South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"
By Simon Deng
Providing on-skills training to learners is difficult when the education providers are themselves lacking skills. This is a situation South Sudan is working towards changing by engaging education practitioners from China to provide skills to teachers and education managers.
The China Aided Technical Cooperation Project on Education in South Sudan is providing a platform that lets educationists use approaches that develops skills of the learners rather than imposing on them what they aren’t gifted at.
It is becoming a household program among education enthusiasts who note its great impact in education across South Sudan.
“The second phase of the China Aided Technical Cooperation Project on Education in South Sudan has come with two objectives; one is to review the text book for primary, from primary 2 up to primary 8 and then to print the textbook from primary 2 also to primary 8,” Olok told The Dawn in an interview in Juba.
“They also give funds for printing science subjects in secondary school, especially mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, ICT and English and the second objective of China Aided Technical Cooperation Project on Education in South Sudan is training teachers plus head teachers plus principals; that means training teachers and managers,” he said.
David Dhal Malual, the deputy head teacher of Jada Jedid Primary School is one of those who received training under the project.
It was a four months capacity building from April to July tailored around South Sudan’s education system, Malual told The Dawn.
“That training has changed my teaching career and experience,” he said.
“It was a very good training. It was a practical training in English, mathematics and science.”
Under the training course, teachers were provided first hand visit to schools in China to see how the education system works, and more especially when it’s geared towards nation building.
“The Chinese told us that the teaching methodology must be based on child-centered teaching method,” Malual said.
“It should not be teacher-centered. The work of a teacher is to guide learners on what to do. Teachers should focus on whether the children are understanding what is in the textbook,” he said.
Under the program, Chinese tutors train South Sudanese teachers on how to use the child centered teaching method, Olok corroborated.
“The testimony of our people is that when they came we have seen these training have got a very huge impact on their performances,” he said.
“They were very happy and even they were saying that this training has benefited us a lot, and when we go back to teach, we will not be the same again.”
According to him, the training aims to reach more than 600 South Sudanese teachers and education managers.
“We need training to cover a good number of teachers because we are getting that our teachers both primary and secondary are benefiting from these training,” Olok said.
According to the program, educational textbooks will also be printed and provided to South Sudan.
“We have many teachers trained here and there are many books that we have printed,” a Chinese official implementing the project told The Dawn.
“The two phases of the technical cooperation are majorly based on review and development of text book on three subjects, English, Mathematics and Science. In phase one, we worked on primary one and phase two we concluded from primary 2 to primary 8, and we also printed text books for primary schools and also secondary schools,” the official who preferred not to be mentioned by name said.
“We will continue supporting,” the official said.
