Misi Banteras Masalah Literasi (MBML)
Quality Education
Department of Education and Training, Queensland Government define literacy as the ability to read, view, write, design, speak and listen in a way that allows you to communicate effectively. The power of literacy lies not just in the ability to read and write, but rather in a person’s capacity to apply these skills to effectively connect, interpret and discern the intricacies of the world they are living in. Helping someone to read and write effectively which many of us take for granted, can actually improves the future of everyone in our societyExcellent literacy skills open the doors to employment opportunities so that people are able to pull themselves out of poverty and chronic underemployment. Illiteracy is one of the biggest factors for underemployment and it happens a lot to the lower socio-economic status people. The children we observed got lack of education attention from their parents at early age. Thus this inadequateness leads to illiteracy problem amongst the children, and we are trying to start from here.Harian Metro reported that according to a survey conducted by The Global Campaign for Education, with thousands of teachers from 150 countries found that 106 million students from around the world failed to get a good basic education. Furthermore, Datuk Nafisah Ahmad, the National Library of Malaysia director- general, said that Malaysia’s literacy rate is 94.64% out of almost 31 million populations. In Selangor, a population of 6.2 million of which adult literacy rate is at 95.7% - which is 4.3% are suffering from illiteracy which equivalent to 266,600 people. Out of these numbers, there are 23 children in Kampung Setia Jaya (KSJ), Selangor who cannot read and another 35 children who are able to read but did not understand what they read.We believed that education and literacy are the tools needed for a society to arrive to its true form of happiness. Misi Banteras Masalah Literasi is a project to help the lower socioeconomic status community in increasing Malay and English language literacy level among the children in KSJ. We aim to accomplish this mission by conducting periodical classes of two times per week, which will be facilitated by students from International Islamic Universtiy Malaysia (IIUM), Gombak. This class will be using one-on-one teaching concept. Each class will be held for one hour and thirty minutes. Each student will be allocated with 10 minutes to read in front of a facilitator. This project will be using a wellestablished module from iSina as the ground and guide for the facilitators. All facilitators involved must attend three courses/workshops organized by iSina and all of them will be certified by iSina as a proof of teaching qualification.
Overview of Issue / Background
Department of Education and Training, Queensland Government define literacy as the ability to read, view, write, design, speak and listen in a way that allows you to communicate effectively. The power of literacy lies not just in the ability to read and write, but rather in a person’s capacity to apply these skills to effectively connect, interpret and discern the intricacies of the world they are living in. Helping someone to read and write effectively which many of us take for granted, can actually improves the future of everyone in our society
Excellent literacy skills open the doors to employment opportunities so that people are able to pull themselves out of poverty and chronic underemployment. Illiteracy is one of the biggest factors for underemployment and it happens a lot to the lower socio-economic status people. The children we observed got lack of education attention from their parents at early age. Thus this inadequateness leads to illiteracy problem amongst the children, and we are trying to start from here.
Harian Metro reported that according to a survey conducted by The Global Campaign for Education, with thousands of teachers from 150 countries found that 106 million students from around the world failed to get a good basic education. Furthermore, Datuk Nafisah Ahmad, the National Library of Malaysia director- general, said that Malaysia’s literacy rate is 94.64% out of almost 31 million populations. In Selangor, a population of 6.2 million of which adult literacy rate is at 95.7% - which is 4.3% are suffering from illiteracy which equivalent to 266,600 people. Out of these numbers, there are 23 children in Kampung Setia Jaya (KSJ), Selangor who cannot read and another 35 children who are able to read but did not understand what they read.
We believed that education and literacy are the tools needed for a society to arrive to its true form of happiness. Misi Banteras Masalah Literasi is a project to help the lower socioeconomic status community in increasing Malay and English language literacy level among the children in KSJ. We aim to accomplish this mission by conducting periodical classes of two times per week, which will be facilitated by students from International Islamic Universtiy Malaysia (IIUM), Gombak. This class will be using one-on-one teaching concept. Each class will be held for one hour and thirty minutes. Each student will be allocated with 10 minutes to read in front of a facilitator. This project will be using a wellestablished module from iSina as the ground and guide for the facilitators. All facilitators involved must attend three courses/workshops organized by iSina and all of them will be certified by iSina as a proof of teaching qualification.
Project Objectives (Vision & Mission)
1. To eradicate poverty through education
2. To increase the literacy level among students
3. To ensure the participants can read and write effectively in two languages; Malay and English
It is hoped that the participants in this mission will gain a lot of experiences and knowledge so that it can be used to produce and develop a better nation in the future.
Project Details (Activities and Tasks)
2030 – 2045 Assemble and set up For students’ disciplinepurpose
2045 – 2145 Reading and practicing session
- Learning session would be one on one.
- Each student will have a maximum 10 minutes session with the facilitator.
- The remaining time would be spent by finishing their workbook with other children.
2145 - 2200 Assemble and cleaning up For students’ disciplinepurpose
2200 Disperse
Expected Project Result & Outcomes
The students will be able to read in Malay and English language. They will get the opportunity to have extra classes in order to improve their literacy. They will also be able to read any text given, including newspapers and new words that they never encounter before
0% of RM1.00 Goal
Project Information
| University name | : | International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) |
| Project leader name | : | Hanis Safiyyah binti Zulqarnain |
Section I
This project was conducted at Kampung Setia Jaya (KSJ), Gombak for 3 months. Every week, 2 sessions of one hour and 30 minutes are conducted on Tuesday and Thursday. Basically, this project was an initiative from a group of students from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) with an aim to witness the decrease of illiteracy rate among the unlucky children who come from low socioeconomic families. Because of the limited manpower and lack of financial support, we started with a very small community consists of 5 volunteers and 30 students. Months after months, our community were getting bigger and today, we managed to have 14 volunteers and 60 students who managed to consistently present in every session.
Everything we do in life must come with aims and objectives. As for us, Small for Big (SFB) also have our own objectives that we would like to achieve through Misi Banteras Masalah Literasi (MBML) project. The objectives were to eradicate poverty through education, to increase the literacy level among students, and to ensure the participants can read and write effectively in two languages; Malay and English. Poverty eradication through education means is a time-consuming effort and demands big amount of patience. However, the improvement of literacy rate; ability to read and write of our children can already be seen in three months period and less.
In making any project a success, finance is one of the most crucial factor. Financial constraints will put a burden to most activities especially volunteerism activities. Being a student in high institution and at the same time handling a group of volunteers obviously were not an easy task. Moreover, this movement was focusing on education to the needy children. Not many groups or companies would want to contribute, either in form of finance or goods. In addition, we were not registered under any governmental organizations either Registrar of Youth (ROY) or Registrar of Societies (ROS).
One of the unexpected things happened throughout the project is the imbalance amount of volunteers out of sudden. Since two years ago, it was fortunate that we did not have any problems related to the volunteers. Possibly it was because most of us were still in the first or second year of study. However in this year, everyone is starting to have their own commitment which sometimes would force them to cancel their attendance to MBML session with a short notice. Hence lead to insufficient volunteers for the session. Thus we were making a plan to recruit more new volunteers to help continuing this mission.
We did not have any problem relating to language used or tradition because majority of the students are Malaysian Malays and there are only a few of them who came from Indonesia. Hence, there was not any big issue regarding our communication. For these past 3 years since the foundation of SFB in 2015, we have met a lot of people to guide us in creating and preparing modules. However this year, we finally met iSina and Projek Iqra’ which lead us to use their modules which had been one of the cures and solutions to the children’s literacy and numeracy problems. After using their modules, we found out that the students were able to grab the correct reading technique by applying phonetics concept and even better, there was a significant improvement in the students’ achievements. This would never become a reality without the sponsor we got from Khind’s Project of Happiness as the money received were used to buy the modules for the children.
Regarding the fund and financial issues throughout the execution of this project, we found out the biggest issue was on providing food and meals for the children. As what we had explained in the earlier part of this report, we were organizing literacy classes specifically for needy children. Thus, most of them would come to the sessions in hunger as they did not have any heavy meal for the day. In return, their hunger made them losing their focus. Hence, we wished to give them a light meal before the session started such as a piece of bread and a small box of water. However, with a very limited amount of financial help, we could only provide the food aid once after every 3 sessions.
After almost 3 months of using iSina modules, the reading and writing of 39 students out of a total of 60 managed to be cured. The indicator for this success is when they were given newspapers, they could smoothly read though there were a lot of unfamiliar jargons which were not registered in their mind. We believe that in a long term, they could survive in their future life as long as they have the basic of reading and writing. At least, they could work in a field which needs them to have literacy basis such as re-writing old books. In the future, it is our ultimate wish to have a community to continue this effort because we believe that a reading society is those who will never lose nor give up.
This project was not extremely huge, but with the increasing number of students each week, we believe that the parents were starting to see and put their trusts on us to help their children read. We believe, every little things that we contribute for the society will results in a great, satisfying outcome in any form we could not imagine. A lot of my personal views and opinions changed with the existence of this MBML project. One of those is individual’s rights on education. Whoever he is, and wherever he comes from – he has his own rights on education. If we do not strengthen the education, those oppressed people will never get their rights on education forever.
Life has two rules; first, never quit. Second, always remember the first rule.
Hanis Safiyyah Zulqarnain,
Co-Founder Small for Big (SFB)
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