Revising Budget

 Traveling and Everyday Cost

Workshap Material Cost

Air Ticket Cost (1/3)

Train Ticket Cost

(Purple color is the total cost at the mininum and maximum budget for our project)

Discussion on February 18, 2011

Project Proposal

“Shaping New Ways to Approach Education in Cambodia”

I.                   Mission of the Project:

·          To build students’ critical thinking and leadership skills that will help them to deal with problems that they face throughout their lives.

·         To encourage students to actively and confidently communicate with others in order to help them to come out of the narrow-mind and low self-esteem.

·         To motivate students to become creative and resourceful people who are willing to develop their communities and society as a whole.

·         To reduce students’ behavior of copying from other students or books, and to inspire them to believe in their own abilities

·         To help students to have high morality who can become good citizens in the society

II.                Goals of Project

• To transfer our academic knowledge and experiences by running workshops in purposes

Ø  To encourage students to have different views on how education can make differences in their lives through introducing the role model of successful people and  to inspire students to pursue higher education and visualize possibilities in the outside world

Ø  To build students’ confidence in networking and communicating skills through working as a team, sharing stories, making posters and giving presentations.

Ø  To create friendly learning environment that can help students to bring out their talents and potentials by encouraging them to fully participate and interact with their group members.

Ø  To change students learning habit by encouraging them to read, write and think critically.

Ø  To convince students to change their cheating behavior during exam by showing the consequences of cheating through drama performance and discussing session about some of the relevant questions that relate to the topic.

III.             Why do we want to do this project?

            Do you believe in education? For us, yes we believe in education (need reasons why). Thus, during the last summer we, 8 Cambodian students from Asian University for Women, have conducted surveys and interviews in 4 different places in Cambodia. We have gotten 1111 responses represented as a sample that signifies the whole population of Cambodian students from grade 7, 8 and 9.

After looking at the data, we have seen that about 88% of the students agree that education is important to them. Additionally, about 94% of them are interested in higher education. Students think that education is important and they want to have higher education as approximately 70% of the students say that they need education to better their future. However, here is a puzzle; they do not have any expectations from education. As seen in the figure 1 below that displays students’ expectation from education.

 

Figure 1.  

In addition, the data has shown that most of the Cambodian students have characterized themselves as medium and poor students. In this case, there might be two different interpretations that should be considered. Firstly, from our own understanding as Cambodians, this type of characterization can be stemmed from the culture of being modest because we were taught not to be proud of who we are or what we do. Thus, it might be one of the reasons why we got this type of result.

Secondly, it might be because students get poor quality of education. Hence, it might be true as they have responded in the survey papers.   

Figure 2.

Figure 3 indicates that most of the students support copying from each other and some of them think that copying is simple. Through this matter, we analyze that students do not realize that cheating from each other will affect their future. Moreover, we can imply that the education quality is poor.

Figure 3.

Therefore, we would like to conduct three different workshops that relate with creativities, leadership, role model, and plagiarism.

Budget Plan for Summer Project

Main Expenditures

Material Expenditure for Running the Workshop

Grand Total Budget Need for the Workshop

Budget Discussion on February 1, 2011

What are we going to do?

• Randomly select or put sign up sheet for students who are interested to join our workshop from grade 7-9
• Workshop will be about: making poster, presentation, story telling, inspiring people who are successful in life.
• If possible ask teacher to select students for us. We want students who are brave and willing to learn such as class captain, outstanding students etc. (Are we sure about it?)
• After joining our workshop we want student to share their experience with their classmates. 

How can we are sure that the students will share? To make sure we will arrange the last day of the workshop as a presentation day where we will join with the students in their class room and listen to their sharing as well as we can add more ideas in order to back up the students. Doing like this can help the students who do the presentation not to be afraid. 

• Our workshop will held in two places. First in Kompong Thom province and second one is in Kompong Cham province. 

Why do we choose these two places? The answer is easy. First, the targeted schools are welcomed us and they are opened to learn more from us. Second, we want to see the impact after our project has done. Therefore, two places can help us to focus more. Third, the school principles and teachers are cooperative. 

• Consider how the topic "plagiarism" can affect grade 9 students who are going to take final exam to enter high school? 

Solution: We will not include "plagiarism" in the workshop for grade 9 students. But instead we will focus more on inspiring them by giving example of many successful people who started doing from what they like to do. We will include both simple people and famous people. So that they can have different perspectives on different talented people. 

• Ask help from the students (What help do we need? What are the things that students can do?) 
• We will divide students into group and ask them to name their group as they want. Each group will do a few minutes presentation on their achievement after the end of the workshop.
• We also encourage students to show their talented skills like drawing, singing, performing, writings, or other skills. 
• Encourage students to write diary 

 We will guide the students to make their own diary by using color papers that we have. It is creative and they would learn to us material that would provide them. 

• If it is possible we want to ask donations some organizations that support education in Cambodia. What we want from them are books and other study tools.
• Ask bus library to go to the school at least one a week in order to continue inspiring students to read
• In order to present some of leadership experience of successful leaders we need projects and computers to show powerpoint slides. 
• We will divide ourselves into groups and each group will responsible for each topic that support our workshop's goals. 
• Encourage students to make thank you cards for their teachers in order to strengthen the bone between teachers and students. Also to help them express their feeling as most of they students are shy like us when we were their age. 

Discussion on January 23, 2011

What are we going to do now?

1. Look at the data and come up with some ideas which we are interested to do during summer vacation.

2. Correct summary and data mistakes both in Excel and Word

3. Send email to Prof. Sara and Prof. Hussain.

What are the interesting facts?

1. Copying other students' work and plagerizing is not embarrassing; therefore, about 70% of the students support plagiarism.

2. Many students dropped out of school

3. Increasing number of schools, but lack of quality (question 9): Students have low self-esteem and lack of confidence.

4. Plagiarism is not affecting my future.

5. 76 % of the students do not expect to find a job (question 17.a)

6. About 80% of the students do not expect to know the outside world (question 17.b)

Limitation

• Khmer students qualify themselves lower than their actual capacity (question 9)
• Question 25 is confusing; therefore, can't take into account. 

What are we interested to do?

1. Run a workshop about plagiarism
2. Encourage female students to continue their study
3. Encourage students to do more reading
4. Encourage teachers to listen and give a chance for their students to give their own opinions. 
5. Exchange presentation on students' achievement in their studying
6. Improving school facility by encourage the school to write proposal to different apartments and NGOs to ask for facility.
7. Library: encourage school to open the library and encourage students to do extra research in the library.
8. Find NGOs (Moul Sokhour and PEPY) that can support the school so that after we finish our project, the school still has NGOs to work with.
9. Encourage students to know what education can make difference in their lives

How can we encourage students?

• Divide students into small groups and encourage them to think and teach them to create network within the group
• Play inspiring documentary
• Learn about their strength and weakness
• Creativity like what?
• Publish in the newspaper to influence media (Cambodian Daily, Kos Sonti Peab, Reaksmey Kompuchea)

Questions to think about?

1. where is our target school?
2. When is the suitable time for students to be with us? 
3. Where to start our idea?