AFTER visiting an underserved community in Rawang, Selangor, and hearing about the plight of children with insufficient literacy skills, Taylor’s University’s School of Education senior lecturer Hema Letchamanan was driven to help the children.
Considering the grim reality of how many children and youth from the Sungai Choh community in Rawang rarely get to go to college or university, Hema immediately decided to roll out a volunteer-based targeted reading programme called Projek BacaBaca within the community.
However, Hema and her team faced complications using their teaching platforms due to poor internet and telephone connectivity in the area.
Determined to continue their support for the community through a different approach, the Projek BacaBaca team decided to train a group of stay-at-home mothers within the community to become reading coaches, under Projek BacaBaca Komuniti, so that they could teach the children to read.
“Targeted interventions and community-based learning are powerful and effective as the children are learning from someone they’re familiar with,” says Hema.
“This also empowers the adults in the community, especially the women, to plan and execute early literacy programmes like Projek BacaBaca Komuniti, which is more sustainable in the long run.”
Since April this year, five women from the community have received training sessions led by a team of teacher-training and early literacy experts from Taylor’s.
Using the lesson plans and materials provided by the Projek BacaBaca team, these women are now able to conduct reading sessions for the children in their community. These sessions now have a total of 25 participating students between the ages of 6 to 9 years old.
“On top of the training we have received, we are also sent new lesson plans and audio reading files every week for both English and Bahasa Malaysia (BM) to further help us manage and conduct effective group reading classes,” says Leelavani Amah Kesavan, who is one of the Projek BacaBaca Komuniti teachers from Sungai Choh.
“The group of students I teach had no alphabetical knowledge before this, but after participating in the programme, they are now starting to spell syllables in BM without guidance, so that makes me very happy.”
Sungai Choh community coordinator Thilagawathy Kesavan shares that Projek BacaBaca Komuniti not only empowered the students to enhance their reading abilities, but also motivated herself and her fellow teachers to contribute to their respective families’ income through the monthly allowance funded by the project’s sponsor, Trinovik Labs.
“This is a big opportunity for us as a community, homemakers and parents, and we are very excited for the future.
“We are determined to ensure this pilot is a success to improve the lives of the many families that we know need help when it comes to their children’s education,” says Thilagawathy.
Aimed at enabling primary school students to further improve their reading and learning skills, the School of Education at Taylor’s has championed Projek BacaBaca since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021.
This initiative pairs volunteer reading coaches with students from underserved urban and rural communities who are affected by the Covid-19 learning gap and are at risk of falling into learning poverty.
Since the project’s inception, over 200 children across the country have been impacted by outreach efforts and have shown positive trends of improvement in both English and BM reading skills after attending continuous one-on-one reading sessions via video conferencing calls with their reading coaches.
Projek BacaBaca is an example of the Taylor’sphere ecosystem where like-minded partners, academics and students come together to reach the country’s most vulnerable populations, to provide them with the support and resources needed to make a positive impact.
To find out more about how you can support Projek BacaBaca, contact the team at bacabaca@uni.taylors.edu.my.
For more information about Taylor’sphere, click here
