Helen Collinson, teacher support officer, Ghana
Helen Collison from Portmarnock Co. Dublin left her teaching post in St Sylvesters Infant School in Malahide, to volunteer with VSO as a district teacher support officer in Northern Ghana. Below she recounts her Ghanian experience.
After four years teaching in St. Sylvester's Infant School in Malahide I felt it was time for a new adventure so decided to do two years of voluntary work with VSO. I lived and worked in a rural town named Zebilla which is in Northern Ghana, very close to the border with Burkina Faso.
Breaking the cycle
I worked for the Ghana Education Service which gave me the fancy title of ‘District Teacher Support Officer’. This involved travelling around on my motorbike to schools in the district promoting literacy and providing inservice training in different methods of teaching English for the teachers. Only nine per cent of pupils in the area completing primary school can read with understanding. Our goal in VSO is to break this cycle and to offer education to try and ensure that an increased number of these children can read with understanding by the time they leave primary school.
In this way I feel I reached many teachers, which in turn had a positive effect on the classroom experience of even more children, so my work was sustainable and helped in a small way to build a fairer world. I learnt and gained so much from this experience.
