A Low-Cost Socio-Culturally Situated Mental Health Intervention for the Well-Being of Pakistani Young Women: A Reflective Narrative

The paper sets out to briefly discuss mental health challenges faced by Pakistani young women, and brings out an innovative solution through a multidisciplinary approach, i.e, socio-culturally situated low-cost digital intervention. The paper begins with an overview of mental health issues. It then sheds light on the scope of open education and innovation in Pakistan. Finally, through a reflective narrative approach, I have explored my personal journey of becoming a networked practitioner, and how an open educational website emerged to intersect the needs of Pakistani young women. Data is gathered from 137 reflective diary entries and analyzed through narrative analysis approach. Digital literacy and open networking practices have shaped my digital identity and allowed me to embrace open scholarship. Networking and collaboration have helped me filtering Open Educational Resources (OERs). Further, collaborative activities encouraged participants to become the co-producers of resource development. Overall, an adaptation of low-cost technology has potentially helped participants to reflect and embrace their personal identities.

Pedagogical Strategies Used by El Teachers in Developing Reading Skills: A Comparative Study of Private and Public Middle School Systems in Skardu City

No one can deny the importance of reading skills especially for the students. There is a strong link between students’ performance and the pedagogical strategies of EL Teachers. Research claims that different pedagogical strategies used by teachers help students in developing their reading skills. This study aimed to identify and compare the pedagogical strategies used by ELTs of both public and private schools at Middle level (VI- VIII) for developing students’ ‘reading skills’ in Skardu City. For this purpose, a cross-sectional survey design (descriptive) was employed to collect data from all middle level schools (n=69 out of 72) of Skardu City. The sample of 100 teachers from both public (n=50) and private schools (n=50) teachers were observed through Observation Scale for Reading Lesson (OSRL) where a maximum of three teachers from each school participated. The results show that more than 50% of the ELTs use some pedagogical strategies for developing reading skills. Specifically, three strategies were used by more than 80% of the teachers. The results illustrate that most of the teachers mainly focus on oral fluency, explanation of the text, model and feedback during classroom tasks besides few comprehension and assessment strategies for developing reading skills. While majority of the teachers do not use some important strategies of comprehension, prediction, inferring the vocabulary from the text, silent reading and connection of reading with written strategies. This study further reveals that participant teachers of both public and private schools use more or less similar pedagogical strategies with some variation for developing the reading skills. However, private school teachers have shown better performance as compared to their public counterparts particularly in using six strategies where significant differences were also found. To sum up this study highlighted that there is a dearth of using relevant pedagogical strategies to achieve the standards, benchmarks and SLOs of NCEL (2006). It is strongly recommended that purposeful training programmes with proper follow up should be organized for altering the beliefs and polishing teachers’ professional competency for developing reading skills of the students.