NTT PEP
NTT Primary Education Project
Flores, Indonesia
Poverty reduction and poverty alleviation are very important
goals of many of the wide variety of development programs in Indonesia.
The NTT PEP (Nusa Tengara Timor Primary Education Partnership) is one
such program. This six-year venture project from AusAID, concentrates
on those all-important first three years of basic education. The
teaching focus is basically on literacy and numeracy. But the partnership
more basically aims at developing children's interest in seeing education
as opportunity, as their way forward in their lives. AusAID together
with Indonesian Government sees education as one very real way to achieve
poverty reduction. This exciting program is intended to spread to other
islands NTT and hopefully in other parts of Indonesia.
The full NTT PEP program is based in the Ngada district of Flores
which places it in an effective central position for the other two project
areas - Ende and Sikka.
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The project's main focus is
to work with teachers. 'Partner teachers' (guru mitra) are chosen
because the program is very much about partnership. Rather than just
importing ideas from outside, the project is helping districts and
the Indonesian government to implement the very significant educational
programs that have been underway during the last four years. Concepts
within those programs include school-based management, community participation,
a community competency-based curriculum and learning. It is all about
getting into the classroom, working with local teachers and making
school a rich and rewarding experience for kids. Then they will hopefully
want to stay there and complete their education.
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'I remember sitting in a Grade
1 class where one of teacher invited the kids to tell their own stories.
She invited them to do it in their own language. One little kid got up
and started telling a story in his local language and it was a wonderful
story and he just went on and on and on. People, including parents, were
watching and were falling about laughing but it was so extraordinary.
Within a week of the teacher inviting the kids to talk they were all talking.
They were talking lots! And the parents were recognising some of their
traditional stories in what this kid was talking about'.
Mary Fearnley-Sander
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The children will become competent
in reading and writing, in numeracy, in local skills and most importantly
in their own awareness of the possibilities that their own education
can bring to them and their community. A huge part of the project's
work is to build upon what's already there and to explore how people
in the community and people who are working in the system feel about
important issues in local education. |
Contextualising what we are going
is a key process. The project not only works with teachers in their classrooms
but it also engages the local community in the education process by listening
to the views of all concerned. There are regular meetings with parents,
the school community and administrators - it is a partnership!
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As the partnership motto says,
'It takes a whole village to educate a child.' Besides the usual
roles played by parents such as paying and organising repairs to floors
and walls, parents will now have a say in curriculum and in the discipline
policy in the school for example. There are so many ways in which
school communities can support their local schools and this AusAID
project is exploring all of them, and MORE!
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Further examples of this community involvement have included parents
supporting their children's mathematics teacher by building a beautiful
one meter high abacus, setting up houses where kids meet after school
and where community members listen to the children practising their reading.
Parents are a crucial part of the partnership.
As Mary Fearnley-Sander
says, 'The members of the partnership are the guru mitra,
partner teachers and their schools, partner schools. And we define
schools as being the community of the school. So it's the parents
of the kids and the local community, with the village government,
that support the school. And it's the local dinas as well and the
structure of education within the district'.
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The estimated budget for the project is AUD$25 million
and the completion date is scheduled for April 2008. NTT PEP focuses
on teacher training, school-based management, enhancing community
participation in education and capacity building for education managers
in related government agencies.
In Australian schools, parents
and the community play a very real part in the way that schools function.
This involvement includes decision making about what their children
learn, discipline procedures, school administration and even salaries.
**All
photographs by Desmond Fearnley-Sander
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Indonesia Institute projects and activities in Indonesia
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