Lauren had the opportunity to be one of five Peace Corps
Volunteers to facilitate at the Padayon Mindanao Literacy Summit. This
conference is funded by USAID and is in its last year. This particular
conference has been funded for three years with two conferences per year.
This first session focused on teachers from both the Mindanao and Visayan area.
As volunteers, we aren’t allowed to travel to Mindanao for safety and security reasons. Currently there is conflict between the Christian population and the Muslim population. This of course isn’t found throughout the entire island, just in certain areas where extremist lie.
This conference is meant to not only be an opportunity for teachers to learn how to be more effective in their classrooms, but as an opportunity to share culture. Many Filipinos do not know much about their Muslim brothers and sisters that live in the southern part of the country.
Cultural sharing was done throughout the week as one-on-one conversations, artwork depicting the differences and similarities, and through music and dance.
This literacy summit focuses on demo teaching, how to teach with activities to make it interactive for the learners. The learners in this case are out of school youth. In the Philippines, youth can be anyone up to the age of 30 so you can only imagine the difficulties these teachers have with the multitude of ages and levels when making lesson plans. Lauren focused on two teaching sessions, public speaking and environmental education. The other volunteers also taught two sessions each. Some of their topics included reading, critical thinking, creative writing, math in everyday life, etc.
With environmental education being one of Lauren’s projects she found this session to be the most fun and energetic. At the end of each environmental session, each teacher wrote on a leaf what their pledge would be for the environment. Eventually after all four sessions, the tree was full of ideas and promises made to keeping the environment healthy for future generations.
After the five day conference the teachers took their new learnings out into the community. They were tasked with teaching a two hour session that included activities that they had learned. The topic Lauren’s group chose was early marriage. The teachers gave a lesson on what the differences are between a small family and large family. What characteristics make up a good marriage such as respectfulness, open communication, etc. and what characteristics are bad. It was a great session filled with many games that lead to positive interactions between the teachers and learners.
The second part of this conference brings in the students to take part in a Leadership Summit that takes part at the end of July.
More fun to come……
