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Friday March 29, 2024

Accelerated learning and inclusion

By Dr Naazir Mahmood
October 28, 2019

As an educationist, I get opportunities to attend education-related events where lively interactions take place and one gets to learn a lot. A recent launch of the accelerated learning programme (ALP) by Care International in Pakistan and the Directorate of Curriculum and Teacher Education (DCTE) of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa offered me an excuse not only to share my ideas on inclusive education but also learn from other distinguished speakers.

Before sharing my thoughts on inclusive education with the readers, I must first highlight the good work that Care International in Pakistan and the DCTE have been doing for accelerated learning and inclusion. I may have serious objections against some of the steps the PTI government has taken, but if something positive comes up I feel a responsibility to appreciate and share it. First, something about Care International (CIP) – one of the world’s largest international development organizations – which has been working in Pakistan since 2005. It has an impressive development and humanitarian portfolio that has benefitted millions of people around the world.

One of the features of the CIP’s work is its focus on equality and inclusion, particularly in the areas of health, education, women’s empowerment, and emergency preparedness. Since my specialization is education, I will confine myself to it. Led by two dynamic ladies, Ayesha Salma and Rahat Rizwan, the CIP education programme has achieved a lot in the recent past. Realizing that the two most important challenges for education in Pakistan are access and transition, they have become a top priority for the CIP. Here access means access to quality education and transition implies movement from elementary to secondary education.

It is with this background that the CIP initiated an upgrade of the accelerated learning programme (ALP) for grade six to eight in partnership with the Directorate of Curriculum and Teacher Education, KP. Thanks to the 18th Amendment, passed in 2010, now education is constitutionally a fundamental human right, and the primary responsibility of its provision rests with the provinces. So, the CIP and the DCTE conceived an accelerated programme so that they could address the challenges to access and transition, especially for the girl child.

Accelerated learning, if implemented diligently and properly, can make a major difference to the lives of millions of children and young adults. It mainstreams out-of-school children by offering them a second chance to educational achievement. After the completion of an ALP, the children can rejoin the formal education system again, which they could not for whatever reason earlier. So, how does it work and how different it is from non-formal education (NFE)? Well, NFE can be both accelerated and non-accelerated – that is, moving with the normal pace of formal or mainstream education system.

What the CIP and the DCTE have done is that through the ALP, they have condensed the content of middle-level education – from grades six to eight. The children enrolled in the ALP can complete the condensed content in 18 months instead of the 36-month duration of the mainstream schooling. The key here is not to compromise on benchmarks and quality of education, otherwise the whole concept becomes futile and questionable. To do this, the CIP and DCTE appear to have kept in mind the specific needs of out-of-school children.

Subject specialists from the DCTE have ensured the horizontal and vertical alignments of learning outcomes. Perhaps the best feature of this accelerated programme is that other development agencies and service providers may also take advantage of this groundwork and build up on this. But whoever uses this ALP, the timetable for learning and teaching activities must be a little flexible in accordance with the socioeconomic conditions of the learners. I stress that it should be a ‘little flexible’ because if it is too flexible, the basic purpose of accelerated learning will not materialize.

If the out-of-school children are unable to gain the requisite knowledge and skills they will not be able to reenter the mainstream. The main objective of alternative learning models is inclusion, which means that those children who for one reason or the other have missed the train can hop on at a later stage. The CIP and DCTE are making use of the existing facilities that are available at the local level. For example, a local community or local-government entity provides existing schools and an educated person from the same vicinity starts teaching.

This model engages mostly part-time teachers or services of existing government teachers. The likely pitfall is that if a government teacher starts teaching at the ALP, the mainstream schooling may suffer. So in such cases a preferred approach will be to hire an educated youth rather than some existing government teachers. An interesting aspect of this programme is that the CIP and DCTE had already pilot-tested it in 34 ALP centres in Swat district under the Inspire Project funded by the USAID Small Grant and Ambassador’s Fund. This piloting proved to be pretty helpful for expanding the scope of the programme.

And now something about inclusion as a wider concept. At the launch, I was expected to share his ideas about inclusion. The first point I made was highlighting the difference between inclusion and integration which are sometimes used interchangeably but do have some technical differences. The term ‘integration’ was first widely used in the US during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It meant that segregation on the basis of race was not welcome and all children were supposed to integrate in common educational institutions. Soon, the term integration gave way to other dimension of the process.

Ideally, inclusion should be based on the principles that no child will be excluded on the basis of caste, colour, creed, or capacity. No exclusion will be done on the basis of gender or socioeconomic conditions. If the term ‘integration’ was an antonym to ‘segregation’, ‘inclusion’ was opposed to ‘exclusion’. In many cases integration simply means admitting someone to the group. It is quite possible that a child of a different cast, colour, creed, or capacity is admitted to the group but still the process of inclusiveness is not complete and the child remains excluded even if she is physically in the group.

The first step towards effective inclusion is acceptance by the entire group. For example, children of various religious groups may be admitted to the same class but the majority group does not accept them as part of the whole. This lack of acceptance is a reflection of wider society and in many cases a true image of state policies too. For inclusion, society at large should be groomed and nurtured in a way that is accepting and welcoming of differences. If that does not happen, just physical admittance doesn’t mean much.

The second feature that I highlighted was respect. It is possible that a child of a different cast, creed, colour, or capacity, is accepted in the group but still the majority does not respect him or her. Acceptance may be a simple lack of objection – that is, the other children don’t object to the presence of a child who is different from the majority. Lack of objection does not necessarily lead to respect. For this to happen, we need to see differences and diversities with appreciation, empathy, respect,

The last two points made were about responsiveness and support. We may accept and respect, but unless we devise and implement a mechanism that responds to the needs of diverse groups and people with different abilities, inclusion will remain elusive. Lastly, the response to special needs should have a matching support not only in cognitive and emotional terms but also financially and physically, depending on specific cases.

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK and works in Islamabad.

Email: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk