Found in my old papers! School in a Box

Hi friends and colleagues,

 

There has been occasional controversy on the first use of the term and concept of a ‘School in a Box’. 

 

I found this old article from Refugees magazine in 1989 and I am copying it for those (the Anthonies, Elisa) who were involved when we created this powerful response to the way displaced schools were treated in Khartoum, often being bulldozed at 5 minutes’ notice.   The concept was to have everything in a box – but also, sadly to be able to pack the school back into the box and carry it away to a safe place.  Being displaced in Khartoum then, as now, was a very precarious existence. (Anthony Sebit, Anthony Wani and I wrote the study ‘Creating a Future’  at this time describing the state of education for southerners both in the north and in Juba).   

 

The School-in-a-box was accompanied by the ‘Teacher Assistance Course’, for untrained ‘volunteer’ teachers which was written by SOLU (which at that time also initiated the Foundation course for over-age southerners, a modular self-help course, which was widely used and trialled in JRS evening education centres).  

 

This was an ancestor of the current ‘Bon Enseignant’ and ‘Be  Better Teacher’ (written in UNESCO-PEER in Hargeisa) courses.

 

The SOLU integrated package was carried to Somalia by UNESCO-PEER in 1990.   This then with further development became TEP, which was one of the responses to the Rwanda emergency and has now been widely used and developed for example by NRC, with strong emphasis on the training side.  

 

Of course I have oversimplified and there were many valuable contributions to its development, though in some cases it also lost its flexibility and became fossilised.

 

It developed further in Zambia as the Spark/Zedukit Community Schools project, which is still running.  

 

There have been so many subkits (teacher’s kit, pupils’ kit, school kit, sports kit, science kit – the latter goes back a long way with Michael Brophy now of the Africa Educational Trust being an expert).

 

I am in the process of writing all this up and I wonder if anyone can push the dates back earlier and/or fill in more details.

 

In SOLU we would never claim to have originated the idea of a school kit, but we did claim the name!   As they say there are sometimes ‘many fathers’, but at least one agency’s strange claim in their 60^th anniversary publicity to have invented it in Tanzania in 1994 is forgetful of their own important role in developing the concept earlier than that!  

 

Barry

 

From: Barry Sesnan [mailto:bsesnan@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 9:29 PM
To: 'Vance Culbert'; dabla toure; 'Eldrid Kvamen Midttun'; Solveig Borgenvik Voll
Cc: 'Eva Ahlen'; Tim Brown (brownunhcr@yahoo.com)
Subject: Found in my old papers!

 

The photos were not provided by me.