About the Trainer: For those of you that don’t know Weere Weerasingham who led the program this week. He is someone who started his career and life in teaching and then became a principal in a public school. Thereafter he changed careers and worked for over 21 years in the development sector as a trainer and program facilitator at a community level. He has worked with many community-based teachers over the years in various topics and areas. He is also a strong advocate for many causes linked to equity.
He was invited to start the program to help our teachers understand the root causes of educational inequity and the role of leadership in overcoming the obstacles they face. Here is a summary of the different sessions that they went through.
The Training: Started with a session on identity and understanding their role as young leaders. They were asked to create puppets that they would introduce to their group. It followed with another activity that helped them Understand how their independent identity can contribute to working together to create a collective identity or culture. This promoted the need to value diversity and inclusion.
On Monday afternoon, he used a game with red and green cards, that explored different kinds of inequities that exist in their communities and the public system. This discussion helped them explore equality and inequality based on their existing understanding and observations. Then they linked this exploration into thinking about the intersectional inequality in Sri Lanka. A lot of understanding of Tamil culture and the differences in cast, geography, religion and education was explored in this discussion.
