The Foundation For Tomorrow

On Sunday, we worked with this awesome organization that a former DukeEngage student now works with (based out of Charlotte, NC) called The Foundation for Tomorrow (TFFT) (www.thefoundationfortomorrow.org).  They enroll students from orphanages into their program and find sponsors to provide a full scholarship, including healthcare.  The students all attend USA (pronounced oo-sa) River Academy, a private school that provides an excellent education.  During school breaks, the students stay either with an extended family member or a foster home that TFFT coordinates.  TFFT also provides after school programs called Full Circle, which is mandatory for the TFFT sponsored students, but that any student from USA River Academy can attend.  The students also communicate with their sponsors via letters and a few sponsors have even taken trips to Tanzania to visit TFFT! 

At USA River Academy we worked with all of the TFFT students from all grade levels.  Our main project was a “dreams” project, where the students wrote a story about a dream that they have had.  Then they planned out their picture and took a picture to represent their dreams.  One student that I worked with, Dickson, wrote about a dream where he went to the national park with his friends and a lion started chasing him.  He planned out his picture in a forested area on campus and pretended to run, looking back with a terrified face.  One of the other students took the picture of him pretending to run.

It was a really fun day and great to be able to interact with students of all age levels.  It’s amazing to go to a private school and see how many more resources and more involved teachers they have compared to the government schools.  TFFT is an amazingly successful organization and it’s so great they are able to help provide education for over 80 children.

We met with a few people from the TFFT group for lunch yesterday, and they described some of the challenges they have.  TFFT provides training workshops for teachers at their partner schools about using participatory methods in the classroom and how to create lesson plans that are more interactive and participatory.  They said that even in private schools, teachers sometimes resist these methods because they want to teach strictly to the national exams and thus still sometimes use the rote method of learning instead of finding ways to integrate critical thinking and participatory methods into the curriculum.  They found that sometimes the best critical thinkers do the worst on the exam because the tests and the test graders are looking for one “right” answer rather than evidence that the student was thinking on their own.

TFFT has also tried to work with government schools because those schools have greater challenges and more needs than private schools (lack of resources, teachers with less education, etc).  However, there is an expectation amongst government employees that they should get paid to attend a workshop or seminar.  Even though there is a training budget within the government, no one knows what really happens to that money.

In the US, some teachers have the same issues (lack of resources, pressure for their students to do well on the test, etc).  However, the idea of critical thinking, participation, and teamwork is very much engrained in US teaching methods.  The challenges that TFFT has are challenges that our program, LTP, runs up against with government schools as well.  Workshop attendees sometimes want money even though they are the ones receiving the education and are already getting paid salary as a teacher (for the record, we don’t provide this money, but we typically provide tea and snacks for the tea break).  We also find that teachers love the LTP program, but are hesitant to use it in their classroom because they worry about students doing well on the test.  We often have to state that we are teaching a methodology, not a subject.

Finally, both TFFT and LTP have challenges with our programs “sticking”.  Many teachers here agree that participatory methods are great, but very few actually put it into practice.  Some cite lack of resources, others that they can’t fit it into the curriculum.  We agreed, however, that whatever seeds we plant into teacher’s heads and students that we impact can go a long way, even if the full program is not implemented in schools.

Word of the day: shule - school