Teaching elementary science in Belize

Belize is the size of New Hampshire but is its opposite in many ways. First, its culture is a mix of Maya, Garifuna, Creole, mestizo, middle eastern, Chinese and latin people. While english is usually understood, most people are tri-lingual. The population is less than 300,000, most centered in a few large towns on the coast. Its warm, with a hot, dusty dry season in winter and a humid wet season which parallels the arrival of hurricanes. Many people are quite poor, eking out a subsistence living in a village or working as a laborer in agriculture or shrimp farming. Schools are in every area, combining a small tuition with meagre government subsidies to provide a thin but pervasive educational program. I was in Stann Creek district with the UNH-Belize Teacher Program. New Hampshire teachers are afforded a look at life in the tropics and the challenges of teaching with minimal supplies or central support. In return, they model their own skills to a few Belizean teachers. My second trip with the program had me asking lots of questions about the administration of curriculum in the schools and looking at science in particular. First, with 37+ students in many classrooms, the task is daunting for teachers. Many teachers are young and started to teach the fall after finishing high school. Supplies for teaching elementary science are non-existent and overcoming ESL challenges takes up much of a teacher's time. One of the most obvious problems is the rote pedagogy of mandated science curriculum. In most of the observations I made, the biggest problem was presenting material which children were developmentally unprepared to comprehend. Because of the large differences in between village and town resources, some village children are at a disadvantage in terms of exposure to the world at large. The result is that comprehension of science content is very low and the ability to engage in inquiry style thinking is not modeled. My travels to other Central and South American countries indicates a similar pattern in terms of resource allocation and poor pairing with developmental readiness. For Belize, the science gap is particularly acute, since the country's economy relies heavily on its eco-tourism resources in the cayes and reefs of the coast and the highland jungles of the Maya mountains. In many developing countries, Belize included, resource decisions are made by a few wealthy and educated families with little regard for the overall well being of the majority of citizens. With so much at stake environmentally, science education will be a test of education policy and priority.