Keep Pakistan Learning

Dear friend, 

With the New Year fast approaching, we are excited at the prospect of reflecting on the past few months with the hope of all that is to come! Our 155 Fellows have been hard at work in their schools and classrooms, working to improve their students’ outcomes in service of ending educational inequity in Pakistan. Second-year Fellows have simultaneously been working to initiate their Community Partnership Projects; small-scale solutions Fellows undertake in the second year of their Fellowship as a response to barriers to student learning. 

With the 28th Annual Conference of the Parties (COP) Summit just having ended and a surge in conversations on climate change, we thought it important to reflect on our own year in regards to the topic. Pakistan’s context and positioning in the climate conversation is unique given its place in the Global South. Despite contributing to less than 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, our vulnerable communities have been most disproportionately impacted by climate disasters - the floods of June 2022 a prime example.

Although Teach For Pakistan does not operate in communities directly impacted by the floods, we do work with vulnerable communities that are witness to similar disasters on various scales regularly. We strongly believe, then, that what we teach our students in classrooms must be grounded in the reality of what they experience in their daily lives.

Along with working to improve academic outcomes, our Fellows also work with their students to build their non-cognitive skills including team-work, resilience, and critical thinking among others. Fellows’ work on climate education is no different. Their work is testament to the belief that it is critical to center the voices of those that are impacted by climate change most disproportionately and learn with and from them about how a concept so vast and abstract can manifest across localities. 

Read on for snapshots from the past year of Fellows’ work on climate education and climate action in their classrooms and communities.

Building Climate Understanding

2022 Fellow Sana has always felt passionately about the environment and ensuring that we be cognizant of our impact on the natural world. When she began teaching her students, she found that they only thought of climate change as a result of natural phenomena, and not that human actions contribute to it as well. Her students didn’t realize how humans can contribute to such a problem, thereby also undermining their own agency in impacting and mitigating it. 

To counter this, Sana took up several activities to engage her students with the topic through practical learning and built their understanding of climate change and climate action through climate education. These activities included tree-planting drives and poster-making competitions. Sana’s students also conducted clean-up drives in their school and made and disseminated brochures in their communities spreading awareness about conserving natural resources and the environment. 

As a result of this engagement, Sana’s students not only have a deeper understanding of climate change, but have also adopted more climate-friendly practices such as minimizing their use of paper, being cognizant of wasting electricity and water, and ensuring that they decrease their use of plastic. Most importantly, her students have also taken to planting various trees, vegetables, and flowers in their community and have designated days where they conduct clean-up drives within their own school and community. 

Sana and her students’ dedication to strengthening their understanding of climate change tells us that the best time to start is now, and never to undermine one's own power in impacting the world around us. 

Climate Conversations beyond the Classroom 

First year Fellow Toseef teaches English to grades 6 and 7 at a public school in Bhara Kahu. With an undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences, he is particularly invested in incorporating climate education in his English lessons, and has found innovative means to do so.

When Toseef began teaching, his students didn’t seem to understand the connection between CO2 emissions and its link to climate change. Through a more focused discussion with his students, he found that not only did his students understand the link, they were also able to connect the problem to their daily life! Something seemingly foreign just minutes earlier became accessible with a simple nudge of pushing students to think a little deeper. 

Toseef began to incorporate climate education in his English SLOs. When students were required to learn application-writing, they did so by practicing writing an application to the local MNA to highlight the issue of a nearby road that is the cause of traffic jams and subsequent environmental pollution such as waste and water mismanagement as well as stagnant water that is home to harmful bacteria. Similarly, another SLO called for students to write a letter to an editor to detail the personal risks associated with environmental degradation. 

As a result of these efforts, Toseef’s students now have the vocabulary to explain the circumstances they live in and an enhanced sense of agency with the understanding that they also have the ability to impact that which affects their lives.

Our Fellows and their students work on climate education has shown us that to solve for any problem, we must learn about it with those who see it most closely in their day-to-day, and that solutions to a crisis as vast as climate change can come in different shapes and sizes! 

Continue to donate to Teach For Pakistan to support the critical work of empowering future leaders to think more deeply about important topics such as climate change! 

Dear friend,  

We hope you are well and the past few months have seen you through an eventful summer. Teach For Pakistan has been home to much exciting news, and we are all ready for the new academic year to begin in full-swing. June marked the end of the 2021 cohort’s two years in school as they graduated the Fellowship and began their journey as Alumni. While we were sad to part with Fellows, we are excited for the start of their Alumnihood and witnessing all they are capable of! In July, we prepared to welcome our newest addition to the Teach For Pakistan community - the 2023 cohort - for their six weeks of pre-placement training before they began teaching in schools. Our 2022 cohort concluded their first year of teaching in schools and prepared their strategies for the upcoming school year, informed by their learnings from the first year of the Fellowship.

Details of major highlights from the past quarter are outlined below. 

An ever-growing Alumni network! 

June marked the end of 32 second-year Fellows’ end of Fellowship and their induction into Teach For Pakistan’s Alumni network, now up to 215 leaders! This Alumni Induction Ceremony was particularly special as we got together to celebrate the 2021 cohort, who entered the program at a time when the public school system was experiencing fatigue post-pandemic, and embodied the resilience and courage needed at the time, reminding us once again of the hope needed to partake in this work. 

This group of extraordinary educational leaders taught more than 3,000 students across 22 public schools in Islamabad throughout the course of their Fellowship. In just their first 8 months of teaching, their students grew on average by 1.74 academic years, a remarkable feat considering students had just gotten back to learning after extended school closures on account of COVID-19! With every intention of continuing their impact, the 2021 cohort designed and executed 18 Community Partnership Projects, meant as solutions to systemic barriers that obstruct students’ learning and growth. 

The highlight of the Induction Ceremony was the Leadership Breakthroughs - brief talks delivered by graduating Fellows and students, focusing on multiple areas of work undertaken throughout the Fellowship to improve student growth. We heard from both Fellows and students recounting their stories of triumph in the face of obstacles blocking their path to achievement. These Breakthroughs are a testimony to how this cohort not only understood but embodied what it means to work as a collective in the pursuit of something greater.

The full playlist for these talks can be found here.

To commemorate Fellows’ achievements, their parents and students also attended the event, and witnessed first-hand the culmination of their hard work over the past two years along with envisioning what their futures would look like - inevitably bright and hopeful. This Ceremony was a reminder that though the Fellowship is designed for only two years, the Alumni movement is a life-long commitment to the promise of ending educational inequity in Pakistan. This is only the start of witnessing how these leaders will expand on their journeys in a multitude of ways, and we are honored to have been a part of how that journey started. 

Bringing more leaders into the system

As we said goodbye to our 2021 cohort, we prepared to welcome Teach For Pakistan’s 10th Fellowship Cohort into the program! The 2023 cohort is a group of 68 exceptional individuals, selected from a total of 3,319 applications. The past quarter has been spent in the preparation and execution of Training Institute for the 2023 cohort, a six-week intensive pre-placement training to prepare Fellows for their time in schools. 

Throughout Training Institute, Fellows were grounded in TFP’s vision and theory of change and trained in pedagogical sessions on how to build classroom practices with the intention to improve student outcomes. Fellows are also required to take part in an immersive Summer School experience where they apply their learnings from Institute in the classrooms, and get a taste of what it’s like to do the real thing!

Back to School! 

94 second-year Fellows have spent summer break preparing for their return back to school for what will be the last year of their Fellowship. As schools closed for summer break in May, these Fellows came together to reflect on their journey so far and articulate their hopes and aspirations for the second year. Fellows also used their end-of-year assessment data to audit progress in their first year and will be developing classroom strategies and practice informed from this data to improve student outcomes. They have resumed school in the first week of August, and we eagerly anticipate what their last year of the Fellowship will shape up to be. 

Your support has enabled our Fellows’ journeys till now, and will continue to sustain the work they do in the future. We are excited not only to witness all our Fellows and Alumni will do in the future, but are thrilled to go on this journey with you as our most loyal supporters and friends.