Bridging the education gap
If, as an instructor, you find you are separated from
your students by a wide social and educational gap,
there are things you may be able to do to help bridge it:
2-13
1. Admit openly to your students that the gap
exists—and that the shortcoming is yours as
much as theirs. Invite your students to discuss
and look for ways of bridging the gap together.
2. Do whatever you can to understand in a personal way the life, language,
customs, and needs of your students and their communities. Live, if you
can, with one of the poorer families in the community (paying your way}. Eat
their food. Drink their water. Help each day with some of the physical or farm
work. Accept no more income than an average member of the community
earns. (This is only a suggestion-but a good one.)
3. If you are from out of the area, or are specialized in a narrow field of health
care (like medicine), try not to be the main teacher, but rather a teaching
assistant or auxiliary. (The main teacher will need a wide range of skills and
knowledge, including, above all, teaching skills and inside knowledge of the
local people. He or she needs personal understanding of what it is like to
approach learning new things without much formal education.)
4. When teaching, make every effort to always begin with the knowledge
and skills the health workers already have, and help them build on
these. You are the stranger, so try to adapt your language to theirs; don’t
make them adapt to yours. If they are used to learning from stories or from
actually doing things, rather than from lectures and books, try to adapt to their
way of learning-even if this means exploring forms of teaching and learning
that are new to you.
5. Most important! Make yourself as unnecessary as possible, as soon
as possible. Look for local persons who are socially more qualified (less
schooled, more in harmony with the people) to take over the training. Work
toward having more experienced village health workers become the teachers
of new village health workers as soon as possible. Every chance you get,
move one step further into the background. Become the teacher of teachers.
Then, just an adviser or ‘person with ideas’. Then leave.