LABORED: a continuing training project for nursery and primary school teachers.

This is a project that Children in the Desert has been carrying out in Burkina Faso since 2018, born from the pedagogical-didactic experiment "Reading and writing in Burkina Faso".

At the end of six years of experimentation, carried out in Nagreongo from 2012 to 2017, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, it was necessary to continue offering theoretical and practical training sessions for teachers interested in improving the Burkinabè school.

The LABORED project was born, thanks to the collaboration with prof. Karim Kaborè, an official at the Ministry of Education, with whom we have shared for 12 years theories and pedagogical practices. The staff of Labored also includes Sama Prosper, local contact person for BnD; Saba Abel, inspector at CEB in Nagreongo; Ouedraogo Marcelline and Sawadogo Tiburce, teachers and historical members of the MBEM (Mouvement Burkinabè d'École Moderne) movement, which is based on the Freinet Pedagogy.

The first training session on "Metacognition" has just ended, a crucial topic to give students the tools to be "in charge" of their learning. How do you think? Reflecting on how one thinks and learns, how memory and attention work, the importance of constantly planning, monitoring and evaluating one’s learning process. In a word: to learn to learn.

In these seven years of activity, Labored has involved about 80 teachers, directors and inspectors, through two training sessions per year on the following topics:

- Literacy processes from 5 to 7 years

- Learning difficulties

- The Freinet Pedagogy

- Montessori Pedagogy

- Cooperative Learning

- Metacognition and study skills

The project, financed in part by the Table 8x1000 of the Waldensian church, unfortunately struggles to find funds: teacher training is not perceived as a priority, while we believe that it is at the root of the change of the school, therefore of the whole society.