By Sahar Gul | Program Associate
Dear Supporters and Friends,
We wish a very joyous Eid to all those celebrating around the world! This Eid, on behalf of Teach For Pakistan, we are grateful for the unwavering support you have extended us since COVID-19 hit the world and disrupted learning for our over 5,000 brilliant students. Through your partnership, our Teacher-Fellows have worked tirelessly over the past two years to ensure that over 5,000 students don’t stop learning. Together, they have shown it is possible for all of Pakistan’s children to learn and thrive, despite all barriers.
Since school routines have resumed after the last wave of COVID-19, our students and Fellows have redoubled their efforts to bridge the learning gap and build life-long learning habits and ambitions. Across schools, we are seeing accelerated literacy programs customized to student needs, libraries being established and career readiness programs being launched by Fellows. All of this is made possible through the support and collaboration of the parents, other community members, and school staff.
This report provides a brief overview of our key activities since the start of this year and gives you a peek inside two of our Fellows’ classrooms.
Growing our movement of leaders
Second-year Fellows who started their Fellowship in 2020 will be completing their tenure in June to join the 146-strong network of Teach For Pakistan Alumni. Fellowship Alumni enter a diverse range of fields, including but not limited to, public policy, multinational corporations, policy think tanks, consultancies, and graduate school programs. This ensures that our collective impact is made through multiple critical pressure points in the system, each of which is important in the broader movement to end educational inequity.
As the 2020 cohort of leaders completes the Fellowship, another one prepares to begin its journey. This April, we have concluded the recruitment campaign to induct 110 new Fellows who will begin teaching in Islamabad’s public schools in the upcoming academic year starting August. Over the last six months, our team has met incredibly inspired young people across 24 Pakistani universities who are determined to take ownership of the systemic issues in education, beginning with one classroom and school.
Girls can STEM!
Students, particularly, girls, enrolled in under-resourced public schools have limited opportunities to participate in project-based learning or experimentation that can spark passion for STEM subjects and careers. In addition, they often internalize societal stereotypes about what subjects and professions are considered a “natural fit” for women to pursue, thereby curtailing their curiosity for Science. To foster a spirit of academic and intellectual excellence in young students, Teach For Pakistan conducted a STEM Academic Olympiad, the culmination of months of work and preparation at the school level. On the final competition day in April, 160 participating students from 29 schools competed against their peers in a full-day of back-to-back rounds with multiple-choice questions and some nail-biting buzzer rounds. They were cheered on by over 600 parents, teachers, principals and school friends.
The inspired Little Women of Jaba Taili
Fellow Haleema, teaching in a girls’ public school in the Jaba Taili community in Islamabad, shares individual chapters of the novel "Little Women" with her students during their weekly reading days in an effort to introduce works of fiction to her students and build on their literacy skills. The students are now using these chapters to compile their own novels! This exercise has generated curiosity and interest in the students without overwhelming them and now they look forward to completing the novel each day whilst simultaneously improving their literacy skills. They have created their own versions of the novel as pictured below.
Poet Laiba Zahid on ‘Friends’
Fellow Mahnur has been working hard with her brilliant Grade 6 class to make her students more comfortable in reading, writing, and speaking in English. Mahnur decided to work on her students’ language acquisition by exposing them to different stories and poems and by encouraging them to listen to various audio aides. As a result of their determination, one of Mahnur’s students, Laiba Zahid, from a government girls’ school in Dhoke Gangal got her poem published in Dawn Young World magazine. In it, she speaks about how she values her friends and the role they play in her life.
Links:
By Sahar Gul | Project Leader
By Ghazanfar Ali Khan | Project Leader
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