My Experience Facilitating a SEED Workshop in Port Said, Egypt
Voices
My Experience Facilitating a SEED Workshop in Port Said, Egypt
July 9-13, 2006 [Port Said, Egypt]
 Ahmed and the students at the beach collecting water samples. |
A Personal Glimpse into Learning While Doing
While most teenagers in the Egyptian coastal city of Port Said (Sa-eid) spent their summer lounging on the beach, an energetic group of students from the Port Said Experimental School and the Port Said Secondary School for Girls volunteered to participate in a 5-day workshop to learn about a topic of critical importance to their country: Water Pollution and Conservation. The students, 4 boys and 17 girls ranging from ages 13 to 17, participated. They brought with them their enthusiasm and their willingness to foster new friendships. This workshop was particularly successful in utilizing SEED’s active approach of “learning while doing”, which encouraged the students to present findings to their classmates at the end of the venue – an opportunity they would not normally receive in their everyday classes.
Port Said, sitting on the Mediterranean Coast at the entrance to the Suez Canal is a bustling place. With a population of 500,000 and a globally critical port, the city has a significant impact on the Egyptian economy. Huge ships are constantly passing through the port, while the sidewalks are lined with locals enjoying the many coffee shops and fish markets.
 Ahmed explains how to create and test a simulated watershed.
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 Two students test the water from the beach collection site.
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 Learning while doing is the cornerstone of SEED’s teaching philosophy.
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 Student Mohammed presents robotics to his classmates. |
Canals from the Nile River provide the only source of fresh water to the city. Directly to the west of the city is the brackish Lake Manzala, heavily polluted, and shrinking. The Suez Canal, separating Africa from Sinai and the rest of Asia, constitutes the eastern border of the city. With its forces of economic development and environmental welfare at constant odds, Port Said was an ideal place for this group of high school students to study the severe strain their country is facing with regard to its water supply and pollution.
The first day of the workshop included lessons, discussions, and a hands-on activity where the students had to build a working model of a watershed. They filled an empty aquarium with sand, gravel, and water, thus simulating the drainage patterns of the Earth’s surface. Because simply feeding the students factual information about water science would cause their concentration to wane, one objective of the workshop was to introduce the students to scientific methods at a collegiate level. Dr. Gamal El-Baroty, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cairo, volunteered his time to demonstrate several of the tools to measure water quality. The students collected their own water samples from the beach and measured them with a variety of digital instruments.
The next day the students learned about water treatment principles and even had a chance to build their own water filters. Combining an empty plastic bottle, sand, gravel, coffee filters, and a few chemicals, the students were able to observe first hand the basic methods for treating water.
As soon as the students were finished analyzing the filtered water, Dr. Mostafa Abbas, Professor at Al-Azhar University, arrived from Cairo to give a presentation on Egyptian Biodiversity. For most of these students, it was their first exposure to a college-level lecture and it offered them the rare chance to engage in discussion with an expert. In Egyptian public schools, teaching is usually a one-way street, where the pupils do not have many opportunities to raise questions. The students also had the chance to show off some of their own knowledge. One student, Mohamed, shared his knowledge of robotics and programming with his classmates.
One of the highlights of the workshop occurred on day three, when we embarked on a field trip to an environmental preserve, 15 minutes west of town. The preserve, known as El-Gameel, contains several wetlands, which have been exposed to alarming levels of pollution over the past several decades. The supervisor of the preserve, Mr. Gamal el Sharaf el Din, along with several park rangers gave a detailed boat tour of the lake and the polluted locations. The students took multiple water samples, using a hand-held GPS (global positioning system) monitor to mark the location of each sample so that samples could be retrieved from the same location in the future.
During the bus ride back to the school, we were all reminded of the many problems Egypt faces in terms of pollution. On the side of the road leading back to town, garbage is regularly dumped and burned while drainage water in the street gutter appears to contain raw sewage.
Nearing the end of the workshop, another guest speaker, Dr. Magdy Abbas, Deputy Minister from the Ministry of Agriculture, was generous enough to make the journey to Port Said. He engaged the students in an intense discussion about the aquatic wildlife in Egypt and the impact of water pollution on them.
 The students are making an impact on their community, and proudly display their certificates for completing the workshop. |
By the fifth and final day of the workshop, the students had been on several field trips, built many models, tested numerous samples of water, and engaged experts from all over the country. To say the least, we were all quite exhausted, but to pat ourselves on the back and say job well done was not enough. The final task of the workshop was for the students to break up into groups and give detailed presentations on specific topics from the workshop, followed up by a discussion period. Splitting up into 5 groups, the students were able to create their own presentations, based on their notes from the workshop, and present them to the class. Lasting about 15 minutes each, this was the first opportunity many of the students had to speak in front of a large audience, but because the students all felt so comfortable with each other, there was little need for nervousness.
With the workshop concluded, the only task left to complete was to congratulate all the students and present them with a certificate for a job well done. Hopefully these students will appreciate the impact that water has on their future as well as benefit from their unique experience in experimenting and presentation.
