Keep Pakistan Learning

Dear Supporters,

We wish you a very safe, healthy, and happy New Year! We want to thank all our supporters and advocates for your continued support throughout a difficult year across the globe. Through your generosity, our Teacher-Fellows have worked tirelessly and innovatively to create and sustain safe and engaging learning environments for their ~5,552 students across 40 schools in Islamabad’s rural sectors. They have partnered with students, parents, and community members to solve for contextual challenges borne out of systemic injustice and exacerbated by the pandemic.

We have grown our movement to provide critical support to the Islamabad public school system, and are now also delivering the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training’s project on Improving Recruitment and On-boarding of Teachers in the Federal system, leveraging our approach. This ground-breaking, three-year partnership not only enables Teach For Pakistan to grow but also to seed our learnings and insights in the wider system so that one day, all of our children have the education they deserve.

The following report provides an overview of our main activities, as well as two spotlights from our Fellows’ work with students.

Training and placement of the 2021 cohort

This August, we proudly welcomed our 2021 cohort of Teacher-Fellows to the Teach For Pakistan movement. These inspired young Fellows will be teaching full-time for two years in underserved communities across Islamabad. We have trained and placed 45 Fellows from the 2021 cohort in 22 schools in the Federal Directorate of Education school system. Intended as a boot camp to prepare Fellows for day 1 of teaching, the Training Institute focused on developing participants’ critical mindsets, knowledge, and skills in four leadership domains: self-leadership, leadership in the classroom, leadership to mobilize people (community and collective action), and leadership in the larger system. After three weeks of intense pedagogical training, our Fellows stepped into their classrooms for a two-week practicum followed by another week of training before formally entering their schools on day 1 of teaching in September.

Growing our movement: launch of the 2022 Recruitment campaign

Teach For Pakistan launched the 10^th campaign for its Fellowship 2022 cohort in October to recruit 110 exceptional and visionary leaders to the Teach For Pakistan movement. This year’s campaign is centered around instilling hope and a sense of possibility to solve for systemic problems within education in Pakistan. While there are many negative and hopeless narratives that our young people are surrounded by, this campaign is a call to action to “FlipTheScript” and challenge the systemic realities that drive those narratives.

Fellow Sameen’s kids writing their own stories!

Fellow Sameen Kamran teaches English to 5^th and 6^th graders at a public school in Bhara Kahu, Islamabad. When she first stepped into her classroom in October 2020, she found astonishingly low English literacy levels among her students. Their resources to English language were limited to their assigned textbooks. Sameen decided to introduce her students to the world of stories and began by reading short stories to her students during and after her English lessons. Children who were previously intimidated by the foreign language began to excitedly and impatiently look forward to the storytelling lessons. Seeing their interest pique, Sameen conducted various sessions to help her students learn to dissect short stories and their structure so they can understand the art of writing stories themselves.

Fast forward to November 2021, Sameen’s kids are not only enjoying reading books but are writing their own stories! As a group, they brainstorm, do story-mapping exercises, and develop multiple drafts of their stories before submitting them to their teacher. Her students have recently written a book, The Little Astronaut, and with the help of their teacher, are currently in the process of getting it published and printed. Sameen says that this particular story was chosen to be published because its “protagonist embodies determination and resilience in the face of odds stacked against her” which she believes is a message that symbolizes how she and her students operate in their classrooms.

Fellow Iman’s little activists

Fellow Iman from the 2020 cohort teaches Social studies and General Knowledge to 4^th and 5^th graders in a school in Islamabad’s Tarnol sub-sector. Iman’s school had a culture of tolerance for physical and verbal abuse, amongst students and from teachers to students in the form of corporal punishment. Iman knew that her students needed to have a healthier outlet for their expressions and that the classroom space needed to feel like a safe environment for it to be conducive to learning. Iman arranged a conversation with her students about the circle of violence and how incidence of a violent childhood can lead to violence in adulthood. Once her students had understood the implications of violence, verbal and physical, she led a conversation with them where each student apologized to their peers that they had verbally or physically hurt.

Once student-to-student aggression was addressed, the students were more wary of corporal punishment by other teachers in the school. Iman explained the idea of a power structure in this relationship and how that needs to be broken by using the power of one’s voice. A few weeks later, Iman’s students learned of a peer being hit by another teacher in the school. Much to Iman’s surprise, her students led a protest against violence and marched across their school to demand their right to a violence-free school. Upon seeing this, the school Principal took notice of the incident and called an official meeting of all teachers to inquire who was engaging in corporal punishment, why, and to work together to stop this from happening again.

Links:

• 2022 Fellowship application: Recruitment booklet
• CEO, Teach For Pakistan speaking about educational inequity