Tackle March 2021

teered, people came out on weekends
to do community work, people
were directly involved in building
their communities and ultimately
the country.
Participatory democracy flourished,
daily, weekly, monthly – not for five
seconds every 5 years. People felt
a sense of ownership of problems.
Never before or after was there such
an explosion of peoples power.
Several of the critical programme of
the revolution centered on peoples
involvement.and were designed to
protect the poor and vulnerable in
society.
Training Teachers
Through NISTEP
The NISTEP programme involved
the part-time training of teachers
over a three (3) year period to enable
them to achieve basic professional
qualifications. Hundreds of
untrained teachers journeyed to
the Teachers College in Tanteen,
St. George’s, one day a week for
all day lectures. To accommodate
everybody, half received their instruction
on Thursdays and the
other half on Fridays. On the other
days the teachers in training taught
their classes under the watchful
eyes of highly professional and
experienced tutors. These tutors
monitored the implementation of
lessons.
The benefits were double fold: the
untrained teachers received, over
the period, the same number of
hours of theoretical instructions as
teachers doing the fulltime training
course; and they (the untrained
teachers) would have significantly
more supervised practical training
experience. In that way all
untrained teachers had the opportunity
to be fully trained without
significant disruption instructions of
the classroom.
What happened though to the thousands
of school children affected
by the absence of the teachers on
Thursdays and Fridays? The PRG
created an ingenious solution in another
programme – the Community
School Day Programme (CSDP).
Community and School
Connecting Through
CSDP
The CSDP complemented NISTEP.
It became yet another example of
the PRG’s creativity in solving problems
. through people’s involvement.
Under the CSDP, parents
and skilled persons from the communities
surrounding each school
were brought into the classroom to
engage the students in a wide range
of work and life skills, in addition to
sporting and cultural activities. The
community and the school became
more connected.
Maurice Bishop International Airport (MBIA)
10 Tackle Magazine MARCH 2021