Project Outcomes

SeeBeyondBorders is focused on three main areas of development:

• Quality Teaching
• Building Education Infrastructure
• Community and Family Support

Each of these areas is interlinked and fundamental to supporting quality education.  They are described in more detail below.  Individual projects can be viewed in the Projects List.

Quality Teaching

Teach the Teacher Workshops

Aiming to enhance the quality of teaching, “Bringing Maths to Life” workshops are our first initiative.*  The workshops last for three days and run consecutively in Battambang and Siem Reap.  They are run twice annually. We have at least six foreign teachers for each programme, working in pairs for each workshop. There are 20-30 Khmer teachers per pair of facilitators, 60 - 90 Khmer teachers per workshop or 120-180 Khmer teachers annually. The workshop topic is Maths covering Pre-school, Years 1-3 and Years 4-6 content. Longer term we plan to include “general knowledge” topics that tie into the Khmer curriculum and cover areas such as: Geography/science & nature; health & body / technologies; world history etc.

Resource Packs

Providing resource packs assists teachers to introduce ‘child-centred’ learning into their classrooms empowering students to take an active part in their own learning. Our locally sourced resources will complement the workshop programme and materials developed will initially relate to mathematics. Without the use of appropriate types of resources, students have little if any exposure to a concrete understanding of number and space. Such an understanding is vital before a student can progress to related abstract concepts, such as the algorithms as found in Khmer textbooks.

School visits

Following the Teach the teacher workshops we will follow up with Khmer teachers who attended.  We will spend 3 days working with teachers, together with an interpreter in the classroom, and focus on classroom management and assessing resourcing requirements

Mentoring programme

Provides the training of eligible teachers to mentor teachers in their own schools who have attended SeeBeyondBorders workshops. A SeeBeyondBorders trained supervisor will rotate around the schools in the programme to act in an advisory / trainer capacity for the local teacher mentors in the schools.

University partnerships

We aim to build partnerships with Cambodian universities, or other similar organisations, that support young adults with superior English skills; the objective being to have these students act as interpreters on the school visit programme. Benefits would be bilateral in that the students would be learning about being an interpreter and developing their English skills as a result of direct interaction with native English speakers.

Building Education Infrastructure

Emphasis is on ‘access’ to education, which involves a range of activities from helping to build and operate schools, to helping families hampered by the impacts of poverty to gain access to education for themselves and subsequent generations.  This often requires us to support capacity building, enhancing communities’ economic situations in a variety of ways. An appropriate learning environment is essential if children’s minds are to be captivated and allowed to expand. Children need spaces that support appropriate learning and SeeBeyondBorders works with partners to provide these whether it be a new coat of paint or treatment of woodworm to new school buildings.

Community and Family Support

Mini Schools

Mini schools are simple constructions in a village that cater to children in Grades 1 and 2. They help to build a tradition of education in the villages and support children’s learning until they are old enough to travel to a government school. Government schools are generally not built nearby because villages do not have a hisotory of sending their children to school. The establishment of a mini school in the village helps to encourage school attendance and introduce the habit of sending children to school. Once this habit is established, there is more likelihood that families will allow their children to continue their education in a government school from Grade 3 onwards.

Nutrition

The school house or hall, in Old Piek Snaing village provides children with the opportunity to learn and have a meal, which is simply not available at home.  Soup or “Bor’bor” is served once or twice a week and the ingredients are bought in the market and then prepared and cooked in the kitchen adjoining the hall. The kitchen is a hot smoky place and the cooks often have their small children in there while the wood fires are heating the cauldrons of bor’bor. According to Stuart Conway, co-founder of Trees, Water & People, a not-for-profit based in Fort Collins, Colorado, respiratory problems caused by exposure to smoke from unventilated cooking fires kill more than 1.6 million women and children a year in developing countries.

Recently we have discussed the possibility of funding the construction of a chimney on the cook house and also of erecting some form of veranda covering over the area outside the kitchen where the washing up gets done.  SeeBeyondBorders is looking for sponsorship of this project, including a construction team and the possibility of utilising a stove that is more fuel efficient and therefore less costly to run.

Salas

SeeBeyondBorders, under the guidance of its partner Dhammayietra and coordinated by local Old People’s Associations (OPS’s), assists with the construction of “Salas” which are the community centres in remote settlements, serving as places of learning, of worship, or for community celebration.   Salas provide the elderly with a project, a sense of place and then somewhere to gather their neighbours, friends and families, helping them re-establish their identity and value as the conduit for their cultural heritage to the next generation.

Rice Scholarships

Children often perform a variety of essential tasks to ensure the survival of their family.  These may include collecting water, working in the fields or selling things.  Due to this crucial role within their family, it is difficult for some families to afford to send their children to school.  These families are trapped in a cycle of poverty from one generation to the next.

Sometimes the only solution to break this cycle and lessen the responsibility of the child to the family’s welfare is to supplement the family’s needs.  This would include basic necessities such as rice.  This can help to alleviate the financial burden placed on the family by the child’s attendance at school.

Support programs such as these can be extremely resource intensive as they require each family’s relevant circumstances to be assessed and the child’s attendance at school tracked and monitored.

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* SeeBeyondBorders acknowledges the generosity of the East Timor Teacher Placement Program (ETTPP) for sharing its successful model of ongoing Primary Mathematics Teach-the-Teacher courses, developed & implemented in East Timor since 2007 by volunteer teachers from the Dioceses of Broken Bay & Parramatta in Sydney Australia in a Catholic education partnership.