Partnering with the Department of Education for literacy

One of the biggest activities I've been working on this month is the second phase of our organization's partnership with the Papua New Guinea National Department of Education (NDOE). For the past year, I've been the project manager for this partnership. The NDOE sought our assistance in Literacy education for elementary students. If you think about the education system in PNG, you can understand why the NDOE might look to outside organizations for help. Imagine creating a national curriculum in a country in which schoolchildren come from over 800 distinct languages; with an eventual goal of complete fluency in English, which some children have rarely heard before starting school; and training and monitoring thousands of teachers, many of whom teach in schools so remote there is no access by road and no cell phone signal for communication. What a task!

Literacy is one of the cornerstones of our work here. How will people benefit from the translated scriptures if no one can read them? And how can people connect into the benefits offered by the wider world without basic literacy skills? So when the request came from the NDOE, we were thrilled to have an opportunity to speak into the education system in PNG.

Last year was the first phase of the partnership. In October 2013, we hosted 30 elementary teacher trainers and NDOE officers at the Ukarumpa Training Centre, for a 3-week course in Creative Phonics. This is a phonics-based reading method designed by our Literacy consultants, and is suitable for literacy in any language--English, vernacular, or Tok Pisin (a language of wider communication in PNG). The 30 participants took those skills back to their regions, all over the country, and over the next few months trained 4,000 elementary teachers in the Creative Phonics method.

This year, the second phase of the partnership focused on what we called "the Vernacular Pathway to English." This training course explained basic principles of multilingual education, including showing ways of helping students bridge from their local vernacular ("mother-tongue") to English, which is the ultimate goal of the PNG Government. Twenty trainers and officers joined us at the Training Centre, from August 5-19, for this course. Last week they returned to their regional offices, and they will now train their teachers and implement the teaching as part of the newly designed curriculum.

My part in this year's workshop was creating the budget, working through details with our NDOE contacts, and making the travel arrangements for all of the participants (no small job, when people are traveling from all over PNG and need to arrive on the same day!).

It's been a very complicated year as this project has developed, but I'm glad we have the opportunity to work in national literacy education. Please pray for all of the trainers, officers, and teachers, who have major work remaining to finish the revision of the national curriculum and implement it in 2015. Also pray for the teaching staff of the Pathways course, who struggled with illness during the course and are now very tired from the intense work. And most of all, pray that the children of Papua New Guinea will develop a deep love of reading, fluency in all the languages they need, and the opportunity to read about God's great love for them.

(all photos by Crystal Pennington)