Shots from the Trip
About the Community
When Rowena Jimenez of Pinoy Reading Buddies first messaged us on Facebook (the command center for her non-profit organization and the network that has had explosive social impact in the Philippines), we could not have imagined a better fit for a partnership. PRB not only has spent the past two decades teaching students to read and write across the islands, but has been shifting towards training the teachers the essentials of engagement and constructivist philosophy, or plugging into and cultivating students' intrinsic desires to learn as well as shifting learners from absorbing knowledge to producing their own understanding.
Thanks to our recent successes in Kenya, our teacher training workshop has been growing more elaborate and more impactful, and we embarked on a journey with PRB this month to develop something even bigger. Not only did we zoom around rural and urban Philippines teaching our normal storytelling workshop. We also deployed an original "Design Thinking"-based workshop (just like our main storytelling one!) on three occasions with over 400 teachers across the Philippines, in which we used various types of media (auditory, visual, textual) to take them inside the classrooms of teachers all over the world. We sparked reflection on their teaching and helped them define a set of principles that they can use to re-design their classrooms in a new light.