training

Situational awareness:

Awareness of what happens around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions impact your goals and objectives now and in the near future.

Traffic is hectic as you take yet another daily commute on the interstate. Suddenly someone swerves into your lane. You hit the brakes and fervently glance behind you to see if a rear-end crash might be eminent.

While dangers that come with travel on crowded freeways are unavoidable, how we react to those dangerous situations is within our control. If fatigued or stressed, we are likely to be less aware of what is going on around us. This leads to poor reactions that heighten the chance of tragic outcomes.

MAF pilots and maintenance staff who work long, non-routine hours in remote locations often face stress and fatigue which can lead to unsafe conditions. To address this issue, MAF Learning Technologies (LT) staff is working with Kent Contrucci, MAF Safety Specialist and a former MAF pilot and flight instructor, on a safety curriculum that emphasis situational awareness.

How do we reach the majority of Ugandan church leaders who cannot afford to leave their families or work for years of Bible study? Even if they could, most of them would struggle to learn through the highly literate approach used by most Bible schools because their learning preference is Oral, not literate.

Tony Okullu is meeting the need through by establishing a “Church Based Mobile Bible School.” This network of coordinators (such as Edola Francis, pictured at left) strategically places audio recordings of leadership and discipleship teachings on MP3 players with a speaker unit in trade towns. Pastors and church leaders gather to listen and learn. From there, more MP3 players are loaded with the teachings. The leaders can continue listening and share the teachings in even more remote villages where they work.

MAF-LT partners with Tony in providing free resources from our many partners. Together we are working to bring more resources to the most remote leaders and it is delivered in the same way that they prefer to learn -  orally.

We have been interacting with Naveen, an evangelist/pastor/leadership trainer in India. Naveen is seeing many come to Christ and he is actively developing leaders for the many new groups of believers where he works. The challenge is that many of them don’t read or write even one word. He is asking MAF LT to help him develop leadership development materials that he can use with these leaders.
What do “materials” for non-literates look like? What are the issues in transforming training materials written for lettered cultures into materials for oral cultures? Should that even be attempted?We invite you to participate with us through prayer for wisdom as we wade into this with Naveen.Below is a recent e-mail from him.

My colleague and I are preparing to leave our Christmas-decorated homes on Sunday. What would motivate us to do this, we who have 8 children between us?

Two ministries have asked us to come and give consulting on instructional design. Since they have time in December, we go in December.

One of the ministries provides Christian audio and visual materials for their region. They want us to help them learn how to develop courses and lessons to accompany their audio/video materials that can be delivered on CD.

The other ministry is a major seminary that trains leaders for their national churches. They invited us to meet with their faculty and administration to learn about good instructional design and about how to develop online distance learning.

The challenges are many for both of these ministries. We appreciate the prayers of those who partner with us as we continue to help ministries around the world.

By the way, we will be back on Dec. 21, so won’t miss the Big Day.