Visual Apprenticeships for Teachers

Making teacher education accessible using sequential photos of excellence unfolding in teaching and in student work

A teacher writes on the chalkboard: "Je compte 1 a 1 de 40 jusqu'a 50." The small children painstakingly begin to copy the sentence. The teacher explains proudly: "This takes all class--they don't know handwriting ... or French."

Children in under-resourced countries often spend years in school, yet leave unable to read, write or do basic sums. In Madagascar, 80% of teachers have no teacher training, a problem in many under-resourced countries. Teachers copy from a text; students copy from the board. What they copy may be meaningful ... or not.

To compound the problem, materials and programs--when available--are often inappropriate and inaccessible. Materials are language-dense despite many teachers’ low literacy levels, and materials assume educational backgrounds, supplies and goals that neither students nor teachers have.

Poet Lucille Clifton wrote, "We cannot create what we cannot imagine.” How can teachers across Madagascar, where 75% of the population live in extreme poverty, imagine a model of schooling they have never had an opportunity to see? How can teachers improve their teaching when the materials--when offered--are inaccessible? How can they teach children 21st century skills when the only schooling they’ve seen is students sitting, copying?

Technology to capture images of excellent teaching is common; cell phones have cameras. But it hasn't been used that way--there are almost no images of great teaching and strong student work available in any form for Malagasy teachers.

We aim to change this--we will spark excellent teaching, then capture not only images of its outcomes, but images of how the teaching unfolds: steps teachers and students take and the work and learning that result. Then, by using common technology to share those sequences of photos, even teachers who can’t easily read or who face language barriers will be able to envision and lead students in active learning and responsive teaching projects.

By adding to and sharing this collection of accessible teaching and learning sequences, we can shatter the idea that school means meaningless copying and silence. In its place, we will offer teachers steps for clear projects and methods to try, tied to the national curriculum.

Where an inaccessible manual--or no support at all--does nothing for untrained teachers, these sequenced photos can offer a vision and steps for excellence in education, even in high-challenge school contexts. The photos will reveal processes rather than only products, progressions rather than only outcomes. These photos will cross language barriers, they will highlight high-poverty settings, they will showcase the practices of students and teachers themselves, and they will include expertise of scholars, curriculum specialists and visual storytellers. For these reasons, they will be uniquely positioned to support untrained teachers anywhere in the world. With these images, teachers in high-challenge contexts can learn steps to improve, apprenticing themselves to the teaching in the images to create classes of active learning, places of meaning where children can learn to think, to create, to build, and to act to improve our communities and our lives.

Most teachers in Madagascar have no access to images of high-impact, evidence-based teaching. We aim to use existing technology to create visual examples, role models, and sequenced demonstrations of effective teaching, useful regardless of teachers’ literacy levels or first languages. We’ll use cell phones to catch and send sequenced images to teachers of active, responsive education--in settings like their own--so that they might apprentice themselves to those images. Following effective teaching as it unfolds, teachers can enact and learn an alternative to writing meaningless phrases for silent students: project-based, energized lessons that train their students’ hearts and minds.

We need cell phone camera technology-- teachers often already have it--to capture photos (not video because of its larger file size) of excellence in teaching, as it unfolds in the field. To share these sets of teaching photos, we need to be technologically versatile, since teachers in Madagascar and around the world have different access to technologies for sharing. We will need to be able to disseminate these images in various ways in various formats: wifi, cell service, website and cell phone, or even in printable format for places with neither wifi nor cell service--depending on teachers’ circumstances.

This year, we will work with 33 teachers, grades 1-11, in suburban and rural Madagascar--Antananarivo, Andasibe, Sakalava, and Ranomafana--supporting and documenting 2-5 learning projects each. We’ll collect 100+ photo sequences across grade levels and subjects. As we finalize each, we’ll share it so other teachers can apprentice themselves to it, testing it. Once a sequence is “finalized,” we’ll turn to graphic storytelling experts to create a collection of designed project sequences to--again-- disseminate to teachers. We’ll collect data on effectiveness of these sequences in improving the learning of the 900+ students involved, and revise based on the results.

Once we’ve developed and refined our core digital content, we’ll expand by piloting and revising in/for:

• More extreme settings in Madagascar, higher poverty, more remote

• More international areas where teachers have little training: Chile, Argentina, Kenya maybe Morocco and Bangladesh

• More teacher needs, discovering, filling necessities for topics, grades, regions

Meanwhile, we’ll continue developing and disseminating different versions of the core resource-- paper book, ebook, curated texts, app or website--according to regional capabilities. With every teacher, we reach from 30-200 students, and we can reach nearly limitless numbers of teachers around the globe.

Hantanirina Rasamimanana Ratovonirina and Saotra Solonirina Rakotonomenjanahary are professors at the University of Antananarivo’s School of Education. They work closely with teachers across Madagascar. They also lead a network of nine trained teachers. At weekly meetings, the nine respond to overwhelmingly large numbers of requests for teacher training from the field. They volunteer time and expertise whenever possible. Most requests go unmet however; the nine have no appropriate resources to offer. Using cell phone cameras, we will build a resource to deploy via technology available regionally--wifi, cell service, thumb drives for offline computers or even printed on paper.

Our team has ongoing volunteer work with 25 teachers/200 students outside Antananarivo and Andasibe. We also lead workshops around the country, each for 10-30 teachers (20-40 students per teacher). The teachers we serve are generally untrained and have repeatedly asked for our training; they walk and canoe great distances for it. Often, they themselves have had little education--reading/writing in any language is challenging for them. They live in and serve under-resourced, high-poverty communities. When we bring them images of active teaching, they express amazement and ask many questions. They leave resolved to encourage talk, thinking and active learning.

This year we’ll work with 35 teachers and 900+ students in Madagascar and pilot with teachers in rural Chile, Argentina and Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. With our beta, we’ll reach teachers across Madagascar who can receive texts, emails or paper. In three years, we’ll have multiple appropriate, accessible resources for teachers in high-poverty, low-literacy communities.

Seeing new images of teaching changes teachers. We have seen it again and again. They are amazed, excited; they leave with new visions of learning--students talking, making, thinking, changing, doing. They send photos and questions, they report fewer dropouts, more engagement, joy and... learning.

Our team has lifetimes of expertise in Madagascar’s teaching-learning traditions, languages and goals. We have years of experience teaching for social-emotional well-being in under-resourced areas and 20+ years of using visual art in and for education--plus experience as artists and writers. We’ve created and published teaching resources for more than 15+ years. We have 50+ years of teaching in under-resourced schools around the world. We have access to faculty, partnerships and resources of multiple universities, to the Ministry of Education and to on-the-ground NGOs in Madagascar. We are contracted for a book about effective education practices around the globe.

We need grant funding to get started. Once we have our core digital content, we can create formats that can be sold inexpensively to teachers across Madagascar and eventually around the world. Proceeds will partially sustain us and allow offering this resource in one of its forms to teachers who cannot pay.

We have local partnerships with teachers, NGO’s and Ministries of Education around the world and will easily be able to pilot, revise and offer our resource for sale or as a donation once it’s complete.

This teaching resource format invites other resources like it to be built, focused on different academic subjects, teaching methods, learning dispositions, grade levels, health or community goals or concerns and more.

Once we have a beta version and formal effectiveness results, we can tap into more funding sources.

We will be creating high-quality, digital content for this resource, and we will need to put it into formats and platforms accessible for regions around the world with differing technological capabilities. We hope SOLVE can connect us with technology experts who can advise us.

We also need start up funds to develop this resource in order to win other partnerships for support and participation in this project.

We hope SOLVE can also partner us with experts in designing effectiveness and impact measurement.

We’ll need to be able to disseminate these sequenced images in various formats--via wifi, cell service, thumb drive or on paper--depending on regional circumstances. We need tech coaching on the format best suited to saving this content to allow us maximum reach, versatility and longevity.  

To avoid teachers dropping out of the development phase of our project, we will need to compensate them for their time and for data-service-related expenses.

Our small team will need time in classrooms together in Madagascar to see how our pilot is working (and not yet working). Travel vouchers or support would make this work.