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From the Bronx to Kabul: UFTer part of AFT professional development team in Afghanistan
Mar 18, 2010 1:29 PM
Nick Norman (right) from the UFT Teacher Center at Samuel Gompers HS in the Bronx and a math specialist in Kabul work together in a professional development training session.
The educators longed to learn effective, practical teaching strategies — even if it meant drawing graphic organizers in the dirt.
And UFT Teacher Center staffer Nick Norman provided that professional development — even though it meant leaving a secured compound in an armored vehicle with driver and bodyguard, and traveling over rough roads to the other side of Kabul.
Norman worked daily with veteran Afghan educators in the National Teacher Education Department at Aayyed Jumaleddin Teacher College. Together they created a teaching training program, which will eventually reach about 50,000 K–12 teachers.
Many of those teachers live and work in village schools with no resources other than their own determination. Because education is a casualty of war — about 30 years of it with barely a lull since the 1979 Soviet invasion — the longtime teachers are heroic, he said, in their commitment to keep education alive.
AFT team member Betty Harris of the ABC Federation of Teachers in California works with a senior teacher trainer.
Also heroic, he added, are the many new teachers who have more skills, courage and talent than formal training.
Now they are beginning to get that training, due largely to the AFT and its association with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan.
Norman’s two-week February trip was the second stint in Afghanistan for the Bronx educator, who works at the Samuel Gompers HS UFT Teacher Center. He was first sent to Kabul for five weeks in July, one of three people selected by the AFT to create training materials.
“That meant getting materials that had been translated from Dari to English, revising and editing, and then getting it translated back into Dari and Pashto,” Norman said.
Afghan educators, shown here with Norman, keep education alive in the provinces despite great risk.
Another goal was extending education to girls and bringing more women into the teaching force.
The subjects Norman worked on included science, math, language, social studies and history.
But one of the first sets of materials he was given explained teaching Islam.
“I had to be very conscious about language and respecting ideas,” Norman said, adding that each training session began with prayer.
He was also conscious of his Afghan colleagues being visibly associated with Americans when he and his AFT associates traveled with them.
“But we didn’t get any sense of resentment or even of distancing because we were Americans,” he said.
He was impressed with the expertise of the veteran Afghan teachers.
“There was real dialogue,” he said.
There was also plenty of Afghan food.
“It was fun eating with everyone at the college every day. Not so fun was the 110-degree temperatures, dust and no air conditioning,” he said.
“The needs of teachers in Afghanistan are the same as those of teachers everywhere — practical support, strategies and resources,” he said, adding that classroom conditions are not at all foreign: lack of appropriate textbooks, uncooperative supervisors and underpaid, overworked teachers.
Would Norman go back?
In a heartbeat.
“When I arrived this time I was embraced and, a strong indication of friendship — was asked about the health of my family,” he said.
“I was touched to be greeted this way. I made friends among the Afghans.”
