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Care International El Salvador (in partnership with UNICEF/Save the Children (USA)/Ministry of Education)
Address: Col Lomas de San Francisco, Calle 3 Casa 20, San Salvador
Tel: +503 273 4100
Fax: +503 273 0939
Website: www.care.org
The programme reported the following in 2001. An update is sought.
Organisation
“Our activities began in February 2000. They are implemented through four schools which are part of the EDUCO model - community-administered, rural government schools. CARE-USA is funding the staff (two full-time project implementers and one third-time co-ordinator) plus office support (stationery, computers, transport, etc.). UNICEF are funding materials design, development and printing. Save the Children (USA) are offering technical support (monitoring and evaluation, early childhood development),training costs and transport. CARE-USA's basic Education Department have offered technical support through materials and document review right from project design stage. Save the Children (USA) in El Salvador have more experience working in the field of ECD and in schools than CARE, so their organisation is offering some technical support in these areas to the implementing team based in CARE. Additionally we have the support in the field of one of SCF's Social Promoters who is attached to one of the regions we are working in. We have set up a Steering Committee comprising representatives from the USAID mission in El Salvador (Education Department), the National Institute for Child Protection, the University of Central America (ECD and Education department) as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education, UNICEF, SAVE and CARE. The purpose of the steering committee has been to reach a consensus on the project goals, and lend technical assistance and resource materials during the materials development and validation process. The CARE team has provided the steering committee members with a brief introduction to the Child-to-Child approach in the hope of generating support for future initiatives. SAVE's technical team have given us advice in materials development, as have the Ministry of Education and UNICEF. Collaboration with other agencies has not been as fruitful as hoped.
As of 2001, approximately 350 children, 160 parents and 31 teachers, from 10 communities, were involved in our project. There were also 31 volunteer teachers developing educational processes based on Child-to-Child in areas such as diarrhoea and nutrition. The project is operating in two mainstream, government schools in the central region of El Salvador (San Martín) and two schools in the Eastern area (Usulután). All four schools are in poor rural communities; in San Martín there is some employment from the factories in the nearby town; in Usulután the economy is mainly subsistence farming, added to by money sent back from family members living and working in the USA. All four areas have been beneficiaries of water and sanitation programs, but the water supply is erratic and hygiene is not good. The schools all have intermittent electricity; they are well stocked with furniture and national curriculum books but have minimal ‘extra’ resources for teaching. The Child-to-Child activities are based out of grades 3-5 in schools, so the implementation focus is on children aged 8-12. However, in practice, a number of the grades are combined (2 and 3 together, 5 and 6 together) and the teachers teach morning and afternoon shifts so they are trying out the methods and materials in both sessions. We are therefore in practice covering most grades in the school. Additionally, the age range within each grade can be quite varied, so the theoretical range of ages 8-12 in reality extends to include adolescents of 15 and 16. Adult workers involved in activities are mainly primary school teachers. However, we have also included the local Ministry of Health Health Promoter in our Parent School sessions. School supervisors have been invited and kept informed but have not participated so far.
Main purpose of the activities
Our aims are:
1. To develop and validate materials that focus on understanding and improving early childhood development to be integrated into the national curriculum for grades 3 to 5.
2. To present these materials along with training and planning sessions that promote the Child-to-Child approach to support teachers in using child-friendly, participatory learning methods in their classrooms.
3. To raise awareness of the importance of stimulating young children in order to ready them for school, and the role (but not responsibility) that primary school aged children can play in this process.
4. To introduce CtC to the Salvadoran Ministry of Education and other NGOS working with children in Salvador and engender interest in them to continue with the approach.
We also aim to work with all primary school-aged children, which implies equal participation of boys and girls. Through our focus on ECD at this level we hope to address the gender divisions apparent in child care amongst adults before they become too ingrained. By concentrating teachers and parents on the importance of participatory learning and listening/communicating to/with children we are beginning to promote children's rights; additionally, we are stressing that the child's role in the development of their younger siblings is a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the parent's/adult guardian's role.
Methodology and children’s participation
We are working directly with teachers who then put the CtC ideas into practice in the classroom. Through the CtC six-step approach we are also hoping that CtC activities will reach beyond the school. Fostering real child participation has proved to be our biggest hurdle. Despite the rhetoric of the Ministry, teachers are not familiar with participatory methods and the children are not accustomed to having to think actively in the classroom. Our training plan assumed a basic understanding of this process that is not borne out in reality; further programming will require a much greater emphasis on teacher training in participatory learning methods. We are working closely with the teachers in the classrooms during the project cycles in order to facilitate child participation and decision making through promoting the use of CtC activities, but we recognise that in future we need to work much more on these skills prior to project implementation; it is not part of the education culture here that children are leaders in the classroom. Whilst we have stressed the six-step approach throughout the project, at times we have considered switching to the four-step model developed in the Americas, to see if it will be simpler for the teachers, but we are worried that a change now will confuse them further. (We will consider using the four-step model in an up-coming project – we are planning to use CtC within our water and sanitation programmes). Perhaps by having 4 steps we can reduce the volume of materials necessary to train teachers in the process, and yet still emphasize that each step has a component within and outside of the classroom in order to cover the scope of the six-step approach. Some of the teachers have really internalised the steps and understand the process well, at least in theory; others are still finding it hard to accept that learning and educational activities can occur outside of the classroom (and their control). In practice, a problem we have encountered in all schools is that with the high levels of absenteeism, teachers find it difficult to sustain a topic over a period of weeks, as they are frequently required to repeat earlier stages with pupils who were absent. Another problem we have found specifically with Step 3 (discussing findings and planning action) is that many of the materials we have stress the use of charts and graphs to present data, yet this is proving difficult for the younger children in our age range. We are now working on including alternative methods for data presentation and analysis that are less ‘formal’ and more accessible for younger and less literate children. With respect to the kinds of competency that we aim to develop in children, our materials make explicit links with learning objectives in the national curriculum in maths, language, science, social studies and arts. We are also hoping to encourage team working, listening, children learning to take turns, speaking up and sharing ideas, critical thinking and decision making. Additionally, our focus on ECCD contains ideas on self-esteem, self-expression, inter-personal relationships, tolerance and acceptance, understanding feelings and constructive play, which we hope to develop in the older children as well through the six-step approach.
School Based Activities
The Ministry of Education and Health have a Healthy School programme, of which two of our schools are part. This initiative focuses mainly on external health services (providing food, vaccination campaigns, tooth brushes, etc.), but it could be a launch point for expanding the project in the future. We worked on an expansion plan with the Ministry of Education to reach 125 schools. In theory, health is taught across the curriculum rather than as a separate subject. In practice, it has been quite difficult to evaluate how successful this has been. In our training and planning with teachers we have discussed overlaps between the CtC objectives (for each theme) and overlaps with National Curriculum learning and competency objectives. In this way, the teachers identify a subject in which each activity can be carried out, such as writing a description after a field trip to observe the safety hazards in the children's play area in the language class, or a session on understanding the danger of flies in a science class. Additionally, there are some formal ‘health’ lessons programmed in the national curriculum under science, but we are encouraging teachers to follow their CtC plans outside of this class to promote the integration of CtC activities across the curriculum, not just as Health.
Involvement of the community and different agencies
Each school holds a monthly Parents’ School (2 started last year), which we ‘borrow’ time from to present ideas relating to the current ECCD theme being worked on in the school as part of our project. We carry out some simple activities to demonstrate the benefits of parents communicating with their children. The idea is to raise awareness in the parents of the project so that they will encourage and support the replication of activities within the home. In theory, the teachers are responsible for organising these meetings, in which they are supposed to provide educational information and administrative information about the school. In reality, we have found that they expect us to lead these sessions, something we are not keen to do as it is not sustainable. We have come to a compromise of planning activities for these meetings with the staff beforehand, but making them responsible for most of the presentation. By the end of the project we will have minimised our participation, but ensured that the parents have had the opportunity to learn a little about ECCD and the six-step approach that their older children are involved in. Attendance at the Parents’ School is pretty high – from 50-80% of families represented. But this often falls during the months when more families are involved in harvesting. We are defining ‘community’ as parents during this project; non-parental community involvement is limited to representatives from the Ministry of Health local health units who have been interested to attend the Parent School. We have health and education specialists in our Child-to-Child team, though ultimately the planning is directed by the school teachers.
Monitoring and evaluation
Our monitoring and evaluation is highly qualitative. Due to our intention that the children and teachers choose the areas that they wish to study, and the in-process status of our materials, it was not feasible to set a quantitative ‘test’ prior to the intervention. We have designed a classroom observation checklist that is used in each class we observe, and results from these are collated for a more systematic evaluation at the end of each cycle. We also carried out a thorough, though small-scale, pre-test situational analysis in each school which is compared with post-test results to identify changes initiated during the project's duration. Evaluation of activities is a weak point in the project, and something we would greatly appreciate help with! As far as evaluation findings are concerned, it's too early to tell yet what kinds of changes have been brought about by the Child-to-Child activities. As of 2001, we had not measured the impact of our Child-to-Child.
Training
We have trained our NGO/GO steering committee briefly in the methodology, but our main training activities are with the teachers in our four schools. We gave a short presentation on the project and CtC at an ECCD conference in the national University some time ago. Training activities are carried out by our team: one Health Promoter with previous CtC experience, one former teacher and school administrator, and one specialist in international development who has experience in integrated education. We have followed closely the training outline suggested in Participatory Approaches to Promoting Health in Schools: a Child-to-Child Training Manual (available from the Child-to-Child Trust), though split over shorter sessions. However, we have found shorter sessions a hindrance. In future we will push for a full-week, uninterrupted session.
Use, Adaptation, Translation and Production of Child-to-Child Materials
We have been using the CtC activity sheets, Children for Health, and Health Promotion in our Schools. I have just received the new book Children as Partners for Health, as well as Health into Maths, and a package of CtC materials developed by the CtC centre in Ecuador, and I am sure we will be incorporating ideas from these sources into our materials shortly. Validation (and adaptation) of CtC materials in the rural setting is a major objective of the pilot. We are working with the teachers (including their reflections from using the materials with their students) and local health promoters to ensure that the focus is appropriate. We are using Spanish CtC activity sheets as a basis for our materials development, along with inputs from other sources, some in English. We are developing materials that use ideas from the CtC worksheets on child growth and development, along with ideas on self-esteem, early learning, play, feelings etc. We hope to use these in a way that primary school children become catalysts in the home and community for raising awareness of how to interact with young children to prepare them for school. Awareness of this is very low in rural El Salvador.”
Date: 2001. Updated information awaited.
Source: CtC Website Directory 2000
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