ConTextos’s program, Soy Autor (I’m an Author), started with at-risk youth living in neighborhoods with high levels of gang activity, and then forayed into juvenile detention centers and prisons. Soy Autor challenges El Salvador’s assumptions about our youth and forces us to wrestle with multi-faceted individuals.
Last Friday, gun fight broke out in front of Aldea de Las Mercedes School in San Salvador, El Salvador. ConTextos’ Teacher Trainers Enrique and Jennifer were working at the school when shots sent students and teachers scrambling.
My daughter was five-years-old when we discovered her learning disability. She loved listening to books and being read to, but when she tried to read by herself she struggled with even simple words. She was so discouraged, that by the time she turned seven, she stopped reading.
It's been nine months since the United Nations committed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals "to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all." It's a 15 year window of opportunity to achieve these goals, but how do governments, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals like you and me accelerate impact in each of these areas?
In 2009, Impact Network began building schools in rural Zambia to bring educational access to some 57 million children who were out of school. Two years later, we handed over 5 newly built schools to the local communities to operate. But as the school year unfolded, we saw that while we had left a structure for the community, we had provided no teachers, no management structure, and essentially no tools to help provide a quality education.
Can you remember your first day of kindergarten? Or even preschool? Chances are, you were excited beyond words.
Chances are, your first classroom greeted you with colorful drawings on the walls, 27 letters on the chalkboard, and even a cozy reading corner filled with stacks of books, waiting patiently to take you on an adventure.
For 250 million children around the world, getting access to high-quality, relevant, and interesting reading material is a huge barrier to learning how to read. Many of these children are already enrolled in primary schools, but they don’t have sufficient access to quality materials – or the time to enjoy them. How can technology help connect children with the right materials to enrich their reading experience?
As the international education community begins to focus a long lens on the Sustainable Development Goals taking shape around secondary education and quality, lifelong learning, with special emphasis on technical and vocational skills, Connect To Learn too is evolving our mission to build upon our work providing girls’ scholarships and ICT tools in remote, resource poor classrooms into one that takes a broader, more holistic approach to education.
As millions of students return and have returned to school over these past few weeks and months, 127 million did not. 127 million children of primary and lower secondary school age were not greeted at the door by their new teacher, did not greet old friends and meet new ones, did not crowd in to the school yard, did not spend the morning finding their shiny new desks, learning new rules and finding their way as they transition from primary to secondary school.
The group of mothers sitting in the sun in a village in north India was happy to chat. We talked about children and about their school. “Are they going to school?” I asked. “Of course,” said the mothers proudly. Some went further to say, “we even send them for private coaching after school.” “How are they doing with their education?” The common word for education in Hindi is the same as reading-writing. The chatter stopped. One mother looked at me sternly and said, “How do we know? We are illiterate. Anyway, that is the business of the school and of the teachers.”