Blog

This conference is taking place this week in Bangkok (24-26 September). If you are attending, we draw your attention to a presentation on Wednesday 25th on ‘The Impact of Language Barriers in Education for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh’ which discusses research by Translators without Borders that one of our consultants, Rachel Bowden, was involved in. There are many other exciting topics and initiatives being discussed too.

If you are not attending the event, you can still follow the conference social media pages to see what’s being discussed, add your thoughts to the online discussions, and find out about the post-conference publication. There is also a short pre-conference booklet which introduces key themes and provides some suggested reading on the topic of inclusion, mobility and multi-lingual education.

The conference highlights that human mobility is reaching unprecedented levels due to an increasingly mobile workforce, increased mobility for higher education, and the highest ever levels of involuntary displacement/refugees. In the Asia-Pacific region, challenges of inclusion, social cohesion and peacebuilding are raised, for both mobile populations and stable but linguistically marginalised populations, including issues of access to civic participation, justice, health and information. While more children are in school, many are still not learning, raising fundamental questions about the balance of local, national and global languages in education.

For the last few years, EENET has worked with Norwegian Association of Disabled (NAD) to develop and test an innovative inclusive education teacher training approach in Zambia and Zanzibar. You can now read about the project’s background and take a detailed look at the process in a dedicated new section on EENET’s website: Participatory development of teacher training. By early 2020 we hope to share the training modules under creative commons licence.

The approach has focused on working collaboratively with trainers and other key education personnel in each country to develop in-service training modules that are relevant to the context, built around action research principles, and which local trainers own and have the skills to constantly improve. By involving pre-service trainers in the process from the start, change in pre-service teacher education is also being influenced and supported.

We have also prepared a briefing paper which answers key questions about the teacher training approach.

The International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI) has launched a YouTube channel to share videos showing ideas for making maths teaching accessible for blind learners. There is also a comprehensive manual.

Light for the World with its partners, supported by the Early Childhood Program of the Open Society Foundations, has launched the summary report from its recent study ‘Leave No Child Behind. Invest in the early years’. The study uncovers trends and strategic commitments in aid for inclusive early childhood development.

The full report and accompanying advocacy materials will be available soon.

Filming for our new inclusive early childhood education videos is now well underway in Swaziland. One of the exciting aspects of this film-making project is that we are not just documenting good ideas to help early years educators become more inclusive. We are also working with youth from local secondary schools. We are building on the lessons learned in our Listening to Young Voices project, and now older learners in Swaziland are working with pre-school learners to help them talk about their experiences of education.

This approach to facilitation works well at stimulating young children to express themselves, and it helps the older learners develop different skills. It is very important to us that when we are filming we are not just taking away footage, but are offering learning opportunities at the same time.