Last week, I attended a Peace Corps workshop called Student Friendly Schools. This was the second time ever that Peace Corps did the Student Friendly Schools workshop; the first time was in Malawi. This is a new global initiative of the Peace Corps. Myself and 14 other volunteers along with Thai counterparts attended a two-and-a-half day workshop to learn about gender-based violence and school-based gender-based violence. Then we started working on a plan to implement what we learned back at site.
I went with the supervisor of English programming from my school district, saw naw, because I had an idea of what kind of project I wanted to implement with this information. I wanted to make sure that this workshop would be able to impact the largest number of educators as it could. Having an ally for teaching this information to teachers and principals at trainings in the future is important. Saw naw Panya was a great person to choose and I am so glad he came. He even made the comment in one of the sessions, “I had another training to be at this week, but I am so glad that I came here instead because this is so very important.”
What We Learned and Took Away
We learned about the differences between sex and gender, the Convention of the Rights of the Child, gender based stereotypes, what gender-based violence is, culturally appropriate ways to intervene, positive discipline vs. punishment and then we worked to put together a loose action plan for when we returned to site.
I had given myself a project: to write a set of lesson plans that can be reused at the various trainings that happen every year and to train Thai teachers as facilitators for these lesson plans. I wanted to make a lesson plan on the information from Student Friendly Schools to include, but part of this is making sure that saw naw, the one who organizes and sometimes helps me to facilitate, understood the material and would advocate for it to be included in trainings. Panya definitely saw the value in the information and in spreading it to all of the educators in the district, and I am very grateful for his support.
Challenges Faced
One of the things that was a big part of the discussion was about the use of corporal punishment in schools. I don’t think that the workshop entirely changed the views of the Thai counterparts in regards to using corporal punishment, but I think that it certainly opened their minds to maybe trying other forms of discipline. It was certainly difficult to sit and listen to adults say that if you hit children without emotion, then it is OK, and you just know when the level crosses the line into being too much when to me that sounds like the signs of a psychopath.
There was a lot of people who were previously unaware of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, so it was really neat to see people be exposed to it for the first time and then to also think about about sometimes, as a teacher you inadvertently violate some of their rights.
I will keep you updated on the progress of my educating the educators in my district about this topic and the success and struggles I’m sure to face. I’m really excited about this project.