Faculty to help Afghan educators

IU faculty members plan to travel to Afghanistan within the next couple months as part of a $38 million project to help rebuild the educational system in the impoverished country.\nA consortium composed of representatives of IU, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Washington, D.C.-based Academy for Educational Development received a grant in late January from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The endowment, which allocates $4 million to IU specifically, will fund the consortium's Afghanistan Higher Education Project. \n"This project is not so much about bricks and mortar as it is about developing capacity," said Terry Mason, director of IU's Center for Social Studies and International Education and associate professor in the School of Education. "By helping the Afghanis themselves rebuild their educational system, we will be restoring a key part of civil society."\nMason said IU faculty developed the initiative after USAID made a public request for proposals to facilitate the restoration of Afghanistan's infrastructure. \nThe political and social turmoil of the past few decades, he said, brought about the virtual collapse of Afghanistan's educational system. Schools shut down and teachers were dismissed for advocating ideas not aligned with the teachings of the Taliban.\n"Because of a quarter-century of conflict and the succession of regimes -- Soviets, Mujahideen and Taliban -- there are very few university educators left in the country with master's or doctoral degrees," said Mitzi Lewison, an associate professor in the School of Education's Department of Language Education. "This project has the potential to begin to change this situation."\nM. Nazif Shahrani, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, who served as a former assistant to Afghanistan's Minister of Higher Education, said an estimated 120,000 Afghan teachers will need to be trained. \n"Four million students attend tens of thousands of schools that have opened in the last four years (since the end of the Taliban's rule)," he said. "These schools, however, exist basically in name."\nFaculty from the U.S. consortium -- experts in an array of educational fields -- will focus on improving teaching methods among Afghan educators at the secondary and university levels, Mason said. Today, he said, just 16 Afghan institutions of higher education train aspiring teachers. The USAID project will seek to work with these institutions to map out priorities for their organization and development, he said.\nIn addition to the U.S. educators who will travel to Afghanistan, at least 24 Afghans will also come to IU to pursue master's degrees in education, Lewison said. \nLewison said her main role in Afghanistan will be to work with the teachers there to improve methods of teaching English in the universities and secondary schools.\nLewison emphasized the need for cultural awareness among project participants. \n"At this point, teachers have few up-to-date materials, and most have little knowledge of modern teaching methods that could greatly help with instruction," she said. "At the same time, we need to be culturally sensitive, making sure that Afghan educators work with us as partners to change, adapt and create materials that will work in Afghanistan."\nShe identified low salaries as a major factor in how difficult it has been to attract quality teachers to the profession there. \n"Until salaries increase," she said, "the outcome of enhancing educational opportunities is still in question."\nThe Afghanistan Higher Education Project continues work that began last spring when IU's School of Education paired with Kabul Education University, Lewison said. Four faculty members from the Afghan university's English department traveled to Bloomington to work with IU School of Education professors to modernize their curricula. The project was funded by a grant from the Fulbright Educational Partnership Program, she said.\n"(It) has been an extremely rewarding program, but small in scope," she said. "The USAID project provides the resources to build on what we started with the Fulbright project."\nLewison is representing IU and the Afghanistan Higher Education Project at USAID meetings in Washington, D.C. this week to determine logistics and a more specific time frame for the project, Mason said.\n"The concrete things are still being ironed out with USAID," he said. "Sending people to a place like Afghanistan just doesn't happen without overcoming some obstacles first."\nAs of now, the consortium expects participating faculty to depart for Afghanistan in the next couple months, Mason said, adding that plans for the event are still in the very beginning stages.