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| Lynette Hester lecturing at Maela Refugee Camp |
Effective Teaching Series goes to Thailand.
Rev Peter Hester
Thailand --
Rev Peter Hester, Pastor of Gloucester Baptist Church and a pioneer of Christian schooling in Australia, has visited the refugee camp before to help to design a mathematics curriculum for the schools there. Lynette Hester, also a pioneer in Christian schooling, is a lecturer in curriculum design at Southland College. Lynette has been one of the writing team of the Effective Teaching Series and is currently helping to write Phase Three of the Series. Peter and Lynette's initial report is attached. A video of this initiative can be found on http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=0w08--OoSZ4
 YouTube Video
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| Lynette hester using one of the PowerPoint Presentations |
REPORT
The Karen are a displaced people from Burma, escapees from the oppressive and abusive Burmese military government, and trapped in long term ‘temporary' camps of bamboo and teak leaves. There are 130,000 - 150,000 such people along the border with others still in a camp across in Burma. Many of these refugees are Christians and they do a great work in the camps in churches, Bible schools, and loving care for other residents.The Australian organisation, Effective Aid International which facilitated the project, has established two excellent Christian schools in the camps catering for over 1,000 students. They also fellowship with other Christian schools in the camps. Teachers from 5 schools attended the workshops. The camps face great challenges of losing many of their best teachers to other countries through repatriation programs and so are constantly needing to train new teachers.
In October this year forty five Karen teachers attended a week long workshop where Peter and Lynette Hester presented stage 1 of the New Hope International Course in Effective Teaching. These teachers eagerly soaked up insights in Christian education, being enthusiastic about seeing their students as image bearers and trying out different approaches to learning. 38 successfully completed the whole course while a few have just one or two sessions to make up prior to graduation. They will be able to complete these using the videos produced throughout the week. We were able to use an adapted version of the Power Points prepared for last January's conference. Each session was videoed and included our presentation as well as a very competent Karen translation - these videos are to be made available to the schools for ongoing training as well as being a great resource for the translation of the manual.
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| Some of the participants enjoying a workshop |
Workshops
Workshops were not an activity that the teachers initially appeared comfortable with but as the week progressed they quickly warmed to them and participation became very active. I think there will be a decision to reproduce some form of these translated into Karen, as well as a modified form of the revised manual
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| Some of the Participants working with the NHI Phase One Workbooks. These are in English but will be translated into Karen |
Working with the Karen refugees
As well as schools from within the refugee camp, schools from Thai/Karen communities were represented as well as some from Karen State inside Burma. It is always an inspiring and humbling experience working with the Karen refugees and this week was even more so
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| The graduants with their certificates. |
The Graduants
A closing ceremony of celebration where 38 who had attended the whole course graduated with certificates was ‘a little like Heaven’ with various tribes presenting their different styles of praise song.Videos were made of the course and will be used extensively throughout the camps in the months and years ahead. The assistance of EAI Project Director, Ian Aitchison and the expert translation work of Pastor Joseph is gratefully acknowledged.
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