Carrying the Mount to
Madagascar By Nathaniel Bald, C’21
AS PART OF THE FIRST Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) cohort in Madagascar, my colleagues and I often get invited to special events and clubs as guest speakers on topics ranging from American culture and regional accents to strange idioms and whether they’re pronouncing words correctly. Nonetheless, what most Malagasy English teachers are interested in is my role as a Fulbright ETA and any differences I have found between education in the United States and Madagascar. In fact, those are also the most popular questions I receive from friends and family back in the States. So let me share my most useful insight. My primary job as a Fulbright ETA is to teach 19 different classes at Lycée Jean Joseph RABEARIVELO (LJJR), a high school located in the very center of Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo. I only see each class for an hour a week, plus any of the students that attend the weekly English club during Tuesday’s lunch period. I focus the classes on speaking and listening, something which Malagasy English teachers are desperate to have. High school in Madagascar is 10th through 12th grade, the names of which, in order, are seconde, première and terminal. These grades are optional, as Malagasy students who complete the ninth grade exiting exam are not required to continue their education and finish high school by passing the baccalaureate, an extremely long and stressful exam that lasts a week in July every year. My 19 classes are spread across the three grades, but I usually teach the same lesson for each class, adjusting the difficulty as necessary. I have observed many differences between education in the United States and Madagascar, but here I will focus on one major dissimilarity: the classroom itself. In the United States, teachers typically receive their own rooms where they hopefully invest time and resources in making it a welcoming,
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CLASS NOTES SUMMER 2022
useful and open learning environment. If done properly, a classroom in the United States is as much as a teaching tool as are handouts and homework. Walls are filled with conjugation charts, mathematic formulas, historic timelines, quirky comics, and all other visual aids that just scream, “this is a place of learning!“ More importantly, it suggests that there is an ongoing pedagogical shift from a teacher-centered approach to a student-centered approach in the United States. That’s not the case in Madagascar where classrooms are large (or sometimes small), consisting of a single large (or small) and sometimes shattered blackboard, a small wooden stage in front of the blackboard, a teacher’s desk and chair at the front of the room, and row after row of heavy, clunky, barely functioning desks only big enough to hold two students but very often carrying three. Students are packed in like sardines in a tin can while the teacher, who moves from classroom to classroom because students don’t move from their assigned room, writes on the board, distributes handouts, and lectures indefinitely. It has not been uncommon for me to show up to class to find the teacher before me had decided his or her class would last another hour, meaning it’s back to the teachers’ room for me to practice my Malagasy. In contrast to the American classroom, which is moving toward a student-centered methodology, Malagasy classrooms are literally designed for teacher-centered approaches. Everything about the room and the teachers points toward a structured and rigid approach where the teacher is the provider of knowledge and students are to receive that knowledge and then repeat it when commanded. What about applying that knowledge in a form of critical thinking? What?! Are you crazy? That’s not how we do things here.
