My Connection to Thailand
I lived and worked as a teacher in Chiang Mai, Thailand between 2010-2013. My first school was a popular Thai-English bilingual school, with more than 2500 students. The school was famous for investing more into modern appearance and fancy reputation than real academics (which took me four months to slowly realize and eventually make the decision to leave). The school was clearly following different priorities than my family.
During my first week I found the library. I had two small children and I wanted to sign out picture books. (Good quality books were hard to come by in Thailand at that time. Even Amazon didn't deliver to Thailand.) The library's English section was brand new, colourful, with comfy seats, shiny shelves in the school colours and a plastic rainbow arching over the room. There were about one or two books on each shelf, nicely spread out. I've never seen an emptier library in my life. In the next couple of weeks I took home every single book, I read them to my kids, I read them to my class, I scanned them and turned them into slide shows. When I ran out of books, I quit my job.
In my second job (a Buddhist/environmentalist bilingual school, where I stayed for three years and spent probably the best time of my teaching career) I had the privilege to be part of the process of creating a new school from the very beginning. It was a fantastic, very rewarding experience. I got to order the books for the library with a colleague, by using a Bangkok-based agency that specialized on foreign books. I also spent some time explaining and modelling to the Thai school librarian how to run story time for preschoolers and primary aged kids, how to create visuals, how to prepare activities, because all he had been trained to do was administering library duties.
School Libraries in Thailand
When it comes to library and media skills, I was shocked to see the lack of consistency in the Thai education system. I had the chance to visit numerous schools, and it seemed that only the long-established, private, prestigious international schools had well-equipped libraries, modelled after the British barding schools. The small, state-run village schools had some musty, black-and-white books on shelves, only in Thai, if they had any at all.
I found a study online that focuses on Thai school libraries. The author comes to the same conclusion: lack of resources and lack of standards in public schools: "Even though the Thai government has developed school library standards and supports many projects to help all schools establish effective libraries, most rural small public primary schools still struggle to improve their libraries enough to reach even the minimum criteria of the standards. Thai government and policy makers appear to overlook the special management, guidelines and standards challenges for libraries in rural small public primary schools. The lack of expenditure in Thailand on research and development of rural small public primary school libraries has led to a minimum of related primary data and studies, giving very little indication of ways to improve the quality of those libraries effectively." (Nilobon)The writer also urges the implementation of information and communications technology. Data shows that in 2017 in rural Thailand there were still schools without electricity, running water and internet connection, and of course, libraries. (Nilobon, p.148)
“Libraries lack computers and internet connection to support students to be independent learners. Most libraries lack teacher-librarians because they were assigned to be responsible for mainly teaching students. Therefore, the libraries lack providing a variety of activities and services developing the reading habit and reading culture based on which is their job responsibility." (A Thai principal's opinion quoted in Nilobon.)
The principals named the low budget as the most important contributing factor to the current situation. Obviously, the list of priorities should always start with running water and electricity; libraries and technology will come second. Nevertheless, they voice their discontent that the government's solution to the problem regarding these badly equipped, isolated small schools is to close them down and send students to larger schools, far away from their parents.
Technology as an Opportunity
In the 21st century wifi and internet could bring isolated communities close together and help them connect. As we saw it during the pandemic, there are endless opportunities to bring together children, teachers and parents through technology, to inspire and motivate them to acquire new ways of learning. Connecting these schools to the world wide web should be the way of keeping these small schools alive, giving the students the possibility of growing up and learning near their parents, and having the same (or at least similar) opportunities as the children who grow up in affluent families in larger cities and have the privilege to attend private schools.
If anyone is worried about how these rural children from mostly underprivileged families will learn how to use technology, I would like to bring a very interesting experiment to their attention. A Delhi professor Sugata Mitra placed computers in freely accessible places in slums and rural villages, where children hardly had received any formal education and previously acquired no English skills. The children learned complex computer skills and taught each other as well - within months, days or even hours! Mitra's experiment suggests that children around the world, regardless their language and education level can learn complex skills independently when provided with access to technology.
School libraries and their roles in rural Thailand: Perceptions of public primary school principals. Wimolsittichai, Nilobon (2017) PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/116146/1/Nilobon%20Wimolsittichai%20Thesis.pdf
I connected to this post as I too taught in Thailand, but only for three months. I was in a rural community outside of Chiang Mai called Wiang Haeng. I thought long and hard after reading your post and I don't think I ever saw a library in any of the schools that I was in. I was consistently surprised and amused by the Thai culture. Girls were excused from all their classes every day after lunch if they were dancers, the sole purpose of this being for them to sit around with their wrists taped, flexed backwards, so they could bend their hands back in a way that is considered to be beautiful. I also loved how that, most days of the week they had special dress days: Monday they wore yellow to honour the king, another day was traditional dress day and another was wear your scouting uniform day. I got sidetracked, but I just wanted to say that I loved making so many connections to this post and also enjoyed reading about your time in Thailand.
ReplyDeleteThis is a well-researched, well-developed, and engaging post. I appreciate the way in which your intertwined your personal experience with examples from your reading and research. You leave your reader with much to consider.
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