Tomorrow evening we have been invited to attend the class of an ChineseAmerican lecturer in linguistics who is teaching at the local provincial university. He has thrown away the textbooks and is teaching English through literature and creative interaction. We wonder whether the future volunteer project will be able to have input here.
‘The only answer to this terrible rote chanting is to train the teachers differently, to give the bright children scholarships to train abroad.’
Apparently after independence in the fifties the Malaysian government sent thousands of teachers to train overseas in order to develop the Malaysian education system. This lecturer is meeting Colin tomorrow to discuss extending the scholarship system. Colin phones to tell us that he is organising a conference at Hanoi University shortly after our return from the mountains in the north, in late December. Will we please prepare a paper for discussion on the value of volunteers here in educational development. We are pleased about this, and suggest a number of people we have met on our travels who have stimulated our thinking about the development of the volunteer project.