UNE helps Bhutan boost teachers' skills

April 19, 2007

A University of New England lecturer is spending three weeks in Bhutan this month, helping the staff of the Samtse College of Education prepare distance-education material for the professional development of primary school teachers throughout the Himalayan kingdom.

Dr Robyn Smyth (pictured here), a Lecturer in Higher Education at UNE's Teaching and Learning Centre, is sharing her knowledge and methods with distance educators at the College to help them lift the level of primary teachers' expertise to Australian Bachelor's degree standards.

"I will be helping with the design and content of the printed materials they send out for their distance education program, based on recent work I have done and the processes we have used here for many years," Dr Smyth said before leaving for Bhutan. "Resources will be an issue, though; I'll have to adapt the way I teach them according to the resources I find."

She will recognise a few friendly faces in Bhutan, as one of her previous Master's students, Namgay, is currently the Coordinator of Distance Education at the College. Namgay is just one of a number of Bhutanese postgraduate students who have studied at UNE since 1991 with the aim of returning home to assist in the development of their country.

The current project grew out of a visit to Bhutan last year by the Program Director of UNE's Bhutan Project, Associate Professor Tom Maxwell, and several of his colleagues. Dr Maxwell said that the aim of the project was to find ways of improving the qualifications of primary school teachers, and distance education was the best way to do that in Bhutan.

"The most important thing we identified was that their instructional materials needed a lot of work," he explained, "and this is Robyn's field of expertise. These students are practising teachers, so the materials had to be related to their work."

Although UNE has been teaching Bhutanese students for over a decade, the Armidale chapter of the Australian Bhutanese Friendship Association (ABFA) is a relatively new one. It was started when the Minister of Education of the Royal Government of Bhutan, Dasho Thinley Gyamtasho, and the Vice-Chancellor of UNE, Professor Alan Pettigrew, launched it last year.

The Armidale chapter of ABFA plans to hold a fund-raising dinner on the 7th of June. The event will have a silent auction of artefacts, photographs, and items brought back by Dr Smyth, raising funds for teachers' housing in remote Bhutan. For further information on ABFA or the dinner, contact Dr Maxwell on (02) 6773 2583.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Dr Robyn Smyth displayed here expands to include Associate Professor Tom Maxwell.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at April 19, 2007 10:27 AM