Teacher Power
Fred Mednick, founder of Teachers Without Borders, with Afghan girl Vasila. TWB helped her get the heart operation she needed. Photograph courtesy of Teachers Without Borders
At age 13, Fred Mednick gave an impassioned bar mitzvah speech about how he would change the world by improving education around the globe. Thirty-four years later, after a 20-year career as a high school principal in Los Angeles and Seattle, Mednick is making good on that promise. As founder of Teachers Without Borders (TWB), he has created an ever-expanding, mostly volunteer network of more than 5,000 teachers in 84 countries who are helping one another build dynamic education systems in the communities that need them most.
These teachers of different social, political, and religious backgrounds are partnering with local communities to build Community Teaching & Learning Centers — each a combination of gathering place, cybercafé, library, and classroom, where students and teachers alike can learn everything from reading to HIV-AIDS prevention to computer expertise to job skills. Teachers are mentoring one another to become better teachers. They're providing daycare so women who have lost husbands in war or have been abandoned by them can earn money to feed their children. In short, teachers are uniting to transform their communities.
Mednick's own metamorphosis began in 2000, when he earned his doctorate in education while running a high school. To prepare his dissertation on the qualities of educated teens, he interviewed teachers around the world. By his account, "I asked, 'What do you see outside your window?' and for some reason that touched many. Through these interviews I realized teachers were the glue of society. They know who's sick, who's missing, who's orphaned by AIDS, and who's been conscripted by the army or the sex trade.
"I began to realize how influential a global teacher community could be, and that teachers, because of their intimate access to people's everyday lives, could be as powerful as any top-down international relief agency." Mednick changed his dissertation's focus to the role of teachers as catalysts for change in their communities.
From Seattle to a Bedouin Tent. Then Mednick came across an astounding UNESCO statistic: There are 59 million teachers, making them the largest single group of professionals in the world. Mednick "fired himself" from his administrative job and launched a Web site asking teachers to sign a petition pledging to join him as an agent of change. It was a vague mission at first. But he began getting e-mails from educators as far away as the Middle East and India. Within months, he found himself in a Bedouin tent in the Negev Desert in Israel, working with Jihad El-Sana, a Muslim computer-science professor, to create an "e-lab" center for teachers to gain computer skills and for youth to gather after school. Staffed by Arab and Jewish volunteers, it became TWB's first Community Teaching & Learning Center (CTLC).
Five years later, TWB is operating CTLCs in more than a dozen countries — mostly in developing areas of India, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. As Mednick often says, "Despite the drought, war, famine, and disease that Africa endures, at no other time in the recent past has the potential for hope been so great. The tipping point is teachers, and the delivery system is education. Girls who remain in school for one year longer create double-digit economic benefits to families; increased literacy results in increased infrastructure, spending power, better health."
Teacher training is central to TWB's mission. In South Africa, for instance, it focuses on helping teachers improve their math and science teaching skills. In rural South Africa, math and science pass rates on the national matriculation exam — the entrance to college and, for many students, the ticket out of poverty — hover around 30 percent, though education is being targeted as a national priority. Rural teachers, educated under an apartheid system that denied black children proper instruction in science and math, feel underprepared to teach certain topics on the exam.
For the last four years, Yunus Peer, a teacher at Punahou School in Hawaii and himself a former resident of Port Shepstone in KwaZulu-Natal, has led TWB educator teams to South Africa during school vacations to work with their South African colleagues. They share content and teaching strategies and work with students as well. "We attacked math problems together, and the teachers were eager to demonstrate their solutions," writes math professor James Metz of his experience. "On the final day, a local teacher said to me, 'Of course we love this. We all speak the same language — math and science.' I truly cannot remember so many consecutive days of feeling wonderful about teaching." Twenty-one teachers from Hawaii have worked with 580 South African teachers and 2,500 of their students — reaching hundreds of thousands more, of course, as the teachers return to their classrooms with newfound skills.
The workshops in South Africa have been so successful that TWB can't meet the demand. It is opening a new local office this year, working on scheduling year-round workshops, and planning to build its first high school. And last year, Teachers Without Borders opened two schools in refugee camps in Nigeria and Afghanistan and is working with Engineers Without Borders to tie building schools to vitalizing communities. A TWB project, "One Face at a Time," links elementary and high school students in Seattle with their counterparts in Kabul.
Virtual Teacher Lounge. The Certificate of Teaching Mastery program comprises five online courses with an e-learning platform donated by the Cisco Learning Institute. Teachers collaborate on course material and post their work to an electronic portfolio. After completing the classes, they earn a certificate. "Fred was one of the first to identify the potential benefits of connecting millions of teachers," says Peter Tavernise, senior program officer for Cisco Systems Foundation, which has given TWB more than $400,000 in grants. "TWB's collaborative model takes advantage of the promise and power of technology to allow teachers all over the world to share best practices."
Funded by grants and individual contributions, Teachers Without Borders also secures in-kind donations such as free shipping from DHL to get donated computers to their recipients. Want to get involved? You can sponsor a teacher's Certificate of Teaching Mastery.
About the Author
Jennifer Haupt writes for AARP The Magazine.
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Summer 2005.
