Teachers Without Borders

• Remarkable images:  Haiti:  Two Years after the Quake
• TWB iTunes podcast:  Earthquake Research and Education in Haiti
• TWB iTunes podcast:  Post-Earthquake Education Efforts in Haiti

Two years after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed over 70,000 people in China, a shallow earthquake leveled Port au Prince, Haiti. Up to 300,000 lost lives and over a million homeless. January 12th, 2012 marked the two-year anniversary of this natural and “national” disaster, the effects of which could have been mitigated.

While it is unfair to compare one country’s reconstruction efforts with another, I cannot help but illustrate what is possible when teacher leaders are in charge.

That is where a member of Teachers Without Borders’ Advisory Board comes in: Sharon Ravitch, Ph.D of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.  Dr. Ravitch currently serves as Senior International Advisor to the Haitian Ministry of Education. Along with her colleagues in Haiti and beyond, she is addressing policy issues and educational reconstruction, as well as the coordination of services.

But Sharon Ravitch is doing something even more fundamental. She is relying upon local educational leadership and teachers – the educational pillars necessary to maintain a society’s structural integrity. She knows that teachers have their ears to the ground, always listening to the rumbling just below the surface.  She illustrates how teachers are the ones who recognize the fault lines, serve as a community’s first responders, and represent the only true, durable multiplier of change.

The epicenter of the Chinese earthquake of May 12, 2008 was close enough to TWB’s center of operation in Dujiangyan China (where educators were studying science inquiry methods) to decimate everything.  We lost teachers and students.  These were shoddy buildings in a densely populated area.

At least they had some kind of disaster plan.  It was, however, wrong.

I arrived in China shortly afterward during the relief and recovery stage.  Within months, Chinese teachers, geologists, and school administrators explored earthquakes from a geological and structural perspective, informed by accurate science.  Groups of teachers gathered around shake tables, stretched springs and coils, created and tested Popsicle structures.  They learned how to create lessons around structural and non-structural hazards; when to gather under one’s desk or escape the building based upon whether it was likely to sway or sink.  Officials crossed out inaccurate data about their escape plans and substituted more accurate versions. Building-phobic parents sent their children back to school.  Science became central to physical and emotional safety.

In Haiti, the same thing:  dense population, lousy buildings, shallow earthquake.  At the sign of any danger, Haitians often instinctively and immediately run indoors for protection.  Here, too, the buildings killed them.  Yet many Haitian Geology teachers knew exactly what to do on January 12, 2010, thus saving hundreds of lives (listen to our podcast with )

But this was the exception rather than the rule.  Despite the thousands of NGOs and rock-stars Haiti has been forced to accommodate with equanimity and grace, there remains enough rubble (measured in metric tons of concrete) in Port au Prince alone to construct a four-lane highway from Port au Prince to Los Angeles and back again.

When Chinese teachers in Sichuan first heard about the earthquake in Haiti, they wrote letters of support.  Sensitive to the emotionality connected with anniversaries, they writing again, sharing their love and shared sorrow with their colleagues in Haiti.

How many earthquakes will it take until the global community supports teachers from below the ground and up?  Anything less undermines the very foundation of society itself.

But this is something Dr. Sharon Ravitch has known all along.

LEARN MORE:

• Emergency Education: at Teachers Without Borders
• TWB Teacher’s Guide to Earthquake Science & Safety (free)
• Sharon Ravitch, Ph.D:  Teachers Without Borders Advisory Board
• Sharon Ravitch at the University of Pennsylvania
• Aga Khan Development Network:  Deep support for vulnerable communities
• PARSQUAKE:  Earthquake education in the global Persian community
• Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies:  A global leader
• IRIN News: Humanitarian news and analysis

May 12th will be a date forever emblazoned in my mind, being the day a devastating earthquake hit Sichuan province in 2008. For two years prior to the disaster, Teachers Without Borders had been collaborating with our teacher colleagues in the field of science inquiry teaching methods. Our friendship was deep. Then, in moments, so many lives were gone, buildings leveled.

Teachers Without Borders responded in China by tailoring our science-inquiry methods teaching program to include a practical connection between science and safety. That program has grown considerably and has been embraced by teachers in the region.

Middle school teachers in Sichuan go through TWB's Teacher's Guide to Earthquake Education

Today, on the 3rd anniversary of the earthquake, our work continues, undaunted. Located in – and endorsed by – the Qing Yang Teacher Learning and Resource Center, our office will enhance TWB’s science through emergency education program by providing staff, volunteers, and local teachers with a headquarters to collect and access resources, and hold regular meetings.

Our program now includes psychosocial assistance and has jumped borders. With support from the Cisco Foundation, TWB’s China Country Coordinator, Li Hong Xu, and Yu Lu Wang, an Assistant Professor of psychology at Chengdu University, travelled to Pakistan to provide a workshop on counseling in disaster situations. TWB’s staff in China met with staff from our partner in Pakistan, the Potohar Organization for Development Advocacy (PODA), to exchange ideas and resources that will strengthen their post-crisis recovery work in their respective countries.

In partnership with the National Science Foundation and Purdue University, our Director of Emergency Education, Solmaz Mohadjer, is in Haiti, talking to potential partners that can help implement an earthquake education program in local high schools. Centered near Port au Prince, the shallow earthquake in a densely populated area resulted in the loss of over 230,000 lives. We are obligated to be of assistance there as well.

In a few weeks, Ms. Mohadjer will travel to Central Asia through a new initiative, Parsquake, designed to bring earthquake education to the global Persian community. Millions of people living in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan are highly vulnerable to earthquakes. With support from the PARSA Community Foundation, Parsquake is addressing this vulnerability by raising levels of earthquake awareness, education, and preparedness in these regions.

The mainstream news may not cover the anniversary of the earthquake in Sichuan, but we remember. I am writing you, dear colleagues in Sichuan, because we will always be there for you. Together, and with the help of the global TWB community, we will work tirelessly so that teachers and students – everywhere – can live and learn safely, and in peace.

My warmest regards,
Dr. Fred Mednick, Founder, Teachers Without Borders

This past May 12th marked the two year anniversary of the tragic Sichuan earthquake.  Having worked in Dujiangyan for two years prior to the earthquake, Teachers Without Borders returned to Sichuan to focus on earthquake science and safety.  We saw the buildings in ruins.  We asked about the teachers and students.  Many are gone.

So we began to teach.  Today, our Emergency Education program is a core feature of what we do, extending to Haiti and beyond.

Emergency Education at Teachers Without Borders focuses on earthquake science and safety.  Teachers and students engage in hands-on activities to build shake tables and popsicle structures.  They split open eggs to see the layers.  They come to understand the ground below them and the structure of the buildings they occupy.  They now know what to do, how to prepare for seismic activity in their particular region, and why it all matters.

It’s math and physics and health and service learning and community capacity-building and international diplomacy all in one.

The curriculum is available digitally, as well as in booklets, as posters, on podcasts, and online.  Trainings take place locally at schools and community centers, and globally on the internet.

Earlier this month, TWB’s Director of Emergency Education, Solmaz Mohadjer, published an article in the Journal of Geoscience Education describing her research and practical work in earthquake science.  My heart soared.

With all this activity, however, I must also ask:  what if no one hears about this?  Without global attention to world-class earthquake science and safety, how many more lives will be lost?   Without  the proactive and gritty work of preparation and knowledge, we will all continue to have blood on our hands.

Even more, all the noble efforts to ensure that the world’s 70+ million children attend school (eliminating fees, providing bed-nets, creating incentives, digging wells at school sites, distributing iodine, ensuring that hygiene is habitual, and implementing feeding programs) cannot convince already skeptical parents to send their children to school if these same parents realize – from each subsequent earthquake (anywhere in the world) -  that the actual school building itself can kill these young souls in an instant.  We simply cannot let that happen.

Perhaps an educational metaphor will reinforce this urgency.  When thinking about the earthquake fault lines winding their way across Central Asia, for example,  consider the metaphor of the older biology textbook that used to include the see-through plastic overlay illustrating the innards and systems of the frog. So, too, the river of earthquake fault lines – like the various systems of the frog – follow the same route as political fault lines, economic fault lines, and educational fault lines.

The complete picture of the frog only makes sense when all the overlays are understood.    Safe schools ensure greater attendance;  school attendance correlates with social welfare; social welfare is a global responsibility.

As the second anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake passes, we remember those teachers and students now gone.  Today in China, families now display pictures of new babies. New buildings sprout, almost overnight, to replace those buildings that were reduced to rubble in under a minute.

But what about the next earthquake and the next vulnerable community?  Forgetting is not an option at Teachers Without Borders.  A sin of omission is as unacceptable as a sin of commission. Meanwhile, the earth rumbles on, displaces its energy, and shifts about – sometimes without notice and at other times with an awesome and brutally destructive force.  Earthquake activity, worldwide, has not changed, but more and more earthquakes rumble precipitously beneath crowded urban areas.

Certainly, Teachers Without Borders will respond to the latest disaster, but we reserve the right to call the world’s attention to an ongoing crisis. TWB will continue to build our Emergency Education program and lessons.  We need your help to publicize these lessons, translate them, localize them, and engage teachers and geologists and everyday citizens – worldwide.

We cannot prevent earthquakes, but we can mitigate against them.  We will not forget those lost and we will not cease until we know we are doing our best to show how excellent  content, in the hands of excellent teachers around the world, will create an environment in which parents are confident about the safety of their children, who can come to school, each day, knowing that they have every opportunity to grow up and flourish.

Please join Teachers Without Borders and lend a hand.  It will not be forgotten.