Interactive Radio Instruction: Confronting Crisis in Basic Education. Newton, Mass: Education Development Centre, Agency for International Development (undated), 86 pages. |
VOL. 6, No. 1, 97-99
Any book that advocates an educational approach that "offers hope for 100 million children in the poorest nations who cannot attend school" needs to be taken seriously. This slim and very readable book provides a summary of experiences from a $20 million USAID program in 14 of the poorest developing countries, based on the use of "interactive" radio instruction (IRI) for teaching core curricular subjects (math, Spanish, English, science, and health education).
Interactive radio is direct teaching aimed at children in the poorest areas of developing countries. In the Barahona area of the Dominican Republic, there are 120,000 children who work from dawn to late afternoon in the fields and have no schools, nor time to attend. Interactive radio provides one hour a day of direct teaching for these children; in the other 13 projects, the radio broadcasts are used in conventional schools as "surrogate teachers, completely self- contained and understandable to the children without intervention" (p. 14). These broadcasts do not use the "passive" approach of traditional educational radio, where "the radio voices and the audience mimicked the traditional teacher-student relation-ship: one spoke; the other kept silent" (p. 2). Interactive broadcasts have up to 200 "pauses" an hour for children to shout out responses to questions posed in the broadcast itself. Teachers are thus "freed" to deal with other pupils or to follow up the programs later with related workbooks. In most cases the broadcast scripts are integrated with national school curricula by local Ministry of Education staff.
The book describes three key projects, Radio Math Nicaragua, the Radio Language Arts Project in Kenya, and the RADECO project in the Dominican Republic. Further chapters describe the spread of IRI to other countries, and plans for the future. There is an appendix that deals with implementation, sustainability, and costs.
Very strong claims are made for IRI: that it is low-cost (as little as $0.50 per student per year); effective (impressive evidence of large performance gains are given, with greatest gains for children from the poorest regions); easily accessible to the very poor; "interactive" and fun for the children and popular with teachers; and easily adapted to local circumstances and national curricula.
So is this the answer to educating the world's poor? Readers will have to make their own judgments regarding the behaviouristic approach to learning, the role it requires of the classroom teacher, and the implications of the approach for the non-instructional aspects of the school curriculum. It is worth pointing out though that there have been problems of "institutionalization" and sustainability, that is, getting national Ministries of Education either to extend the projects across the system or to continue the projects after foreign financial assistance is withdrawn.
One reason for this is that IRI requires "add-on" costs, that is, extra expenditure; it does not replace existing activities. Indeed, the whole treatment of costs in this book left me very uneasy. The figure of $0.50 per student per year appears to me to be a hypothetical, "best-case" figure, if the system were to be applied to all schools in a country, yet few if any projects have reached this target. Despite the extensive experience now of IRI, no actual costs are given in this book, although primary sources are referenced. One study quoted, for instance, concludes that IRI is much cheaper and more effective than teacher training. However, without knowing whether this refers merely to one year of operation or to a sustained period of application, this statement is meaningless, since IRI "effects" are more immediately measurable than the effects of teacher training.
My other concern is much more fundamental. While within a narrow context the projects may appear successful, what kind of life is it where children work all day in the fields, then have to come home for radio instruction in community shelters where "furniture is not really important" (p. 40)? This is an educational band-aid. Such projects do not address issues such as why children are working in the fields all day (or who benefits from it). More than one-third of the Dominican Republic's annual budget goes on repaying foreign debt - money that could be used for providing decent schools and teachers. If the USA or other developed countries are really concerned about improving education in poor countries, these are the issues that have to be addressed.
Nevertheless, what does one do in the meantime? IRI is a teaching strategy that several Ministries of Education in poor countries and its American sponsors consider to be highly successful. I, therefore, look forward to seeing it applied to the educational crisis in the USA's own inner-city schools.