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by CJ Hines Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Kurt Meredith and Jeannie Steele may not have planned to change the world, but their project, The Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Program (RWCT), is making headway as it is now present in 32 countries and has affected millions of teachers and students. The program began in 1997 in Slovakia as the Orava Project. “It started for us in 1991 when the first education minister from Czechoslovakia came to the United States for a conference on democratizing education. While at this conference, he asked for help with teacher education and requested the help come from Iowa, because at that time Iowa was first in the nation in standardized achievement test scores,” said Steele, professor of curriculum and instruction. |
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Steele and Meredith—husband and wife who are sometimes referred to as the Dynamic Duo by their colleagues—submitted a grant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). After the grant was approved, the couple moved to Slovakia in 1994 and, for five years, worked with the Slovak Ministry of Education on the Orava Project to teach democracy in the Slovak Republic, which was under communist rule until 1989. They were the first of more than 60 UNI faculty and community educators to go to Slovakia and work on the project. |
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| For their service to education in Slovakia, the couple received the Medal of St. Gorazda, the highest award given by the Ministry of Education. “We authored the Orava program and implemented it in Slovakia. The Open Society Institute (OSI), which promotes worldwide educational, social and legal reform, asked us to develop a program for them. We needed more people, so we formed a consortium with Charles Temple at Hobart and Smith colleges and Scott Walter of the International Reading Association, to found the RWCT program. We ultimately recruited 80 volunteer faculty from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom,” Meredith said. “The great thing is that none of the money ever came from UNI—it was always funded by outside grants. UNI recognized this was a good thing and supported faculty who wanted to volunteer. We’re all connected; even though the cultures are so different and rich, we all have the same needs.” |
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Jeannie Steele—professor of curriculum and instruction since 1986 |
Then Thein Lwin, director of the Teacher Training for Burmese Teachers, a non-profit educational institution operating in exile in Northern Thailand, heard about RWCT. He contacted Meredith and Steele, who brought the RWCT program to Northern Thailand’s refugee camps in 2002. |
 Typical classroom at the Mae Ra Moo Burmese refugee camp school in Northern Thailand |
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“The Burmese refugee camps have been in place in Thailand for some time, and they have had schools operating since the beginning. However, there were serious shortages of qualified teachers. As the refugee crisis grew, there were more and more children. There also was the belief that most Burmese living in camps would one day return to their country, so their children would need to be prepared to build a democratic nation. This resulted in a push to increase effective democratically based schools within the refugee camps,” Meredith explained. “A second push came from some of the Burmese autonomous regions on the Thai and China borders,” he said. “These states have managed to battle the junta in Burma to a draw and now operate somewhat independent of the ruling military government. In these regions there has been a quest to populate schools with better qualified teachers.” The recent unrest and violence in Myanmar hasn’t directly affected the Burmese refugees, although teachers hoping to get out of Myanmar to participate in training may not be able to leave, Meredith adds. |
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Meredith and Steele gave OSI the rights to use the RWCT program in underdeveloped countries, and the two continued to volunteer. “However, OSI is no longer involved with the Burmese refugee program as it pulls back from many of its education initiatives worldwide. But we continue to volunteer,” Meredith said. “Since 2000 we have made at least 10 trips to Thailand, staying for two weeks at a time. Another trip was planned for December but because of the uprising in Myanmar this fall, the next trip is planned for March 2008.” Many original RWCT programs are now sustained from within the countries, and the Burmese refugee program continues to rely on outside volunteers and outside funding. Today, more than 50,000 educators and 2 million students are estimated to have participated in the Orava and RWCT programs. Steele, who is on phased retirement at UNI, plans to write a book about the educational democracy project. “It will be for an American audience, bringing together ideas that have worked so well around the world,” she said. | |||
“The military junta has crippled the public education system. They don’t want the population to be educated. Monks run the schools that do function, and the government—until recently—wouldn’t interfere. So in the last two years, we’ve been working with teachers who leave Myanmar and go to Thailand on a vacation visa. In effect, they sneak out of the country to receive training and then return to teach,” Meredith said.