| Description of good practice: |
Friends in Village Development Bangladesh (FIVDB) is a national non-government organization and its main field activities are in the Sylhet Division- in the northeastern part of Bangladesh. One of its aims is to contribute towards educational and socio-economic empowerment of disadvantaged women, men and children.
Efforts towards IE:
The Child Education Program(CEP) began in 1985 as a result of a community's identified need. Originally FIVDB schools followed the traditional role learning approach, its aim being to provide access to primary education for children of disadvantaged communities. Children were usually taught in large mixed age groups, role learning from textbooks with no differentiation between them to cater for individual needs. While children were learning information using this approach, it was found in a research study that they could not transfer their skills to areas beyond the situation in which they were learning. This was limiting their ability to extend their knowledge and skills independently.
As a result of these findings the program developed and piloted an active curriculum (supported by the Department for International Development-DFID) to give children opportunities to test their knowledge practically and to participate in exploratory activities enhancing children's understanding of the concepts taught.
Over the last three and half years the Active Learning Community programme (ALCP) has expanded its activities from providing education for 6,330 children in 73 semi-permanent structured schools in 1999, to ensuring that 10638 children(51% of whom are girls) receive quality education in 100 fully constructed schools. 228 teachers(49% female) run 428 classes in these schools. Child attendance in the schools has improved over the years maintaining an average rate of 84% for 2002. Student drop out rate is reported to be 8.3%. Among these children 7% are reported to have migrated to other primary schools as their families have moved to different areas, whilst 1.3% have dropped out of primary education altogether.
The CEP has succeeded in incorporating new discoveries/ practices in education to maximize the teaching and learning impact. It has succeeded in:
1. Developing active learning supplementary guides to support all NCTB (National Curriculum Text Book Board) textbooks and competencies.
2. Setting up Shishu Classes and developing suitable curriculum., materials and teaching methodologies. The children get time to build up early literacy and numeric skills while becoming familiar with expected classroom routines and practices in a friendly and supportive environment before they start the main Government curriculum in grade 1.
3. Developing activities and teachers guides to support the children of Shishu class and classes I and II in Environmental Sciences for which the NCTB does not provide any textbooks.
4. Developing resource materials including 20 supplementary reading materials, one big book, 3 mathematics development handbooks and exercise books for Bangla and English language and Mathematics and lesson plan guides for the teachers in relation to all NCTB textbooks for classes I to V.
5. Developed a comprehensive assesment system of children's achievement, comprising of formative and summative processes, for all NCTB competencies, which facilitates the tracking of each child's progress and enables the teachers to adapt their lessons to provide individual need based support.
6. Develop and put in place an effective management and supervision structure with clearly defined job descriptions and accountability framework for each level/component of the programme from the field to the central levels.
The discussion with teacher revealed that; the day begins with the attendance. Special care is taken to see that all children attend school regularly and children share this responsibility. Children's active cooperation is sought during teaching. the lessons are introduced and the children are asked questions. This helps the teacher to judge the knowledge of the children. One focus group and 2 non focus group activities of 25 minutes each are organized for teaching, reading, writing and math. In the higher classes the duration of the focus group activities is 40 minutes. Children are engaged in active learning tasks in groups in the non focus group activity time. Each class has attractive reading corners and time is allocated each day to encourage children to read books alone and collectively to each other.
workshops are conducted regularly to train teachers to teach children in a participatory manner. The teachers think that though at present there is not particular effort to include the children with disabilities and other marginalised children, it is time to begin the efforts. They felt that with appropriate training inputs and opportunities to share experiences, special teaching materials, special curriculum and some minor adaptations in the school they can work with the children from the marginalised groups. |
