In collaboration with the National Board of Social Services in Greenland Fairstart is developing an interdisciplinary education with the purpose of equipping and upgrading teachers as well as caregivers at orphanages and residential accommodations. This will strengthen the learning, well-being and thus future opportunities of children and young people. Quality care and strengthened efforts in relation to the cooperation between adults and professionals around the children and youth is meant to pave the way for a stronger relationships with the parents, living in in the villages and having only limited knowledge of the town’s schools and residential accommodations, although the children live separated from the village from an early age (12-13 years).
Children from the villages straddle between two worlds: the one of an ancient captive culture, where their parents live, and the more modern society with completely different requirements for everyday life and education, where they go to school. When talking to a fisherman from one of the villages about his view on the school in Upernavik, he said that he thought the children were learning too little about fishing. When we asked a teacher at the school in Upernavik how the children prosper when arriving from the villages, she told us that in for example maths the children could handle the basic worksheets but had little knowledge about mathematic functions etc.
Currently, Fairstart is traveling around the west coast here in Greenland to interview and collect data for the interdisciplinary instructor education – the first team of instructors will start the education already in September. Fairstart also develops training sessions including focuses on cooperation and learning. We have just completed a similar joint cooperation with very good results in 6 African countries, so we also have great expectations for our current Greenlandic cooperation.
