Corrugated metal rooftops that baked us as the sun shone or leaked when it rained, 50 students to a classroom without books and teachers that were often not paid on time marked my first experience with international education. For 5 months in 2004 I stayed in Kasoa, Ghana, as a volunteer teacher.I cut my teeth in Africa's underfunded educational context. The glaring lack of resources left me wanting to build libraries in every village from the Sahara to Victoria Falls.
Now it's 2007. A year of MA coursework related to "sustainable international development" at the Heller School of Brandeis University has me focusing on teachers. (I can safely say that living with a beautiful teacher has coloured my opinion too!) If you drop books from the sky, people will not necessarily read them. (This was hard for me to understand because I'm an avid reader.) The teacher, by forcing me to read when it's difficult, by helping me understand the plot, which characters are most important, how to connect what I already know to what I'm reading and how to interpret the symbols sprinkled into the text - constructs a foundation that allows me to independently learn.
I depart June 18th for the Republic of the Marshall Islands. In the capital, Majuro, I'll work with the Ministry of Education to improve teacher education.
