CMES founder and Chairman Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim has been awarded with Switzerland’s prestigious Prix Caritas Award for the year 2009. The award was handed over to him by Mr. Barbara Schmid-Federer, Member, Swiss Federal Parliament, in a grand ceremony in the Culture & Congress Centre, Lucern, Switzerland on 5 June 2009. An audience of some 800, a cross section of the Swiss cultural and public life attended. In her presentation speech Ms. Schmid-Federer said, “you are not being honored mainly for being a socially responsible and ecologically oriented researcher in schience.

Nor are you being honored as a researcher and policy-pioneer in education. You got the Prix Caritas 2009 most of all because you founded and led a forward-looking initiative in education as a practitioner of education. The initiative is called CMES – Centre for Mass Education in Science.

CMES has just started a new project in July 2009 to pilot an innovative teaching learning process for school education. CMES will have EDM (Enfant du Monde) as the development partner in this. The latter has been disseminating this method named Pedagogy of Text which emphasizes a complete participation of the students in the teaching-learning process so much so that it is they who would initiate the preparation of a text based on their own life experience and already acquired knowledge. In some respect CMES’s own methods such as ‘Own World’ and ‘Unbound Literacy’ have some similarity with PoT, and it is being hoped that CMES can successfully adapt PoT within its Basic School System. The experimental project is based on a unit in Khansama Upozilla of Dinajpur District of Bangladesh.

CMES has started publishing a News Letter in Bangla titled ‘CMES Songbad’. The first issue of the news letter has been published in August 2009. It is expected that this will be regularly published from now on as a quarterly mainly for the benefit of the CMES staff and the stakeholders. This is a four page illustrated news letter providing interesting news about the CMES programs, its interaction with the society, as well as news about some personal experiences by CMES people.