A Message from Cambodia

FROM MR DAMIAN CRIPPS- MPS STAFF MEMBER

I have now been in Cambodia for a little over 10 months and life here is like nothing I have experienced before.

I am working out at a rural school called Rouhual Seong Lech, which has approximately 300 students (I work in the two Grade 1 classes). It takes me 45 minutes to get to the school in a tuk tuk or on the back of a colleagues’ motorbike and school starts at 7.00am (so they are quite early mornings for me). The school day finishes at 11am, but the students have to go to school 6 days a week. I also work in the SeeBeyondBorders office for the rest of the day, planning and coordinating our literacy program.

My colleague Kate and I have been writing and implementing a literacy program in the two Grade 1 classes (it is equivalent to our Prep) as a pilot program. We have based it around the way we teach literacy in the early years in our schools, however, we are not writing the program to teach English, we are writing it to teach Khmer (the national language of Cambodia). Considering I don’t speak the language, this has been extremely challenging, yet rewarding. Kate and I have made all of the resources for the program from scratch (levelled readers, Big Books, alphabet charts, games, high frequency words etc.) which has also been extremely challenging as they do not exist at all. Additionally, when creating these resources, we have needed to take into account language/contextual differences, cultural sensitivities, teacher knowledge and student environmental and socio-economic factors.

We have a few fantastic Cambodian SeeBeyondBorders staff who accompany us to the school each day to translate and model teaching/learning sessions, and we train and support the classroom teachers to deliver the program. It has been challenging for the teachers, as the approaches to teaching and learning we have introduced them to are extremely foreign to them and they have mostly handled it with courage and open mindedness. My Khmer language is improving each day, as the kids help me and correct me if I pronounce letters/sounds/words wrong. Quite often, they just give me a confused look and banter on to me in Khmer regardless of whether I understand them or not.

We have made great progress with our program, as their usual teaching method is ROTE learning from a student text book. The view and knowledge of students being able to read and write is that they can memorise words from the textbook and say them when they see them, and copy things written on the board.

Now, as we are approaching the end of the Cambodian school year, we have begun to assess the students. We have been pleasantly surprised and proud to witness our students reading simple texts they have never seen before – decoding words using language rules we have identified and taught and using strategies like context and picture cues, phonemic awareness etc. Most of our students are now reading at an equivalent grade 3-4 level here and can independently write several sentences if given a topic or picture as a stimulus. This is virtually unheard of in the Early Years classrooms in Cambodia. Our program has been so successful that we have been asked to roll it out into 6 more schools in the district next year. Unfortunately, the size of our NGO and funding prevents us from taking on more schools.

On a personal note, living in Battambang is full of a combination of exciting and beautiful experiences, but it does make me remember how fortunate we are in Australia. It is mostly hot and dusty wherever you go in the rural areas. However, I love the beautiful sunsets, the captivating smiles from the locals, the beauty of the landscapes, the incredibly ‘stripped back’ simplicity of life on display, the amazing expats you meet and the support you give each other, remind me of how lucky I am to be here. But the most rewarding part for me is seeing young kids LOVE and being captivated by a book being read to them and getting proud and excited at the fact they can now read and write.

I wish everybody a happy and successful term 3 and look forward to seeing everybody one day soon.