Education and Education Reform
Agriteam has considerable experience implementing education reform projects in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. We have found that there are universal themes present across the world characterizing the reform process, including:
- reform agendas prioritized as urgent in nature
- decentralization, with the school or district as the site of change
- educators becoming professionals and lifelong learners
- ministries developing more outcomes-based curriculums and assessment practices
- teachers being encouraged to use more learner-centred instructional practices
- communities becoming more involved in the education process and ensuring schools are more accountable to their students
We work with developing country partners to encourage these themes and move through the phases of the reform process. We have advised ministries at the policy and planning level, as well as developed programs where schools and teachers are the focus of change. Through the Canada-South Africa Teacher Development Project, for example, we worked with the national South African Department of Education to develop an inclusive and participatory national teacher professional development framework. In Tanzania, we worked within the Ministry of Education to support key partners as they promoted gender-responsive educational practices.
Through two CIDA-funded projects—Support to Egyptian Primary Schooling and The Early Childhood Education Enhancement Project—we are helping the Ministry of Education in Egypt carry out education reform on a massive scale. Our work is targeted at building the capacity of the Ministry—at a systems level—to implement reform initiatives that are sustainable, particularly at the primary and pre-primary levels. In Jordan, our Supporting Jordan’s Education Reform Project works to improve the quality of education (kindergarten to grade 12) by supporting the Ministry of Education. With schools as the unit of change, systems for continuous improvement have been developed collaboratively with the MoE, which are then supported by the districts, central ministry, mothers and fathers and community-based educational councils.
Our Improvement of Basic Education in Piura, Peru Project has created an integrated approach to educational reform where communities, local governments, and regional departments are mobilizing for change. Its model of teacher professional development is being replicated in other jurisdictions in rural Peru. The second phase of this project focuses on democratic governance in education. We model another form of teacher professional development through our Complementary Sector Reform Project in Bangladesh that involves ongoing support for teachers at the school level. In our Strengthening Basic Education in Western China Project, we helped the government carry out teacher professional development using distance education technologies.