Tim Goddard’s motto is “Education changes the world.”
And in his long-standing career in education he has seen a world of change in countries like Kosovo and Lebanon where his background in education leadership and management, in particular development work in post-conflict settings, was put to good use.
Most recently he travelled to Afghanistan to help lay the groundwork for a development project for which the primary objective is to establish a system for the certification of teachers and the accreditation of teacher training institutions in Afghanistan.
This teacher-training mission is particularly meaningful for Goddard, whose daughter, Captain Nichola Goddard, was killed in combat in Afghanistan on May 17, 2006.
She was the first female Canadian combat soldier killed in combat.
“Obviously, Nichola had already been killed in Afghanistan so I have a visceral relationship there, but it was also the work I do . . . which made this opportunity important to me,” says Goddard, who until recently was dean of the faculty of education at the University of Prince Edward Island.
“One thing even when she was there that we talked about was that she did her job so I could do mine. The Canadian Forces and the other military forces put a kind of civil society in place so people like me could go in and do our work. So (this project) seemed a good fit from that point of view.”
The project, which is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and being delivered by the World University Service of Canada (WUSC), with UPEI and the teacher education division of the Afghan Ministry of Education as implementing partners, started in 2009 when CIDA announced that it was going to be funding some educational development projects in Afghanistan.
WUSC invited Goddard to be part of the consortium that put forth a successful proposal to develop a teacher education, certification and accreditation structure in Afghanistan.
For the first stage of the five-year, $10-million program, Goddard and three other consultants on the project will pull together a comprehensive plan for the following four years.
In October 2010, Goddard and other team members went to Kabul, Bamiyan and Mazar-e-Sharif for their first fact-finding mission. They met with people from the ministry of education, the teacher education directorate, teacher training college, the university and others.
“We just got a sense from them of what they need because we’re not going in with a master plan made in Canada. We want to go in and work with people on the ground,” Goddard says.
The need in Afghanistan for teachers is great and will grow even greater in the coming years. In 2001 there were fewer than one million students in school; today there are almost seven million.
This number will rise as more students, especially girls, enter the education system.
In fact it is estimated that nearly nine million children will need access to primary education by 2020 and secondary school attendance will increase by 3 million students. Those students will need additional 211,000 teachers by 2020.
The most common way to become a teacher in Afghanistan is to finish Grade 12 and then enter a teacher training college (TTC), which offers a two-year diploma program to teach at the Grades 1 to 10 levels. Secondary school teachers must have a four-year degree from one of the major provincial universities.
What the Canadian team discovered was that instructors teaching the two-year diploma program had completed their four-year degree but had no actual teaching experience.
“So what we’re going to be doing is (figuring out) how to improve that instruction. And when we say ‘we,’ we mean the government of Afghanistan (and the Canadian team) ...,” Goddard says.
The team will be working with the minister of education to formulate a professional training program that will then be presented to a core group of trainers, who will in turn train more individuals.
“They call it the cascade model where it’s train the trainer, basically, So we train a small group and they go and do the work in the communities. That’s the plan, but we haven’t got to that stage yet,” he says.
A problem unique to Afghanistan is that there are 42 teacher-training colleges with no common curriculum and few shared standards between them.
“So you can graduate from college A and be completely different from someone who graduated from college B and have had a completely different experience as a trainee teacher,” Goddard says.
That’s why the Canadian team will be working with the colleges to identify the commonalities that should be an overall part of teacher training.
One major challenge right now is just the sheer numbers as the population of Afghanistan continues to increase.
“There’s a reasonably high birthrate for a start so you’ve more little kids getting to be school age.
“There are more of them now who feel secure enough to go to school and there are more girls who are participating. So the numbers in school are just exploding,” Goddard says.
Not only is it important to determine how to train the proper number of teachers quickly enough to keep pace with that, access to resources, such as books, blackboards and other materials and facilities themselves must also be considered.
“A lot of schooling right now is taking place in rented accommodations rather than purpose-built schools,” Goddard says.
One idea on the radar for the rural areas is distance education.
“What is distance education? Is it on the Internet and a computer? Is it on the radio? Or is it the old pen and paper correspondence? What is it going to look like (in Afghanistan)?” Goddard says.
The difficulty with the Internet/computer concept is the hit-and-miss nature of electricity in the country.
“There are some communities where when the government goes to show government propaganda films and things like that, they strap a generator to a donkey for two days while they walk in . . . .So we’ve got some communities where Internet-based distance education is not going to work,” he says.
“There are other communities with mud brick houses that have satellite dishes. So maybe there is some role for Internet, but it’s not going to be the solution to everybody’s problem.”
Another challenge for access to education for girls in isolated rural areas is the danger of physically travelling to and from school, which can be great distances from the small villages.
One solution may be radio; girls would gather in one household to listen to their lessons.
“In Australia they’ve done it with the School of the Air in the desert out of Alice Springs. It’s been going on for 50 years where materials are sent out and then there’s a teacher who sits in Alice Springs with a radio and talks to all these kids (in isolated areas),” Goddard says.
“So we’ve got models that we can use. It’s not like we’re making this up.
“It’s just a question of what’s appropriate for the place and what will people accept?”
Goddard acknowledges that the unsettled nature of Afghanistan means there are no guarantees that this five-year project will be successful.
“It’s a risk and we’ve put it down as being a risk . . . .
“It could be that before the end of the project we have to walk away and just say, ‘You know what? It’s just not really feasible for us to send Canadians in here right now.’ And if we have to make that call we’ll make that call,” he says.
“But you can’t not try it. You can’t say, ‘It might get difficult in two years so we’re not going to start anything now.’ “
While Goddard was in Kabul, some members of the Canadian Forces tracked him down and invited him to their training base.
“There were (people) who had worked with Nichola in her rotation and they were back five years later.
“So to sit and talk with them and hear what they’re doing in the training now of the Afghan National Army and the police force they’ve moved into that development (stage was wonderful),” says Goddard, who returns to Afghanistan at the end of this month for more research.
“When Canada first went there in 2005/2006, we were talking about the three Ds: defense, diplomacy and development. And then everything kind of focused on the defense (aspect) and on the war. Now I think we’ve come back to a more balanced approach and we are looking at the development side, whether it’s the military who are doing that in training the army or whether it’s me doing that in working with educators, we’re working on development. So it’s good.”
