Abstract:

Since 2004 students and faculty from the U.S. have worked for a month each year with teachers in 3 rural schools Domasi, Malawi, to seed sustainable change projects that hold potential to save lives and educate children and youth. Partners worried about learner outcomes in the country’s public education initiative, begun in 1994. Educational opportunity promise, but many factors mitigated against attending and persisting in school. A continuing struggle with poverty and establishing functional government, caused these factors to persist. In a farming economy, the need for child workers and cost of school fees sharply restrict access to education. A shortage of schools and teachers prevails, class size can be 140+. Teachers have scant preparation and lack in-service development opportunities. School reading and writing materials are nearly non-existent, must be shared across many learners or used by the teacher only. Hunger keeps children from attending, and older girls can miss a week of school each month. Language diversity constitutes yet another barrier. School is conducted in Chichewa, with English taught as a second language. Non-speakers of ChiChewa are unable to understand the language of instruction, and lack a bridge to English, the language of instruction in Standard 5 onward, and of the Standard 8 exam which structures access to secondary school.

In Malawi, literacy is linked to staying alive. According the Malawi Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment for 2015-2016, 10.6% of the population ages 15 and above test positive for HIV/AIDS. Prevalence varies geographically, ranging from 5.3 percent in the Central East to 18.2 percent in Blantyre City, close to where our work is located. Most importantly, however, the rates of HIV/AIDS infection in Malawi decrease with the level of education (Kadzamira, Banda, Kamlongera & Swainson, 2001).

In 2004, a typical Standard 1 class held 125 children, but by Standard 8, class size had shrunk to 65. In 2017, after 13 years of projects targeted at reasons for school-leaving, 94 learners sat for the Standard 8 exam. In 2004, of the 65 Standard 8 learners, only 3 scored high to attend secondary; by 2010 this number reached 40, and although it fluctuates with variations in school leaders and the experience of teachers, it continues to swell over time. Rates of selection to secondary lag, however, because there are not enough secondary schools. Among our youth and teacher colleagues in Domasi, numbers have attended secondary and college, forming a slowly developing working class: teachers, nurses, business-owners, accountants, news reporters, and government employees, among other professions.

Making school effective and accessible saves lives, and drastically alters life chances. It is also clear that trans-global partnerships that support change agents on the ground can powerfully impact educational change. Our paper details successful projects to date, but its major focus is on developing strategies for sustainability. Working from our current point of knowledge, how do we move forward to fully hand over maintenance and generativity of projects to survive across time, politics, and institutional flux? How do we build institutional and teacher capacity, and teacher leadership, in ways that fully turn ownership over to our colleagues in Domasi?

Keywords:

Trans-global partnerships, leadership for educational development.