[IAEP] Its.an.education.project Digest, Vol 4, Issue 8

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:20 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
>> Again, the culture at Bill's school is radically different from 99.9% of
>> all schools in Nepal. The culture here is very conservative and hierarchical.
>> We aren't going to change this over night or even in several years.
>
> I wonder. Albeit with some external intervention in the form of
> mentoring the teachers, in both Pakistan and Nigeria, some "very
> conservative and hierarchical" classrooms did change--not overnight,
> but within *weeks* of the introduction of Sugar.

As also documented in Ethiopia. See the report at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic Papers

> Maybe the secret
> sauce is to provide support to the teachers for engaging the children
> in a new approach to learning: the "hard stuff" on Alan's diagram.
> Sugar itself cannot do this itself, but a community that forms around
> Sugar can!! In both Peru and Uruguay, the education bureaucracy is
> trying to establish such a mentoring network. Maybe this is the
> liability of being a small trial as oppose to a massive deployment.

No, it worked with mentoring in a small trial in Ethiopia.

> If
> I am correct, this would suggest that we should accelerate our efforts
> on building a social network for teachers.

Good idea regardless. The rest of the world needs to hear from our
teachers, not just from management and outside researchers. Also a
global network for students.

>The network is the thing
> that is different this time: let's exploit it.

Yes.

> -walter
> _______________________________________________
> Its.an.education.project mailing list
> Its.an.education.project at lists.lo-res.org
> http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project
>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay