"An Impact We Could Not Predict"

Four years after the tsunami struck in Indonesia, Penn GSE Associate Professor Kathy Schultz Gr'91 reflects on the long-term work of rebuilding the educational system there.

For the fourth year running, Penn GSE Associate Professor Kathy Schultz Gr'91 was reporting back from Aceh, the Indonesian province that was so hard hit in the 2004 tsunami.

Since July 2005, Schultz and an assortment of GSE faculty and students had been Penn's on-the-ground response to that disaster, focusing on rebuilding the educational infrastructure in the area.

At first those efforts focused on triage. When GSE first traveled to Aceh, just six months after the tsunami, the work was about emergency relief. Six volunteers worked with over 100 Achenese teachers from across the province, introducing them to literacy, science, and mathematics methods and foundational ideas about teaching and learning.

Working in partnership with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and with funding from Pearson plc, Schultz and her team developed that approach in response to the severe teacher shortage that resulted from the tsunami. With the loss of so much of its teaching force, the province needed to prepare replacement teachers, and the GSE team introduced Western child-centered methods to "master teachers" who would in turn mentor their new colleagues. The teachers returned to their schools with new materials, new ways of teaching learned by participating in new learning contexts, and new ideas about how to make their teaching more responsive to children.

In two subsequent visits, Schultz and her colleagues turned their energies to deepening and strengthening the new educational ideas and frameworks, and sustaining the growth of the educational improvements.

"In Aceh," Schultz explains, "there is a professional development system, called the gugus, that brings teachers together from several schools in a geographic area. Our goal was to introduce a set of processes that could be used in schools or during the gugus meetings to help revitalize the educational system."

For instance, during last year's sessions, the GSE team introduced "collaborative mentoring" to the Achenese, in which teachers work with each other to share knowledge and help one another address challenges in their classrooms. In addition, the workshops featured processes used in GSE's teacher education programs to plan units collaboratively and also introduced the teachers to a Japanese system called Lesson Study. But, explains Schultz, "Last year we were only able to spend one day with each group of teachers."

In March of this year, Schultz made her fourth trip-the last to be funded by the Pearson gift-to the region. And, this time, she asked for two-day sessions.

Says Schultz, "On the first day we demonstrated the processes, drawing the teachers into the work. On the second day we asked the teachers themselves to plan together and lead the workshop. Our goal-similar to prior years-was to find ways for the teachers to continue to teach new teachers the processes."

Like so many of the international aid organizations, the IRC recently left the region, while its partner organization, the Consortium for Assistance and Recovery toward Development in Indonesia (CARDI), will depart in the fall.

But Schultz is optimistic that Penn's involvement in the recovery efforts has made a positive impact. The long-term goal of the program, she says, was to spur a self-sustaining professional development movement in the region-to provide teachers with the tools and the ability to share and improve their knowledge of teaching, children, and curriculum. Says Schultz, "Ultimately we wanted to make ourselves obsolete. We hoped the teachers would adapt and use the ideas we introduced to improve their pedagogical practices."

And while IRC and CARDI will be gone from the scene, Schultz hopes to continue to visit and work with teachers. She concludes, "One of our greatest challenges was teaching across the cultural and language barriers that often seemed to obscure meaning and leave us more questions than answers about the efficacy of our work.... Yet in small moments, and often through nods and smiles, participants conveyed gratitude and understanding, suggesting that the ideas might travel to places we couldn't imagine and have an impact we could not predict."