Teachers Without Borders

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.

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.

As I write this, thousands of young bodies have been pulled from schools collapsed in the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010.  Thousands of miles away, Chinese teachers and parents are reliving their own devastating earthquake of May 12, 2008.

So many dead children and so many of their teachers gone, too – these stewards of our future who have recognized what engineers have warned all along: the real tragedy of earthquakes comes from structures that expose them to preventable danger.  Geology teachers describe the tragedy in Haiti as a shallow earthquake, the worst kind for so many regions of the world populated by throngs of people living in flimsy buildings.  In a larger sense, teachers – ears to the ground – have always been listening to the cataclysm rumbling just below the surface. 

Allow me to connect the two.  In 2006, my organization – Teachers Without Borders – initiated a professional development program focusing on science-inquiry methods in Sichuan, China.  The program was collaborative, collegial, hands-on, and in-depth.    In 2007 we  explored deeper concepts – principals and teachers in the same room.  An insightful local leader acknowledged the applications of science and the schools themselves.

He didn’t have enough time.  The epicenter of the May 12th 2008 earthquake in Sichuan was centered close to Dujiangyan, the site of our operations.  In all, over 70,000 dead, many of whom were children.

We mobilized resources for the relief effort.  I flew out to Sichuan and sat with teachers, many of whom had lost their own (and only) children.  We watched the army work in 24-hour shifts, heroic and indefatigable.   Everywhere we walked, we witnessed pancaked buildings, schools collapsed around stairwells,  makeshift shrines constructed of canvas over rubble and sticks, protecting shelves of student pictures.  And in front of each shrine – a pile of lonely backpacks – the litter of the lost.

But we were educators, after all.  What value could we really bring outside of charity bake-sales?

Within days, one of our Teachers Without Borders members, Solmaz Mohadjer, came forward, having recently completed earthquake science and safety programs in Tajikistan and Kashmir.  Several months later, her curriculum translated, Solmaz and her 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 integrity;  when to gather under one’s desk or escape the building based upon whether the building would be likely to sway or sink;  how to prepare for the future.  Officials crossed out inaccurate data about their escape plans and substituted more accurate versions. Science became the key to physical and emotional safety.

These teachers have been building educational pillars ever since.  Now embraced by local Chinese officials, earthquake science programs such as ours serve as a model connecting science to survival and excellent teaching to safety and hope.

Chinese teachers in Sichuan feel the pain of Haitian teachers in Port-Au-Prince.  They know that recovery and relief have been the priority in these crucial days following the quake.  Nevertheless, in all the cacaphony of rhetoric about reconstruction, consider the role of the educators.  Teachers know that, though we cannot yet predict when earthquakes shall occur, the fault-lines are clearly defined.  Might we not take this lesson one step further?  Might we not prepare our children with both earthquake science and, in a larger sense, pay attention to the teachers?

Educators are the glue of a society, its consistent first responders, the multipliers of stability.  Let’s protect the protectors with safe buildings and policies designed to ensure that there is a pillar of strength in every classroom.

Chinese teachers send their love and shared sorrow to Haiti – today in spirit, tomorrow as colleagues, forever as friends.    They long to lend a hand during this horrific time.

In fact, they – like teachers around the world – have been there all along.

• Earthquake Education Curriculum:  A Teacher’s Guide to Earthquake Science & Safety (free).  We encourage downloading and sharing.
• Teachers Without Borders