10 November 2008
Experimental Ethiopian Schools Energize Students, Empower Parents
U.S. aid agency supports government's educational reforms
Asallah, Ethiopia — Inside a mud-and-grass-walled school in rural Ethiopia, students sit in horseshoe formations, some with their backs to the teacher, others sideways and some facing her.
At the start of a class, the students look toward the teacher, who introduces a question or a problem. Then the students turn and face each other and proceed to discuss the question or solve the problem. At the end, the teacher solicits the answers that the students have reached.
What is going on at the Gorasillingo primary school near Asallah, 180 kilometers south of Addis Ababa, is an educational experiment intended to reduce the role of the teacher and energize the students in the learning process. The Ethiopian government is working to revamp teaching practices with the goal of creating a modern labor force capable of staffing an economy plugged into global markets.
“Ethiopia is getting away from lecture-based education, in which the teacher does all the talking and students listen passively,” said Gebi Tussi, an Ethiopian education official. “We are trying to give the students and the broader communities a sense of empowerment in education.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) plays a central role in helping Ethiopia implement these educational reforms.
Tesfaye Kelemework, a USAID education specialist, said, “Education is a big component of economic development. The Ethiopian government is working to revive and expand reforms that were interrupted in the 1970s, when a military-backed communist regime took power.”
A key element in the initiative is a program to encourage students, teachers and parents to manufacture their own educational materials. At the nearby Asallah Teachers' College, Tulu Gobu supervises a center devoted to training teachers to make teaching aids from materials they touch in their daily lives. The workshop has hammers, saws, scissors and other tools, along with paper, glue, paints, wool and an assortment of other common materials.
For example, human anatomy is taught by means of a replica of the human system constructed with stones for teeth and pieces of cloth and strips of wool to represent the organs. The display is attached to a sheet of cardboard. Another teaching aid depicts the circulatory system with blue water running through plastic tubing toward the heart to show veins and red water away from the heart to show arteries.
To learn three-dimensional geometric shapes, students and teachers learn to make cylinders, cones and pyramids from blocks of wood. “These concepts would be hard to teach from a printed page or a teacher talking about them in a lecture,” said Johnson Odharo, another USAID educational adviser.
The scientific concept of distillation is taught with a small still that boils water and condenses the steam. Business skills are engrained with props with which students act out shopping procedures.
Velcro arrows that can be placed on a square of hanging cloth are used to teach the concept of prepositions — above, below, toward, away from, and so forth. Students and teachers make their own classroom maps to teach history and geography.
Teachers throughout Ethiopia are trained at three such teaching-aids production centers in the country.
“They are making their classrooms very active,” Odharo said. “Students and parents make their own teaching materials and present them to teachers. Teachers limit their talking and encourage students to talk more.
“In addition to empowering students, the USAID-supported reforms involve the development of parent-teacher associations [PTAs] to bring in parents as part of the educational process.”
An issue facing the Gorasillingo school is the lack of water on the premises. By involving the association, the government and school officials gain input from the community about meeting this need. Kelemework said this is a new concept for many people in the rural, conservative society. “They are used to asking the government to solve problems instead of finding solutions on their own. Some PTAs are more advanced than others in this process.”
The USAID community-school partnership program works with 1,800 schools and parent-teacher associations in Ethiopia to address problems ranging from inadequate classrooms to lack of potable water. The program specifically coaches PTAs to design and implement solutions. According to a USAID document, the program has built the capacity of more than 45,000 PTA members and provided more than $4 million in assistance to schools. Local communities, for their part, have contributed $8 million in labor, materials and cash to the program, the document says.
