Diversity and local early grade material development – the case of Afghanistan

• In Event: Supporting students through culturally responsive teaching & learning materials: Lessons from Afghanistan, Liberia, and Morocco

Proposal

Years of conflict have had an enormous impact on education in Afghanistan. Despite the support of various organizations to the Afghan Ministry of Education (MoE) in the recent past, the MoE curriculum developers have not had the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and keep their skills up-to-date. As a result, the MoE has been using textbooks with old content. In 2016, the USAID funded activity, Afghan Children Read, was tasked to work with the MoE to develop a set of early grade reading materials based on research and contextualized to the Afghan context. Using a real-time, just-in-time capacity building approach, international experts guided the Ministry’s curriculum development staff step-by-step to develop quality early grade reading materials. This approach, Creative’s Rapid Production Model, brought together the MoE’s curriculum and teacher education departments over a period of eight months for teacher and learning material development. The materials were piloted in schools and through focus groups, interviews and working groups. Feedback was collected from a cross-section of society, including the early grade students, parents, school management, teachers, principals, religious and cultural leaders, district and provincial education officers as well as the deputy ministers for education, and the Afghan president, himself. Nearly 2,000 people provided their input on the materials. The results are a set of teaching and learning materials in two languages (Dari and Pashto) that satisfy the different views and value systems present in Afghan society. Developing educational materials that acknowledge and recognize the diversity in society is paramount to facilitate unity.

This presentation will outline the material development process and how both the process and the product are an example of both building capacity around the science behind early grade reading and sensitivity to the Afghan context. We will share data from Afghan Children Read’s assessment of its reading materials and offer insight on how to adapt to a fluid and complex political and security environment in order to build consensus on what has potential to be highly charged and contentious for various social, linguistic and cultural groups.

Authors

• Susan Ayari, Creative Associates International

• Agatha van Ginkel, SIL-LEAD