Education is Iterative
SEEDS partners with Yayasan Tunas Aksara (YTA) to promote literacy in Indonesia. YTA operates a program called “Saya Suka Membaca” (SSM), meaning “I Like to Read”. SSM was originally conceived as a teacher training program. SSM staff designed and distributed their own contextualized curriculum, auxiliary materials, training, and mentoring, to elementary grade-1 teachers so that they could teach reading well throughout their teaching tenure. Their goals for students were simple: (a) read fluently (b) understand what was read (c) enjoy reading.
The SSM staff have continued to improve their practices according to the needs or challenges they encountered in the field, as good educators do. They streamlined processes, added new positions, made more books, corrected old ones, etc. In other words, YTA has reiterated SSM repeatedly since its inception. YTA has built a spiral staircase, if you will. Yet the big question is whether that spiral staircase performs as intended-Is SSM effective?
The SSM team has worked hard to answer that question. They developed a test to collect pre- and post-treatment data. They are currently proposing to conduct a two-year research project that will examine: (a) quantitative baseline/endline data from all current participating schools (hopefully compared against equivalent non-treatment schools in similar districts); (b) qualitative data from SSM participants to better understand what underlies the quantitative data. That data will be used to inform the next iteration of SSM. The desire to reiterate does not come from a vacuum. The Indonesian government has recently prioritized 21st century skills for its future workforce. SSM plans to change with the times so that the next generation of Indonesian youth can (a) read fluently; (b) understand what was read; (c) enjoy reading; and (d) enter the working world with related 21st century skills. Here’s to climbing the spiral staircase
