Filipino teachers for Uruguay

Paul Woods was in town recently and briefed me on a project that points to yet triumph for Filipinos.

Woods was the Assistant Director for the British Council in the Philippines from January 1988 to September 1991.

When I asked him what he remembered best about those years, these are what he listed:

“The Arts programme we ran in Intramuros; one of the highlights was a one-man show by an actor who played Houdini and escaped from a straightjacket and tanks of water onstage. Visiting places like Cagayan de Oro to run workshops on English for Specific Purposes. The send-off party for Lea Salonga who was going off to star in Miss Saigon. The time when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was published and a protestor set a copy on fire inside the British Council library. Staying one time in a completely empty 200-room hotel in Ilocos Norte. Visiting Malacañang Palace when it was opened to the public for the first time. The time when there was an attempted coup against President Aquino and we were holed up in Greenhills East for several days before the action moved to Makati. My charming old office on the top floor of a building in New Manila, which had the original capiz shell windows.”

Woods is currently in charge of project named Ceibal en Ingles in Uruguay, in addition to various other projects in Latin America. Plan Ceibal is of interest to us because Filipinos in Cebu are teaching English via teleconferencing to first graders in Uruguay.

Let me repeat that. Filipinos (not British or Americans) are teaching English to schoolchildren in Uruguay (not in the Philippines).

Just to give you an idea of how far Uruguay is from us, the cheapest flight from Manila to Montevideo will cost you $3,543 plus taxes. You would have to fly for more than 8 hours to Dubai, spend almost 10 hours in the airport, fly for 15 hours to Sao Paulo in Brazil, spend 17 hours in the airport, and fly a final 3 hours to Montevideo.

How fast does it take for a teacher in Cebu to talk to her students in Uruguay? Nanoseconds.

We live in the 21st century, when the virtual world is as real as the real world. The British Council had the inspired idea of searching the world for the best (and okay, cheapest) English teachers alive. The British Council found these teachers in Cebu (take that, imperial Manila!).

Why can such a literally world-shaking event happen in Uruguay? Because Uruguay is the first country in the world to give every schoolchild a laptop. Moreover, every public school there is connected to the Web.

What is Plan Ceibal all about? The objective is to teach 120,000 primary school children in over a thousand schools in Uruguay. A pilot study found that videoconferencing and laptops raised the children’s scores in English significantly. Incidentally, the proficiency of the Uruguayan teachers in English also improved.

In a video summary of the Plan, a teacher says, “When the children discovered the little button that switched on the laptop, that opened a new world for them, totally new. I am proud of being Uruguayan, of being asked where I live. I live in Uruguay, in the country where all state school pupils have their own laptops, and take them home – the laptops are theirs – and when they leave school, they will continue to be theirs.”

The idea is simple. Students in Uruguay come together in a regular classroom, except that, in addition to a teacher-facilitator (who sometimes does not even know English), there is a huge screen with a Filipino teacher in Cebu teaching them English. The classes are live, but there is also a provision for the more usual online learning management system.

Claudia Brovetto, the coordinator of the plan, explains how an actual class goes: “The main innovation of the Ceibal programme is also the key issue for its success, and as surprising as it might seem, is not related to technology. It relates to the symbolic teaching space of the remote teacher of English and the classroom teacher, and the joint work between the two. This programme requires the remote teacher to rely on the classroom teacher’s capacity to organise the teaching situation to make virtual communication real and effective. In turn, the classroom teacher needs to locate herself in non-traditional teaching space, in which she is not the one who knows everything, but she is learning together with her students and making it possible for her students to learn in a new and more autonomous way.”

“The remote teacher,” adds Gabriela Kaplan, the teacher training coordinator, “speaks almost casually and most certainly enigmatically, but her language may only acquire meaning through the classroom teacher’s explanation of the context. The remote teacher plants the seeds and explains new concepts, new structures and novel ways of perceiving the world, and the classroom teacher makes these grow.”

The Uruguayan educators had to start designing the curriculum from scratch. After all, nobody else in the world has a curriculum that is based on the assumption that every student has a laptop, has access to the Web, and is taught by teachers in another country. That other country, kudos to Cebu, is us.