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- Who: Peace Corps and Zach Swank, Environmental Educator
- Where: Bababe, Mauritania Brakna Region
- When: June 20th-August 22nd for some of us, June 20th-August 29th for others
Working with the Children
The children will be out of school during the period that we are there. The rainy season comes at the beginning of August, so we will not need to worry about the children needing to care for the fields during that time. Often, children will travel during the summer (the communities are sometimes nomadic, traveling to visit relatives during the summer). To help keep the children in town for our program, we will have our ground contact Zach Swank notify his community of the fact that we will be bringing the laptops and making the program available. We will make sure that we provide learning opportunities to all ethnicities and both genders.
We will work with Peace Corp volunteers to establish this project. With their input and the input of the community, we will determine how long a school day should be.
Impact on Children
Goal:
Our goal is to give children the tools they need to explore the world and learn independently of the rote memorization they are accustomed to. We want to empower them with the ability to share what they have learned, teaching their peers and parents the new tools they have acquired and express the ideas they come up with.
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*Project Set Up:*
We are working with the Peace Corps \[http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.wherepc.africa.mauritania\] \[and link to wiki page on Peace Corps in Mauritania\] on this initiative. The Peace Corps has been in Mauritania since 1967 and is well received in Bababe. We are also working with Zach Swank, an environmental educator who has worked with the community in Bababe for two years now. He will provide us with an opening into the community, then facilities to store and charge the laptops, and assist us throughout the 10 weeks. Working with him will ensure that the project is well established by the time we leave. He will remain in the area for a year after we leave, ensuring the integration of the XOs into the school curriculum there.
Working with the Peace Corps will ensure sustainability of the project. Our project, if successful, will serve as a pilot for new Peace Corps programs and further involvement in Mauritanian education. |
Our deployment will be set up as a summer program for children in Bababe in Maison de Jeunes, a youth center established by the Ministry of Culture. Based on the information from our local contact, there will be more children interested in the program than we can provide for. Thus, we will choose a diverse group of students in the 5th and 6th grades. In a heavily male dominated education system, we will make sure that we provide equal opportunities to both genders.
Working with the Children:Our approach to teaching children will be to take learning from passive memorization to active engagement. We believe that given the right tools and resources, children will teach themselves. One of our goals with the XOs is to teach the children how to think critically about their environment, allowing them to turn mundane situations into learning opportunities. With the tools the XOs provide, children will be able to record their community history snd cultural vibrance. They will be able to investigate their surroundings analytically, something that is beneficial for both the children and the community. They will be able to express their creativity by writing and sharing stories, artwork, and music. They will be able to model electrical circuits, keep track of local market trends, and apply their knowledge practically. This will allow them to grow up be engaged and critical adults with greater awareness of the world.
The current school system in Mauritania is not very conducive to children's learning, due in large part to the deep poverty of the country and the consequent lack of resources and tools available for students. Bringing in 100 laptops to a classroom of 6-12 year old elementary school children will have inconceivably eye-opening and irreversible effects on how they learn. Allowing each child to learn and explore the XO's one-on-one will give every student the chance to be exposed to innovative technology and all of utilize the opportunities that come with it. The biggest opportunity is undoubtedly the Internet; the ability for students to access this infinite information database will have astounding effects on their capacity and yearning for knowledge and learning. We will also use the XO's as learning tools in the classrooms, teaching the children how to use the laptops to gain more understanding about each other and their own environment.In addition, girls are often neglected or mistreated in Mauritanian schools. Through our program, we will ensure that girls get the same opportunities that boys do, and that all of the children, regardless of gender, will
The children will learn how to use the XOs through interactive, multi-player games that will show them that they can use the XOs to share information with classmates. They will be encouraged to explore all the features of the laptops and discover for themselves how the laptops work in a supervised setting. Then, they will design projects relating to topics they are interested in. They will work in teams, potentially in collaboration with children participating in our sister deployments in Kaedi, Tdjikja, Kiffa and Kankossa. Using the XOs, they will record what they observe, share the designs and ideas they come up with, and present the results to their peers and parents. We hope that this will foster a collaborative spirit in which students are eager to learn from and teach others.
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In addition, we will work with local educational providers and Peace Corps volunteers to design lesson plans for schools that will incorporate the XOs. Keeping the 5th grade public school education curriculum in mind, we will show the children how to take what they have learned and apply it in a new and interesting way. An elementary game they could play: a scavenger hunt for teams of four. \[link to the following\] There would be a map with the location of the classroom and a destination marked on the board. The first team member would have to type out directions (including distances) in a language they are learning (perhaps English or French) to another child in Chat. The second child would use Record to record oral directions and send the file to the two remaining team members who would follow directions to reach the destination. They would have to use Distance to accomplish the task, measuring the distance between the two XOs to travel the right amount to reach the destination. Other possible ideas include using the XOs to record and share their community history and cultural vibrance. They will be able to express their creativity by writing and sharing stories, artwork, and music. |
In short:
In working with children, we hope that they will have positive effects on the community. The beauty of children is that they are often more communicative and willing to share than adults. Their energy and enthusiasm will allow them to be a positive influence in their communities be able to be exposed to the whole wide world through XO's.
Sustainability
The Peace Corps has been involved in Bababe for more than twenty years and is making no plans to leave. By training Bababe volunteers in teaching with the XO's, and passing on these skills to new volunteers, our program should still be flourishing long after we are gone. We will also encourage the children to keep in contact with our team by inviting them to email us photos, videos, stories and artwork and to keep us updated on their lives as they get older. There is even the possibility of setting up pen pals between the Bababe students and a school in the U.S. or the U.K., so that each culture could learn about the other and so that the Bababe children could speak with other kids their age from a different part of the globe.
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