The SEAMEO Secretariat in collaboration with Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) organized the 7th Evaluation Meeting for Pre-Service Student Teacher Exchange in Southeast Asia (SEA-Teacher Project) on 28 March 2019 at Grand Alora Hotel, Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia. The objectives of the meeting were to review and evaluate the implementation of the 7th batch of pre-service student teacher exchange taking into account best practices and lessons learned as well as to discuss and plan for the 8th batch of pre-service student exchange in the year 2019.

More than 200 representatives from universities and teacher education institutes from Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam attended this meeting. These included 106 universities; 49 from Indonesia, 43 from the Philippines, 12 from Thailand, and 2 from Vietnam expressing their interests to participate in the 8th batch during 1 August – 30 September 2019 for the period of 1 month or 30 days and is equivalent to 2 credit semester.

The panel discussion of SEA-Teacher for the 21st Century led by Dr Ethel Agnes Pascua-Valenzuela, Deputy Director for Programme and Development of SEAMEO Secretariat was conducted during the meeting in order to share best practices of the last batch as well as to brainstorm the ideas of revitalizing the mechanism for the next batch.

The SEA-Teacher programme was established in 2016 for the students whose majors are in Math, Science, English, as well as Pre-school. The period of this practicum is one month and based on the mechanism of a cost-sharing basis. Since the 4th batch (2017), the study majors have expanded to economic education, physical education, elementary/primary, and social science. During the one-month period, the students’ roles and responsibilities including observing, assisting in teaching, teaching and reflecting are assigned weekly. The receiving universities are required to provide faculty mentors and buddies to supervise and monitor the students throughout the practicum period.

In addition, the receiving universities are responsible for determining practicum schools that will provide opportunities for students to do assisted teaching, teach (minimum 20 hours), and other arrangements as stated in the SEA-Teacher guidelines.

Currently, there are 1,876 students from 84 universities from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand participated in the project since the first batch in 2016 until the seventh batch. The 8th evaluation meeting will be conducted in Pibulsongkram Rajabhat University, Phitsanulok, Thailand, in October 2019.

For more information about the programme please visit http://seateacher.seameo.org