Improving education by empowering students’ mothers
Event Overview:
- Prize Category: Overcoming Adversity
- Format:
- Country: Brazil
- Languages: Streamed live in English with automated captions in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Filipino, Malay, Serbian and Hindi.
- Learn more about the Top Ten Shortlisted Schools in the Overcoming Adversity category on the World’s Best School Prizes website.
Watch on-demand
World Education Week 2022 is streaming across social media. We will embed a live stream on this page before the event begins. We are making the live stream available directly on this page alongside the Spf.io platform. Spf.io is one of our partner organisations, and their all-in-one multilingual translation and accessibility platform is embedded and linked below. You can access a range of accessibility features from the menu in the Spf.io player.
About the school
Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos in Cabrobó, Brazil, helps to improve its students’ education by taking the innovative step of teaching their parents as well.
Over time, Evandro Ferreira dos Santos found that its pupils, aged 11 – 15 years old, were struggling with their education in part because their parents received little to no education and so were not able to engage with their studies or help with their homework. Very few parents could read or write. Often, when official school documents needed a signature, a stamp in the form of a fingerprint would be used instead. The situation made it hard for students to feel motivated in their schoolwork when they came home and many even took on the role of caring for their younger siblings or performing household chores, leaving little time for their studies.
So Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos came up with a project that went straight to the root of the problem with a new programme to help parents progress to complete formal education. It focused on helping mothers first. Classes would take place every week, slowly nurturing and emboldening the ambitions of women who believed it was too late to change their personal circumstances. By the end of 2021, the project started to bear fruit; mothers who found themselves unable to write their own name were able to apply their signatures on official documents and started to respond in WhatsApp study groups.
The school was guided by the idea that it’s possible to help foster greater inclusion by helping women become literate, thereby giving them the confidence to pursue their long-held dreams.
Join us for an interesting take in community involvement.
Speakers
Moderator: Mala Malaman
Speaker 1: Elineide Alves
Elineide Alves is a Portuguese language teacher, currently working as a school manager at the Evandro Ferreira dos Santos Teaching Institution. She is a writer, with two books published. She has been working in the education field for 10 years. It has some important awards in this area, which strengthen the teaching curriculum.