Giáo dục trong vùng đồng bào dân tộc gặp những thách thức lớn như những đứa trẻ bỏ học sớm, điều kiện kinh tế khó khăn không thể duy trì việc học, sự tiếp thu kiến thức của trẻ…Được sự hỗ trợ của hội Việt-Pháp (VFE), chúng tôi hỗ trợ các em dân tộc thiểu số có điều kiện khó khăn được tiếp cận trường học và cố gắng phổ cập đến cấp trung học.

• Chúng tôi nâng cao nhận thức về những thách thức về giáo dục mà trẻ em phải đối mặt trong làng, vì huyện Da Teh có nhiều trường hợp các trẻ em dân tộc thiểu số bỏ học sớm. Chúng tôi cố gắng giải quyết những vấn đề đó

• Tổ chức VFE đã cung cấp 419 học bổng cho các trẻ em trên cả nước với mức hỗ trợ từ 100 usd-190 usd.

• 30 trẻ em được bảo trợ là từ 3 cùng dân tộc thiểu số của huyện Đateh: Đa Nha, Thị trấn Đateh, và buôn K’Long. Cha mẹ của các em là những người hưởng lợi trực tiếp từ các dự án phát triển của chúng tôi trong các lĩnh vực kinh tế và xã hội và điều này cho phép chúng tôi có những cách hành động tổng hợp và toàn diện.

• Chúng tôi thực hiện giáo dục hòa nhập trong việc giúp đỡ trẻ em ở trường và và giới thiệu một số phương pháp mới như Montessori (giúp đỡ trẻ em nông thôn ở trường và phương pháp giáo dục Montessori).

• Chúng tôi có các tình nguyện viên nước ngoài hỗ trợ tại trường mầm non và tiểu học vùng đồng bào dân tộc thiểu số.

• Chúng tôi phối hợp cùng nhà trường tổ chức các buổi học về môi trường, nông nghiệp hữu cơ cho học sinh bậc tiểu học.

EDUCATION PROJECT FOR ETHNIC MINORITIES

Overall objective :     Address the problem of early school leavers and school disinterest of ethnic                                                                       minority children in Da Teh district by disseminating the Montessori educational method

1. BACKGROUND OF THE ACTION

Da Nha is a K’ho, Ma and Tay ethnic minorities village in Quoc Oai commune, in Da Teh district. 1 095 persons belonging to 283 households live in this poor village. 118 households are registered as very poor families, that is to say earning less than 16usd a month. Da Nha population is mainly young : 56 % are under 18 years old, 39 % are 19-60 years old, 4 % are 60 – 90 years old. Da Nha population is driven by a good community spirit and are prone to help and communicate each other. All families are farmers, cultivate cashews and rice on the terrasse.

The district of Dateh is located south west of Lam Dong province with a total population of 49,848 people including 2,311 of local ethnic minorities and 8,431 of Northern ethnic minorities. The majority of people at Dateh district are poor.

The K’ho and Ma are the most disadvantaged group in the district of Dateh: the poorest, less literate, less healthy. The other groups are less illiterate less poor and better integrated.

Major part of Da Teh population are farmers or earn their living by cutting bamboos and woods. Nowadays, deforestation being illegal, so people shifted their activities to rice, cashews, sugar cane plantings and breeding livestock, etc. Ethnic minorities are called montainous people as they mainly live in those specific areas and they are totally dependant from the forest. They still cut and exploit illegally the wood from the forest, meanwhile they struggle to adapt their agriculture on the steep slope of mountains, which obviously involves some technical restrictions. Their lives are centered on the forestry activities so that the other parts of their social life are critically detrimental, such as education of their children.

At househould’s level, the Government launched several development plans such as program 135 and the Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction Program (HEPR) to eradicate ethnic minorities’ poverty. More than 95% of ethnic minority residents in Lam Dong Province were loaned capital from the provincial budget to develop farming and family based economies. So, ethnic minority people grew sugar cane, rice, cashews using this capital. They also got livestock from the local government, but the plan didn’t work well because of problems of implementation (poor quality of the livestock given for ethnic minorities for example). The last straw that raises the alarm about their critical conditions is the over-indebtedness trend that they face : with average yearly gross income of 640 USD, they have to pay 850 USD as average yearly charges, in which compound a contracted loan/credit of 520 USD to reimburse with an average of 3%  credit interest rate. That implies that they will take out a new loan to reimburse former loan. Their living conditions have come full vicious circle until we break this trend by instilling selfsufficiency in them…

At children’s level, the government has incentive programs in education for disadvantaged groups: SEQAP. The government provides materials and financial support (about 10 to 20 usd a year) to the ethnic minority family to commit itself to send the children to school and consequently prevent the early school leavers whereas school  is compulsory until 15 and the intermediate education. In some montainous regions, many children leave schools earlier to help their parents. Even if the government tries to reduce the employment age in order to keep the children at school, other practices make difficult both interests meet. Although primary education is compulsory and tuition-free, public schools can start charging parents at the secondary education level and ask them to pay uniforms or require directly the students to pay fees for sanitation, traffic guards, gardeners, pens      and notebooks. Poor and disadvantaged families can obviously not afford it and this entails school drops. In definitive, those programs of education promotion are still inefficient since there is a big challenge to address the problem of early school leavers and school disinterest of ethnic minority children.

The Da Nha project wants to work on both levels. We provide villagers a way to increase their standards of living and contribute to decrease their dependancy culture on forestry activities but we also want to tackle the education problem of our children’s beneficiaries in order to have an integrated and inclusive approach of development programs. It is then of utmost importance to face this major question of educational difficulties of our children’ beneficiaries.

1. DIAGNOSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SITUATION

The causes of early school leavers or the disinterest in education were listed as follows :

Problems at familial/parental level

• The parents do not have time to take care of their children’s education
• The parents want the children work at home or in the forest because the livelihood from cashew nuts is higher than what benefits school can offer
• The parents head to the forest so the children have to watch the house
• The parents do not encourage the children to go to school
• The parents drink alcohol very often in the middle of the day then they don’t do anything. The children take this behaviour as a model, then do anything
• The parents cannot help the children since they don’t have education. They cannot read or write, they cannot speak vietnamese for some of them.

Problems at children level

• The children are not interested in school as the pedagogical method does not attract their interest. A south-american method called VNIN was imposed on Da Teh district schools by the Education Department, whereas this method was declared non applicable to other schools in Ma Da Gui or Saigon according to the students’ parents and thus removed by the Administration. This method consists on letting the students working by group without clear guidance and giving way to their own instinct. It is nonetheless considered inappropriate with the vietnamese culture of the youngest especially the ethnic minorities children. The interviewees declare that method is even more detrimental in primary school and more particularly for ethnic minorities that need inclusive support at early age. The VNIN has been implemented for 4 years now and the Education Department still hangs up this way. The last 3 years, the district has noticed the lowest school success rate. When the problem of school failure is tackled during talking with the education field stakeholders and Education Department, no one dare to admit that this method is disadvantageous.
• The children are not interested in school because of the school programme
• The children are not interested because of the language. Actually in Da Nha school, the teachers are Kinh (ethnic majority of Vietnam) and they speak vietnamese, but at an early age, the K’ho Mà students still struggle to speak vietnamese as they do not practice neiother at home nor at the kindergarten of the village.
• The children are not interested because they do not have materials, tools and and emancipating environment.
• The children like being inactive

Problems at teachers level

• Some teachers (and mostly the teachers of Da Nha schools) feel that teaching in the EM village is a burden in their teaching day
• Some teachers do not like teaching
• Almost all teachers do not speak ethnic language of the village
• The students from EMG and their parents do not like and refuse ethnic minority teachers. They do not believe their teaching and refuse to listen to them

Problems at structural level

• The Da Nha kindergarten does not have enough space for 2 classrooms (even if their playground is very large). So the last-year nursery class (the grand section, 5 to 6 years old) is relocated in a room in Da Nha primary school
• The last-year nursery class borrowed a small room and small outdoor work space in Da Nha primary school
• The 5 to 6 years old children are lost and feel disturbed in the primary school (taking a nap is difficult, they follow the rythm with the older students)
• The Da Nha kindergarten is badly furnished in latrines and watering place for the children

Problems of vision

• There is no successful model from those communities that shows that going to school and learning can be profitable for the future
• The taught programmes and the method of teaching do not take into consideration the reality of the community. Nothing sounds familiar with the young schoolchildren, as they have been taught programmes for Kinh ethnic majority, which are not shaped for their own community and their own culture.
• The teachers accept the fate that K’ho Mà schoolchildren, especially in secondary school, have mental retardedness compared to their colleagues Kinh. They take more time to think and solve a problem

Hereinbefore are several causes that make the ethnic minorities schoolchild and students not going to school or leave school earlier or lose interest in school.

The consequences are as follows :

School is compulsory so the teachers have been ordered to catch the schoolchild at home

            – The teacher, sometimes with the policemen, visit the parents at home so as to ask them to send the children back to school.            They generaly say yes to be polite.

– When the teachers arrive at their home, the children and some parents hide and run away in the forest

– Some EM parents stay in the village to work, meanwhile the children go to Da Teh town to play and skip school

There are some positive discrimination programmes for EM children

– The main programme of Vietnamese government in Da Teh is SEQAP (school quality  assurance project) and aims at      improving and decreasing inequity in learning outcomes, such as reaching the independant learner stage, reaching the reader       and math skills scale or merely increase primary and secondary school enrollment, particularly for the most-disadvantaged         socio-economic groups. To do so, the local government hands out bags of rice, money and sometimes buffalos in exchange of          the cooperation of the parents in sending their children to school

– During the examination or annotations, the teachers usually mark K’ho Mà schoolchildren with more leniency and lightness             to favor their success and catch up the retardedness. They receive adapted topic of examination with easier questions than the    others

– After the last examination in high school, the mark of the high schoolchildren usually determine the acceptance of the        more    or less prestigious university. A high mark will enable the students to go to Da Lat university or Ho Chi Minh City University    for example, although a low mark will not give access to a mere university or vocational school. The EM high schoolchildren            are exempted from this selection. They are just asked to reach the standard mark in order to have access to any universities.

In Da Teh, some of our interviewees like Teacher Linh proposed good studies opportunities to K’ho Mà students. For example,            his daughter work in a vocational school for tourism. He proposed to one of his ethnic minority student to have direct access to       this school and be tourist guide, but the student refused claiming that he wanted to stay at home.

The consequences on the long run of school dropout come up on their own development :

– They do not find work and stay inactive in Da Teh. Their parents find small ocasionnal work.

– The EM adolescent are sooner pregnant

– They are not spontanous in their reaction, they witness a backward development, they are not concerned about their social         issue, they lose their cultural and ethnical strong points

1. THE ANSWER TO THE CRISIS

The suggested solution is multidisciplinary and are fourfold :

– At parents/family level : The specific objectives are to make the parents/family aware of their responsibilities, to enable them to better control their social life and help them at economic plan. To sum up, we will bring a good economic and social environment to help the children to thrive.  The economic and social programs of Da Nha eco-social centre and its partner-founder Caritas Da Lat will permit to reach these specific objectives by working with them on sustainable livelihood and on their involvement in their familial planing and children education .  It is at huge importance to find a happy medium between cultural traditions and social, sustainable, humanist visions of progress.

– At children level : The specific objective is to develop the autonomy of the ethnic minorities schoolchildren at early age and help their development through cultural emancipation and stimulation of languages, movements and senses. The tool of inclusive development we favor is the Montessori Method in partnership with the Montessori International School of Vietnam. We will directly affect the origin of the issue which is development stage of ethnic minorities children from 0 to 5 years old at the nursery/kindergarten. We point out the need of an education project for the middle-term, at least 2 years so as to have a real evaluation of the results and the impacts in the passage from the kindergarten stage to the primary school stage.

We aim at providing a suitable environment for their development : a classroom in Da Nha kindergarten with 1 Kinh teacher and 1 K’ho Mà teacher that have been trained to Montessori educational method. The kindergarden will be furnished with a small library with interesting pedagogical and playful books, with an multimedia area to watch movies and other instructions support, with a relaxation space and tools with sensory tools of development (cf Montessori Method).

This special class will be followed-up and the performance of the schoolchildren will be evaluated in the kindergarten and in the 1st year of primary school and renew if it is successful or revised if necessary.

– At the teachers level : The specific objective is to train the teachers to an educational method more adjusted to the schoolchildren and especially the EM ones. We would like to disseminate the Montessori teaching method in Da Nha village but also to our partners in the Da Teh district that already take in charge ethnic minority children (1 kindergarten : Binh Minh school, 1 primary school : Viet Anh school).

– At structural level : We will build a 2^nd room with furnitures for the grand section of Da Nha kindergarten and provide a better environment to thrive

Website of our partner :  http://montessori.edu.vn/

The expected results :

1° The room for the grand section is built with appropriate furnitures for the practice of a more relevant educational method

2° An adequate program for ethnic minorities children is designed with educational stakeholders for Da Nha kindergarten and         and Viet Anh primary school

2° 1 ethnic minority teacher and 1 kinh teacher are recruited for the Montessori class

3° All teachers are trained to Montessori educational method and know-how

4° The results of the ethnic minorities children are followed-up from the grand section to the 1st years of primary school

5° The project is evaluated and revised if necessary. Lessons are learnt. Capacities are empowered.

– For the vision : The specific objective is to promote dialogue. Following the example of our exchange program in the social part of our activities, we will bring about discussions and reflections between ethnic minorities group, leaders of development and successful model from other districts.

Photos of the children in the village :

Photos of the school structure (preliminary & primary) updated 11/2017 :

Nowadays