English in Action has been working with over 12,500 primary and secondary teachers in Bangladesh from its pilot phase till up-scaling phase. Starting from April 2014, EIA will commence its journey to the final phase: Institutionalisation and Sustainability. Keeping the urgency of sustainability, EIA initiated its work on ‘how the models, approaches, materials can be embedded within the context of teachers and schools capacity in Bangladesh’.

This is a story of one of the upazilas where teachers from 39 schools already were trained by EIA. Along with the training, they were also provided with EIA materials including speakers and mobile phones. Seeing the change taking place in the teachers’ professional development and students approach to learning English, an unprecedented proposal came to EIA from the Education Officers of Kishorgonj Sadar.

The Education officers seeing the impact and change in classrooms expressed their interest to spread EIA’s methods across the entire upazila by their own initiative. That means, they will buy mobile phones and speakers from their school fund, and would require EIA’s orientation on how to use them.

Welcoming this initiative, EIA planned to customize its existing audio-visual materials for classroom and professional development into stand-alone materials. The idea is, they will get only EIA audio video materials and relatively less support from EIA. Expecting it will lead the Teachers to go in almost autonomous mode for their professional development, and they will practice and improve through using the materials in the classrooms. For this purpose, EIA will briefly orient the teachers, head teachers and education officers of that upazila.

A total 204 teachers of 102 Government Primary schools will come under this new idea. As EIA will only provide them a short orientation and a SD card with all AV materials, so it makes the idea of sustainability into reality where EIA’s human presence is almost next to none.

This brings in a lot of strength for English in Action and the work all it is doing. The lessons of Kishorgonj Sadar upazila hopefully will inspire and be adopted by many other upazila education officers and community leaders, multiplying the reach, impact and change into many folds.

Faysal Abbas & Bikash Sarkar