For Joseph Nosek, education has always been a top priority. As the Director of UW’s English as a Second Language (ESL) Program, he has dedicated his life to teaching students how to teach others. When he heard that young women in Afghanistan were being denied access to education because of their gender, he worked with a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Educate Girls Now to develop the Afghan Tutoring Project.
The Afghan Tutoring Project is aimed at helping Afghan women strengthen their English skills so they can attend college, follow their career goals and restore gender equality to educational environments in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Taliban rule forbids women from participating in public events and entering spaces Americans commonly enjoy. Girls can only attend school until age 12, but enrollment rates for this small window have declined, too. Women have been banned from attending secondary schools and universities, prohibiting millions from receiving an education. Because of this, many are married young as child brides. What the Afghan Tutoring Project aims to do is provide a resource to women, so they can continue to receive the education most of them had already begun.
“We’re helping to extend the Wisconsin Idea globally while at the same time providing opportunities for a meaningful practical experience for our TESOL certificate students who are training to be future English language teachers,” Nosek says.
Nosek is the advisor for the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Certificate program at UW–Madison. As part of this certificate, students are required to complete English 415: Introduction to TESOL Methods, which allows students to fulfill a tutoring requirement through participation in the Afghan Tutoring Project.
Each student is paired with an Afghan woman, and they meet online once or twice per week for a lesson. Because the learners are the subjects of discrimination under Taliban rule, English 415 students learn “trauma-informed teaching” practices that they use to inform their lesson plans.
Trauma-informed teaching includes listening to learners while they discuss difficult situations and supporting them through their lessons. Tutors provide structure during each session as they act as a positive influence and resource for their learners. In addition, they motivate the learners to continue learning to ensure that the learning doesn’t stop when the semester is over.
“It’s a program which benefits both the individuals who are receiving the English language tutoring as well as tutors themselves,” Nosek says.
Throughout the program, students noted that the learners had much more of a family-based culture than America does. The line between friends and family tends to blur for the learners.
“My learner explained how she wasn’t able to go out and socialize in the way that we would think that a lot of people do, and so she hadn’t had a lot of friends before,” one student tutor says.
This created a conflict for one of the learners, who said that she was grateful for the program, but felt badly about leaving her family behind to pursue her dreams and get an education. Even though she was empowered, her sister and her parents weren’t. The political climate in Afghanistan is partially to blame for this. The tutors remarked that many American students can go home at the end of the day or stay in contact with their families, but in Afghanistan, this is far more difficult.
“We have the luxury of returning home to our parents, and then for her learner, if she finds that job or the opportunity outside of her own country, then she could never return,” one tutor says. “We’re fortunate enough that we don’t have to make a decision between pursuing our educational hopes and dreams or staying connected to our family,” another tutor says.
One learner told her tutor that her goal was to be able to read a book in English. The tutor picked out a book on Mahatma Gandhi to share with her learner. The next meeting, the tutor asked their learner how much she had known about Gandhi prior to her reading the book. The learner told her tutor that she’d actually written a book about Gandhi in her native language, showing how these women can thrive in academic environments when given the chance.
Another student felt like she and her learner were able to learn about each other’s cultures instead of a one-way learning experience where the learner is the only one who gets anything out of it.
“I started using more stuff from her culture, also mixing with mine, so there’s just this exchange,” the tutor says. “Not only was she learning, but I was also learning during the process.”
Education is a gift that Americans often take for granted. Overseas, many people are not afforded this luxury. For many of them, their identities as women, people of color and people in poverty are enough to disqualify them from a quality education. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in 2022, the literacy rate in Afghanistan was 37.3%. The literacy rate among men was 52.1%, while the literacy rate for women was less than half of that, at a 22.6%.
“Like many women, I fear for my Afghan sisters,” said Malala Yousafzai, a survivor of an assassination attempt by the Taliban. She won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work advocating for women’s rights to education in her home country of Pakistan and around the world.
The work that the Afghan Tutoring Project is doing is part of a larger initiative taken by NGOs like Educate Girls Now and UNESCO that aims to close the education gap overseas. By including the Afghan Tutoring Project in the curriculum for the TESOL certificate, Nosek ensures that these women are one step closer to a brighter future.
Marilyn Mosley Gordanier, President and Founder of Educate Girls Now, has witnessed the positive impact of UW’s Afghan Tutoring Project on the lives of the women it serves.
“This is one of the best educational opportunities and sources of hope for our students amidst all the darkness that surrounds them,” Gordanier says. “It’s truly been a lifeline to the girls in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover and the dashing of their hopes of ever obtaining an education.”