematics, and French.
Contact Atiyyah Edwards aedwards@edc.org OR Norma Evans nevans@edc.org OR Gaëlle Simon gsimon@edc.org

14. Pour une Approche Globale de l'Education (PAGE) - For a Global Approach to Education - Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Education Development Center (EDC), in partnership with the International Rescue Committee, is reaching out to 120 schools and their communities in the Equateur and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The project interventions, which are supported by the United States Congress and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), aim to increase stakeholder capacity to access and pay for quality education. The PAGE project aims to employ a holistic, multi-stakeholder approach spanning three complementary technical components: education quality through interactive radio instruction; community participation; and education policy. According to the organisers, interactive radio instruction is at the core of improving primary education quality in the DRC. PAGE therefore produces and broadcasts daily radio lessons that reach even remote and resource-poor schools in the two programme provinces.
Contact Helen Boyle hboyle@edc.org

15. Improving Educational Quality Through Interactive Radio Instruction: A Toolkit for Policymakers and Planners
by Stephen Anzalone and Andrea Bosch
This guide, published by the World Bank, is designed for African policymakers, education planners, and pedagogical specialists who may be considering the feasibility of using interactive radio instruction (IRI) in their education systems. According to the World Bank, studies of the IRI experience in more than 2 dozen countries during the past 25 years have shown that the use of IRI has led to significant and consistent improvements in school achievement and has helped overcome equity gaps between urban and rural children and between boys and girls.

16. Survey of e-Learning in Africa
by Tim Unwin
According to this 10-page report, published by e-Learning Africa, there are currently many different e-learning practices evident across the continent. Relatively few of these are based on comprehensive Learning Management Systems such as Moodle or WebCT, and most rely primarily on the use of the internet for gaining access to information, and on e-mail for communicating with colleagues and students. This confirms that e-learning is in its infancy in Africa, but the evidence from those consulted in this survey is that there is nevertheless considerable enthusiasm for the potential that it offers across the educational spectrum, not only for universities and schools, but also for vocational training, for lifelong learning, and for marginalised groups such as street children and those with disabilities.

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For more information on this topic see these previous issues of The Soul Beat:

The Soul Beat 111 - Media and Children

The Soul Beat 84 - Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Education

The Soul Beat 48 - MDG 2: Universal Primary Education

The Soul Beat 40 - Communication in Education: Tools for Teachers

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Click here to view archived editions of The Soul Beat Newsletter.

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