July 21, 2010 Categorized under Capacity Building, Featured, Internship

Internship programs: developing local capacity about laptops and learning

Group of Interns that worked as trainers during the July HoS and Teachers Capacity Building

Maybe the most important goal of OLPC in Rwanda is to introduce powerful learning ideas in the society, showing that children are able of much more than school usually offers and computers are a fantastic tool to develop this potential. However, to make such goal sustainable, it is necessary to develop local capacity that really understands the principles behind laptops and learning.

We need to reach people in different levels and spread the ideas not only among school’s teachers, but in people that will support OLPC initiative, people that will be teachers of the teachers, students, school managers, politicians and so on. We need to help the society to change the “grammar of school” speaking a new language that goes beyond teaching, and focus mainly on learning.

As part of this larger perspective, we run different kinds of internship programs in Rwanda. We mostly focus just graduated students (both from universities and secondary schools), but we also have actions on future teachers that are studying in universities and Teachers Training Centers – TTCs.

At the same time that this action is building capacity for people in the country, it is helping to support the activities at schools, contributing in the growth of examples about powerful ways to learn with laptops.

What is capacity building in our perspective?

Our internship program is about learning. Our objective is to help the intern to understand the principles of constructionism and how they can be implemented in classrooms. However, we don’t accomplish that through theoretical seminars, but through the consistent relations between practice and reflection, where the theory comes to contribute in the comprehension of what was observed in the schools.

Developing capacity goes much beyond the training of skills. You can train people to perform simple tasks, but contributing to the cognitive development of a person is a much longer and work intensive task. People need to construct a genuine understanding about their actions, process which is always individual and that we can only indirectly intervene (you can’t think for other person, only try to guide their reasoning in the right direction).

We expect that our interns, more than blindly repeating what we do, understand the principles behind our actions, and become able to critically think about what they are doing and to come out with their versions of how to adapt the ideas to the local context.

To accomplish that, the interns are involved in almost all moments of our work. They are engaged in the planning the actions we are going to carry out at schools, and than go to the field to implement them. This field work, with teachers and students, provide them the elements, the experience, to reflect upon.

We encourage them to document their thoughts on personal blogs, making easier to see the changes and development of their concepts. The blogs are also a feedback mechanism, where we can know what is going through their minds.

Interns Meeting in the OLPC Office at KIST

Once a week, the whole group meets to discuss what happen in the field. It is our role to provoke them towards a reflection over our actions. We usually introduce some theoretical concepts in order to explain what we observed at schools. During the meetings, we also assess our actions and re-plan for the next week of work. It is also part of the internship to learn how to develop materials that can be used both for teacher’s trainings and by other trainers.

The different internship programs

The internship program started in an informal way in 2009. After volunteering in our school’s activities, Jimmy Parfait and Désiré Rwagaju became our first interns and more recently, part of our team.

Their main responsibility is to coordinate action in 2 models schools: Nonko and kagugu. They organize the work at schools offering Clubs, teacher’s capacity building and support in the class, coordinating with the other interns. They also are responsible for to help the school to take care of the laptop, teaching some simple maintenance and re-flashing techniques for some teachers.

In the first semester of 2010,  we started our first formal internship in a partnership with Kigali Institute of Education – KIE. We selected 8 students from a 100 students group that in 2009 worked as volunteers for OLPC. The selected undergraduates were Lote, Leandre, Pie, Emerthe, Theogene, Janvier, Jean Bosco e Evode.

They use part of their free time working in different actions at schools, like students clubs, teacher capacity building and support teachers in class, based on the needs of each school and their time availability. They have helped also in the creation of lesson plans, exemplifying the integration of the XO in the primary school national curriculum.

The last local interns program is the secondary schools internship for students that have full time availability (in Rwanda high-school graduates must wait 1 year before being able to enroll into universities). In this modality we have Jean Claude e Adrien. They have been working in the schools with students in clubs, supporting teachers in the class and also teaching in the teacher’s capacity building.

This year we have received interns from abroad for a period of 2 and 3 months. They are as part of the OLPC internship program, coordinated by Bryan Stuart.
From end of May to end of July we had 7 interns:
Robert from Kenya; Sam, from England; Tiffany, Whitney, Avram, Jackie from USA and Elisee from Rwanda but he has been attending college at USA.
Those interns came to help us in our on going actions at schools as well in teacher capacity building. Although, their main contribution is to cooperatively work with of our local interns, bringing their expertise for the work and sharing their experiences and vision about the world. On their side, they have the opportunity of learning from the experience and vision of the local people.

In other side, by coming to a country with so many challenges, facing the reality and acting in this reality we believe that this interns will be able to develop a deeper understand about what the laptop initiative is about.

Links to Interns Blogs

Learning Development Officer

Secondary school internship program

College Internship Program: KIE (Kigali Institute of Education) students

OLPC International Internship Program

By Silvia Kist and Juliano Bittencourt.

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