Stopping the Violence

Since January 2011, the Strengthening Peace in the Lives of Children project has been equipping Timorese teachers with the skills and knowledge to be child protection advocates and to replace violent physical punishment with a positive learning environment. Since January 2013, Ba Futuru has held four teacher trainings in the capital, Dili, and the remote eastern town of Lospalos.  Eighty nine high school teachers participated in the trainings, which achieved very positive results:

• In the pre-training evaluation just 48% of participants could list at least four child rights. But after the training, all of the participants could list at least four child rights.
• In the pre-training evaluation, just 6% of participants could list four types of abuse, but after the training 87% of participants could do this.

Following the Child Protection and Positive Discipline training in Lospalos, Teacher Sudaryatin from High School No.1 in Lospalos said:  “I have learned many things from this training, such as how to manage the classroom and how to give praise to students. (…) Personally, I feel that this topic was very valuable for me as a teacher, because if I reflect on my own behaviour, I realise that I myself have abused students.  This training has helped me to not use physical and emotional violence against students anymore in the future, but rather to use positive discipline that I learned about in the training.”

In addition to the teacher trainings, an internal training for 24 Ba Futuru training facilitators was held in April which covered the new content in the updated Child Protection and Positive Discipline training manual. The knowledge and skills shared in this training will indirectly impact hundreds more beneficiaries across Ba Futuru’s nine current projects. Rosa Martins, a project coordinator for Ba Futuru’s High Schools Transformation Project, said:

“I really appreciated learning the information about positive behaviour management and the legal framework. In my own experience, I have tended to focus on how to respond well to bad behaviour, rather than reinforcing a child’s good behaviour. Even though I am a Ba Futuru facilitator, my understanding of the laws for child protection still isn’t very strong. This training has helped me gain more knowledge in this area.  And not only about this, but also about many topics which I am now ready to implement myself with participants that I meet and train in the future.”

Following the 3-day trainings with teachers in April and May, monthly meetings began in Dili and Lospalos, providing ongoing mentoring and support to 20 teachers across the two locations. At the meetings, additional positive discipline strategies are introduced, practised and discussed, and teachers have the opportunity to share the successes and challenges of their use of positive discipline in the classroom.

To extend the project’s reach to students in the target schools, Ba Futuru will develop a theatre performance about positive discipline and child protection which will be performed at each of the four target high schools in Dili and Lospalos in the coming months. The theatre performance will be accompanied by posters and reference booklets available at the schools, ensuring that important information about support services and basic rights are available to more than 3,000 students, as well as their teachers and families.

Thanks to your generous donations, Ba Futuru’s work continues to benefit students and teachers in Timor-Leste.

To become a Member of Ba Futuru, or for more information about our work, contact bafuturu@bafuturu.org.