Vital lessons from a village education
by
Michele Nardelli
It’s not every day that a student cries with joy when they
receive their student number. And it’s also rare to hear academics talking about
how one teaching experience has changed the way they will teach forever.
But for lecturers from the de Lissa Institute of Early Childhood and Family Studies, a two-year AusAID education project in Papua New Guinea has been a career-changing experience and one that is set to empower the PNG education system for years to come.
The $1.5 million project was designed to support a new push for village-based education in PNG to ensure more children take part in learning from reception to year three.
The 34 PNG students who recently graduated from UniSA with a Bachelor of Early Childhood Education are experienced teachers, principals and teacher trainers all holding a minimum of an equivalent Diploma in Teaching certificate.
The program’s goal was to educate these teachers to support and develop an “army” of village teachers. Some 85 per cent of the PNG population live in the hundreds of villages across the country.
Project leader Professor Wendy Schiller said barriers to education in PNG are numerous and complex.
“What the PNG government has acknowledged is that only 16 per cent of children under 12 years have been to school,” Prof Schiller said.
“Until now school has been structured very much around a system of area primary schools, but distance, language, and cultural issues have meant many children missed out.”
PNG has 860 official languages and some of the most uncompromising terrain in the world with very little infrastructure development. Getting to school is a problem and then understanding what is being taught is another.
“The goal for the country now is to ensure every village has a school and that children get the basics of education in their own language before they go on to the larger area schools,” Prof Schiller said.
“Teachers in Australia would marvel at the village model because of the whole community engagement in the process and the enormous support of parents.”
Parents usually build the village schools, right down to the hand-woven school bags and mats in the classroom. The teacher is local and elected by the village elders, who also determine the curriculum. All learning is conducted in the local language and parents are most welcome in the classroom and usually play an active part in helping their children learn.
“The educators we have been teaching will be the vanguard (the first 40 out of about 200 teachers and principals) for change in PNG and will ensure more and more children have access to this important early learning,” she said.
“Some members of that group themselves travelled eight hours to the mainland before making the overland trek to the two-week intensive workshops that were part of their degree program. And I can tell you some of the apologies for slightly late delivery of assignments included things like ‘the dinghy driver was late so I missed the connection with the helicopter that collected the mail this week’.
“The dedication of our students is awe inspiring and they value their educational opportunities almost like the air we breathe.
“The project has had a similar impact on the teachers from our school who have been involved. They have come back alive with the joy of teaching.
“They have been challenged and they have had to suspend all cultural and social judgements and meet their students with a completely open mind.
“They have adapted and innovated and in doing that, they have come back from a teaching experience that has also been an enormous learning experience.”