Teacher Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoan, Vietnam, “There are 13 ethnic students in my class. All Hmong girls. Some have a very difficult life. With language, vocabulary is always a challenge. Sometimes when you teach in Vietnamese they seem not to understand, but when you repeat in Hmong, you find out they do understand. So we try to speak Vietnamese in short, simple sentences. Sometimes we use visual tools, like images or real things, to help their understanding. At the same time, I try to learn Hmong from them. ”

Vang Thi Giang, 22, 4th grade teacher, Vietnam: “I am a member of the Giay ethnic group. I speak Nung and Vietnamese. I haven’t learned Hmong yet so it’s quite a challenge teaching ethnic students. Towards a long-term solution we have tutoring sessions to help students improve their Vietnamese, or we organize outdoor activities and games to encourage interaction.”

Sung De a 9 yr-old Hmong, Vietnam: “At first studying in Vietnamese was difficult. I grew used to it in 1st grade. But it’s Math that is the most difficult to me. Even now I still find it hard, sometimes, to listen to Vietnamese.”

T. Sushmitha, 9 years old, 5th grade student in Andhra Pradesh, India: “Of all the subjects I’m taught, Telugu is my favourite. I find English very difficult to learn as it has big, complicated words that I don’t understand. If taught at a slow pace, I can understand easily. English, unlike mathematics is not taught as part of the activity based teaching. I don’t understand what I’ve recited, as most others in my class. Everyone finds it difficult to understand English. Since I find difficult to learn and understand English, I want it to be taught at a slow pace and repeatedly till I understand.”

Gohar Rahman, 26 years old, Pakistan: “I was not educated in my mother tongue. As a child, Pashto was alien to us; we did not understand it and that created a hurdle in our learning progress. Teachers who were native speakers laughed at us when we made mistakes while speaking the language. This embarrassed us and we sometimes felt inferior to those who could speak to the language.”

Assanah Binsulong,Teacher, Narathiwat Province, Thailand: “Being an MTB-MLE educator requires undergoing rigorous training to learn this approach, which is still very new in Thailand. It is worth it when I see the children are happier and doing better in class. A mother of one of my students came up to me recently and asked why this approach wasn’t used for all classes because her child who had been in an MTB-MLE program since kindergarten was doing better in school than an elder sibling who had not. Being an MTB-MLE educator requires undergoing rigorous training to learn this approach, which is still very new in Thailand. It is worth it when I see the children are happier and doing better in class. A mother of one of my students came up to me recently and asked why this approach wasn’t used for all classes because her child who had been in an MTB-MLE program since kindergarten was doing better in school than an elder sibling who had not.”

Chandana Tripura, Bangladesh teacher: “I cried when my mom dropped me off on my first day of school and didn’t stop until my teacher spoke to me in Kok Borok, my mother tongue. That calmed me down a bit and I managed to pass the time, but the next day, my mom still had to take me to school by force – I didn’t want to go to school because I did not understand the language of instruction, Bangla. Now that I can read in my mother tongue, I have grown to appreciate how much we are losing our culture and traditions through lack of use and practice, and I’ve also learned more about other ethnic groups, like the Marma, Chakma, Garo etc. This awareness is growing among parents and villagers as well.”

Tuanyoh Nisani, teacher, Pattani Province, Thailand. “In daily life, I mainly speak Patani Malay. I do not speak central Thai that often. When I was growing up, everyone around me spoke Pattani-Malay. All of my friends and family spoke it and we never heard Central Thai outside of school. Class made me uncomfortable because I couldn’t understand what the teachers were saying. Sometimes they helped by translating the parts I didn’t understand; still it was barely comprehensible. Because of that I came to believe that as teachers would treat our students as if we are teaching our own children, looking for whatever methods we can to help them learn. MTB-MLE makes us proud of our mother language, which is our identity. Nowadays, we love to speak Pattani-Malay and feel we should preserve it. Previously, my teaching approach lacked structure, but after I participated in the teaching training, I now know how to teach so that students can understand. When they are capable of studying, I am truly happy.”

Milagros Choque is a third grade teacher in the Peruvian highlands: “Before teaching in Luis Pata, I worked in a very far away little school called Tanquigua, where I had to travel for several hours on public transportation until the end of the road, and then I had to walk. I arrived on the Monday morning and I went back home at the week-end or every two weeks, because it was such a long distance that I could not return every day. It was very difficult to be far away from my family, but this did not discourage me because the students in Tanquigua deserved a good education, the same as my children can receive”. She has been working in Luis Pata for three years. She is currently in charge of 26 students (19 girls and 7 boys) between 8 and 9 years of age, with whom she has bilingual classes, both in Quechua as in Spanish “The mother tongue of the children in this community is Quechua. Starting from this language, we start to build their knowledge and progressively I strengthen the Spanish.”