It's Getting There That's Hard!

The Seli River Writing Project operates Young Writers clubs only in rural areas now. Getting to schools in rural areas in Sierra Leone can be not only expensive, but alarming.

Here's a section of the road from Kabala to Dankawalie, that SELI managed to slide through at the end of October trying to get to, and back from, the writing club at Dankawalie Secondary School.  We were also trying to get to the community to talk with them about DSS's exciting new school library and what everyone's role will be.

Of course, we're not the only ones who use this road. Vehicles full of traders and their produce regularly get stuck trying to get to or from the weekly market in Dankawalie, either in sections like this, on makeshift "bridges," or up and down very uneven steep hills, or over and through large rock outcroppings. People get sick in villages along the road and need to be brought for care to Kabala. If you want to build something in the village, some of your building materials will need to be brought from Kabala. This is an agricultural area, and everyone would like to send crops to urban areas to sell--this is the only road going there. Children walk this road regularly, trying to get to schools. The many people who want to trade in Kono to the southeast, have to travel west along this road to Kabala and take another circuitous route around to Kono. How we all wish something could be done about THIS ROAD!

Make Your Voice Heard!

This student at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School (AMASS) in Yogomaia, Kabala is reading her first draft aloud for feedback from her peers.

Her classmates listen carefully, pens poised as this boy's is to write comments or questions about the content in her piece.  Following this discussion, and armed with the questions that each student writes down for her, she will write an improved second or third draft.

SELI has encouraged the schools where there are Young Writers junior secondary clubs, to give girls the added support they need to attend. We were so glad to see girls made up 1/3 of the students in the meeting we attended at AMASS last week.  Families depend on teenage girls to take care of younger siblings and prepare food, so it is particularly difficult to include them in after school activities. Young Writers clubs improve students' English communication and thinking skills as well as their cultural awareness. We don't want to undermine the structure of the family, but we need to keep trying to get girls the benefits they deserve!

We're pleased, too, to hear that AMASS has just launched a school library, and that the Young Writers are the first approved borrowers! Long live the Young Writers and all who support them!

SELI Young Writers Takes Shape

Attendance hasn't been all we'd like in the last few meetings, but the SELI Young Writers program is really taking shape.

Since most of the students have domestic work to do at home, they come at varying times. We have found that it works to have a journaling table. When they enter, the first stop is to take their writing folders, and the second stop is to do the journal assignment. Today it was to describe and to "perhaps" about the photograph you see on the table. Who is this woman? Where does she live, and what is she up to? Why are we so sure she is not a Sierra Leonean?

The girls in the foreground are in the third draft of their first (analytic) piece of writing. At this point, they move to word processing, where it is easier to revise and build good paragraphs. The girl on the left has just cut a sentence from one paragraph and pasted it into the next, where it makes more sense. Not bad, for a novice computer user and paragraph builder!

The student at the far table has moved on to the first draft of his second assignment, a personal writing challenge. We read all our first, and sometimes our second drafts, aloud to others for discussion and feedback. And we need more students to enrich that discussion!

A visit to a Young Writers club

SELI visited the Young Writers club at Sussex Junior Secondary School on the Freetown Peninsula for the first time this week. It is a very small school located in sight of, and just a few hundred yards from, the shores of the Atlantic.

These students are deep in thought, either drafting or revising their work after a peer content conference. At least four content conferences were going on in the room at the same time. The facilitators, Moses Gbondo and Kandeh Conteh, demonstrated well how content conferencing can be carried out in a crowded classroom where other people are at other stages in the writing process, with minimal movement, by simply having students turn around on their benches to face the students behind them.

Because this is a new club, no one has reached the self-, peer-, or teacher-editing stage yet. We have great expectations for the Young Writers at Sussex JSS!

At the end of the meeting, the students clapped and asked to take pictures of of their teachers with their certificates from the Leading Young Writers training that SELI conducted in August.

Use Picture Books to Teach Essay Writing

Secondary school writing teachers, try reading Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems aloud to a class that is learning to argue, persuade or advise.

The problem this book presents is stated in the title: Gerald has an ice cream cone and is of two minds whether to share it with Piggie. The first half of the book uses all kinds of argument and gets nowhere.

• ·       Piggie loves ice cream. Piggie is my best friend. (concession, logos)
• ·       We should share with friends. (commonly-held value, ethos)
• ·       This ice cream is SO tempting! (emotion, pathos)
• ·       Maybe she won't like this flavor. It is wrong to force something unappetizing on someone. (commonly-held value, ethos)
• ·       I can just not tell her—she'll never know! (a stance to win)

By page 25 we are looking for how this will end. Stop reading the book aloud here. Have each student write an opinion for each side, drawing on their own personal experiences.

After they have written, go on reading. We expect a reasoned conclusion, don't we? Is that what Gerald will carry out? Or are there other ways opposing opinions can be resolved?

Half-way through the book, Gerald moves into speculation--What if Piggie is sad?--and from there into creating the future. And by staying in the future tense, Gerald becomes able to visualize future choices and their consequences. In other words, he moves into deliberative argument.

In the end, we feel satisfied when he comes to his decision. Deliberative argument is an empowering strategy and it is important for our student writers and debaters to acquire it.

Then comes a twist. The author carries deliberative argument one step further when the future takes on two complications:

• ·       Oops, Gerald's decision was taken too late. His ice cream melted, so a) nobody ate it at all, b) he could not make Piggie happy, and c) he's a failure.
• ·       The roles become reversed. Piggie gets a cone herself and does what it took Gerald so long to decide on doing: she shares it.

Now Gerald ponders—should he stick with his plan and mope, or adapt? But what a change in his mood! The frenzy of indecision in the first half of the book is gone, because deliberative argument has freed him. He contentedly goes for letting somebody else achieve his goal of sharing.

Thanks, Mo Willems, for such a great book!

Relevant Reads

Heinrichs, J. (2007). Thank you for arguing: what Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson can teach us about the art of persuasion. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Miller, R. (2011) "Being without existing: the futures community at a turning point? A comment on Jay Ogilvy's 'Facing the fold,'" foresight, Vol. 13 Iss: 4, pp.24 – 34.

Willems, M. (2011). Should I share my ice cream? New York: Hyperion Books for Children.

© 2012 Jacqueline Leigh

The SELI Young Writers

We're excited about the SELI Young Writers: our new writing class for senior secondary students. We plan to write in all sorts of styles and genres. We are doing journaling, and we write in multiple drafts, reading our work aloud for feedback. We are also stretching vocabularies as far as we can!

Everyone in the class wants personally to become a better writer, and everyone also wants to succeed in school. We plan to do both!

Workshop with Mid-Term Peace Corps Volunteers

Today we spent the day with Peace Corps volunteers who teach in schools very similar to those where Young Writers clubs operate in the Koinadugu District and on the rural Freetown Peninsula, talking about teaching writing.

We discussed how closely our students resemble long-term English language learners in the U.S., and how it helps to look at strategies being used there to address the needs of LTELLs, to see if we can apply them here.

We are glad to see that the Ministry's 2011 JSS language arts syllabus supports the use of child-centered, inductive teaching methods and wants to see the children actively producing language in the classroom. This validates using process writing in our crowded classrooms, which we already know teaches writing skills, addresses ESL needs, and builds needed cultural self-esteem, at the same time that it eases class management. We practiced these strategies, some of which were taken from Natalie Hess' Teaching Large Multilevel Classes (Cambridge University Press, 2001). We had demonstrations on teaching several of these types of writing, by starting not from form or layout (as is so common even in the U.S.) but starting from content close to our students' hearts and experience, and then carrying the writing through the stages of the process.

A highlight for me was when we used Paolo Freire's problem posing method, which has come to be regarded as a useful ESL methodology. Report writing can be introduced effectively with this method in senior secondary school. Our problem-posing "code" for this workshop was a cane, which represented the flogging done in so many schools in Sierra Leone.

Our New Participant: Limicolaria flammea

The Goderich school where we are holding our Leading Young Writers workshop, Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial JSS, is doing gardening in preparation for the opening of school. With the hoe flying dangerously, this very determined being speedily took a supple beeline for our workshop. Here you see Limicolaria flammea about to climb our steps.

We spent the day talking about teaching writing not in our clubs, but in our classrooms. We discussed what the 2011 junior secondary language arts syllabus requires in terms of writing, and then divided into groups to plan how we would get a class writing the genre of our choice, and presenting it to the class. The participants found these practicals helpful, and we'll continue tomorrow. We also all enjoyed writing Tanka poems, and found them much more personal than the Haiku we had done earlier in the week. One of the teachers wrote a four-tanka poem about the death of his grandmother!

When I got home, I saw another snail outside my kitchen window. I've just been out there and took photos of more than two dozen Limicolaria flammea in my garden! What's going on? Although this snail is native to West Africa, has anybody done a study on its having become an invasive species on its home turf?

Leading Young Writers Workshop

In the photo you can see teachers from four rural junior secondary schools on the Freetown Peninsula, busy discussing how conferencing works in the writing process. I'm so pleased at their expertise and level of participation, and we are all learning from each other.

We took a break for the Id ul Fitr holiday, and are back at work today. Our 40-hour Leading Young Writers training is now half-way through. In our group we have teachers from Goderich, Hamilton, Sussex, Kent, and even the Koinadugu District in the northern province of Sierra Leone.

Getting Underway in Goderich

The SRWP is excited to start conducting a third Leading Young Writers training tomorrow, this time for new facilitators from junior secondary schools on the Freetown Peninsula. They will be joined by new facilitators from schools in the Koinadugu District; teachers replacing others who have moved on to employment elsewhere.

We appreciate so much the support of the Deputy Director of Education, Western Area Rural District, Ms. Frances N. Kamara, in introducing us to JSS schools on the Peninsula. We're also very grateful to the administrators of Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial JSS in Goderich, Mr. Mansaray and Mr. Cole, who agreed without hesitation to let us hold the workshop in their school, even though they are busy teaching summer school classes for incoming JSS I students.  We're all working for the same goals!

See for yourself!

Are you thinking of supporting SELI's work? Or have you already donated? We've come across a wonderful video by Kewulay Kamara that will help you see what Sierra Leone is like, and the difference between urban and rural Sierra Leone. You will see children from our Young Writers club in Dankawalie Secondary School dancing in a community event on the school grounds. The title is Ta Boh M'bareh Dankawalie. See it for yourself! 

Non-formal Education

Let's highlight again the point made about non-formal education in the last post.

Especially when we read articles such as Steve Bradshaw's "Sierra Leone's School-Time Blues," we realize what an important need there is for non-formal education and community schools in Sierra Leone. Children need to be taught in their own context, with parents (whether educated or not) playing an assertive role in keeping conditions safe and conducive to learning.

Teach Somebody (to Read and Write)!

September 8th is International Literacy Day. Here are some statistics from UNESCO's site at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/dakar/education/literacy/

·       "Learning to read and write is a fundamental right. Yet, 38 % of African adults (some 153 millions) are illiterate, two-thirds of these are women.

·       Africa is the only continent where more than half of parents are not able to help their children with homework due to illiteracy.

·       Adult literacy rates are below 50% in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and The Gambia.

·       Only 1 % of national education budget of most African governments is earmarked to address the issue of literacy.

·       The situation is alarming as literacy is a crucial step to acquire the basic skills needed to cope with the many challenges children, youth and adults will face throughout their lives.

·       For many disadvantaged young people and adults, non-formal education is one of the main routes to learning. Non-formal education reaches people in their own context and ideally in their own local language."

SELI encourages mother-tongue literacy in Sierra Leone through its Heritage Writers program. We offer five writing lessons to formally-educated native speakers, and then try to move them toward authoring books in their own languages. Literacy isn't very useful if, once you achieve it, you can't find anything interesting to read. If you are not already teaching somebody to read and write, please support Heritage Writers by clicking on the DONATE button here!

Publishing our Writing

Starting with issue 3.1, the Young Voices newsletter of the SRWP (Seli River Writing Project) will be publishing the writing of our Young Writers during the coming year. (Check out Young Voices 2.1).

All Young Writers receive a typewritten copy of their final drafts that to show their family and friends. Selected pieces will make it into the newsletters. To the extent that our finances permit, issues will be shared among the participating schools and to friends and supporters of the SRWP. Few of our students have access to the internet, but the newsletter will be posted here, too, so watch for Young Voices 3.1 and expect to see Young Voices often to catch up on what the students are writing about and on progress in the SRWP. This will give the students' writing wider exposure than do the in-school notice boards where some schools display Young Writers writing.

Would you like to support SRWP newsletter production during the year? Please make a PayPal contribution using the Donate button on the right! 

Library-in-a-Box

SELI has been carrying out a "Library-in-a-Box" project with Dankawalie Secondary School, one of the Koinadugu District schools in the SRWP.

Rural schools, and especially rural schools that are made extra remote by poor roads, have little access to books. So for two years now, SELI has taken some two dozen books each time we visit and exchanged them for the books from the last visit, and handed them over to the club facilitators. Most of the books are leveled readers—either classics or books written in and for West Africa. DSS students share their reading in the journal activity held at the beginning of the club meeting, or sometimes explain why they enjoyed their book in the morning assembly.

Thank you, Lorna and Sandra!

 Because Lorna Johnson and Sandra Leigh sponsored mother-tongue writers at the International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2012, SELI, through its Heritage Writers program, was able to offer five writing lessons for mother tongue speakers of an indigenous Sierra Leonean language. Participants in these classes then formed a writing group. SELI encourages writing groups to meet regularly to stimulate each other with feedback and support.

SELI offered five writing lessons in Krio from May 5th – June 9th, 2012. The instructor was Nathaniel Pearce, who has authored textbooks on Krio.

Krio is a creole language spoken natively by the Krio people in Sierra Leone. It is also the lingua franca of many people throughout the country. Some linguists say Krio stems from a widespread prototype creole; others say its history and grammar identify it as a Niger-Congo language which has borrowed and adapted a large number of words from English and other languages. Other linguists say it's both.

The Krio Five Writing Lessons class was a mixed group of working and retired people as well as students. We soon found that half the group already had mastered writing skills in Krio. Therefore, at each meeting while the beginners worked with Mr. Pearce, the writers took part in a writing workshop with the SELI director, where they were challenged to write personal experiences, do creative reflection, and write poetry in Krio and share it with their colleagues.

 The Krio Five Writing Lessons class now meets as one writing group, the Raytin Kabudu. Members read their work aloud to the group for constructive critique to help them revise. We thank Mr. Pearce for his offer to continue to work with this group on editing and other writing skills. While the Raytin Kabudu members are working on manuscripts, SELI is seeking funds to support publication because Heritage Writers aims to encourage the written literature of all Sierra Leonean languages.

Thank you, Simone!

By sponsoring a mother tongue writer at the International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2012, Simone Anderson made it possible for SELI, through its Heritage Writers program, to offer five writing lessons for mother tongue speakers of an indigenous Sierra Leonean language. Participants in these classes then formed a writing group. SELI encourages writing groups to meet regularly to stimulate each other with feedback and support.

Because Simone helped, SELI offered five writing lessons in Kuranko from April 6th – 21st, 2012.

Kuranko is a Mande language spoken by approximately 268,000 people in Sierra Leone with additional speakers in the region, particularly in Guinea. The language has a strong history of oral literature. Missionary organizations have taught literacy in the language but it is not widespread. The language itself thrives more fully in rural than urban settings, but many children are sent to cities for education. Children in urban areas understand some Kuranko but are more likely to respond in the lingua franca, Krio.

The Kuranko Five Writing Lessons class was a mixed group of working people with strong village oral language skills and secondary school students, some of whom joined under their own initiative and others whose parents saw this as an opportunity for them to get a firmer grounding in their family's language. I found it an exciting class with good, inclusive strategies. Some members have since met as the writing group, Tanyar°, where they are exposed to the writing-craft skills of free writing; of reading work aloud to the group for constructive critique; and of revision. The group was lucky to be visited by a Kuranko traditional poet and performer from New York, Kewulay Kamara, who challenged the members with the promise of an award for documenting Kuranko language traditions.

While the Tanyar° members continue to work on manuscripts with the occasional editing support of their Five Writing Lesson teacher, Saio Marah, SELI is seeking funds to support publication. Heritage Writers would like to see a stronger role played by Kuranko in Sierra Leone's written national literature.

ESL Classes at SELI

The Sentinel English Language Institute (SELI) offers beginning and intermediate-proficiency English classes in Tengbeh Town for teen and adult speakers of other languages who are residing in Freetown. Instruction engages students in all aspects of language—speaking and writing, reading and listening, and grammaring; the beginning students shown here are working on a writing task. The American instructor is an experienced, U.S.-certified ESL specialist. SELI's instructional materials are specifically designed for teaching adult ESL in an international setting.

And just think: all fees are paid to SELI, so ESL learners at SELI are, at the same time, supporting educational projects in other schools in Sierra Leone.

The SRWP is a Rural Program

Running Young Writers writing-workshop clubs in junior secondary schools (middle schools) in Freetown over the past 3+ years has been difficult.  The biggest challenge is finding the time and space for students to sit down and write, and share their writing with each other, after school. For the most part, junior secondary schools in Freetown operate in the first half of the day. They then hand over the school compound to a senior secondary school which operates in the afternoons. Often there is no space for the club to meet. We care about outcomes of the clubs, and infrequent meetings mean loss of momentum and motivation.

Therefore, we've made a change. From the 2012-2013 school year, Seli River Writing Project will operate exclusively in rural junior secondary schools that carry out full school days. We are conducting a Leading Young Writers facilitator training in August for teachers who wish to conduct Young Writers clubs in village schools on the Freetown Peninsula, and for new teachers in the Koinadugu District who are replacing departed teachers. Can't wait to meet our new facilitators!

Chapter Books

The Young Writers from the Seli River Writing Project who have written five or more personal experiences in their clubs, were given the opportunity at the end of the school year to prepare My Life booklets.

Each one chose the sequence in which their experiences would appear as chapters in the book.  They also prepared a dedication and an "About the Author" paragraph to appear at the end.

It's an exciting moment for all authors to walk off with their first new book in their hands, and a wonderfully validating experience for these junior secondary students.  We congratulate each one of them for the perseverance it took to get through so many drafts of at least five different topics.

The IRA supports the SRWP!

The Seli River Writing Project is delighted to have received a Developing Economy Literacy Project grant from the International Reading Association to support the Young Writers clubs during the 2012-2013 school year! It lifts such a load off our heads to know that some of our expenses will be paid, and we can concentrate on carrying out goals. Read about the award at this page.  Hurray for the IRA!

Five Writing Lessons

Five Writing Lessons, a program of the Heritage Writers project, has begun at SELI! The opening unit is Kuranko, and the first of the five lessons took place today at SELI. Thanks to sponsorship from individuals from many parts of the world, we plan to conduct a unit of five writing lessons in as many Sierra Leone languages as possible.

Each class has up to sixteen participants. All should be primary language speakers of the language of any age who have reached or completed junior secondary school, and who are interested in authoring books in their language. The class is offered free of charge.

We are seeking funding for the next stage in the Heritage Writers project, which will support the writing efforts of these would-be mother-tongue authors, and take them onto publication. Exciting, no? Be a part of it by contributing at www.seli.co. Click on "DONATE" to make your payment through PayPal.

A Notice Board for Services JSS, Wilberforce

Today SELI donated a notice board to Services Junior Secondary School in Wilberforce, so everyone in the school can read the pieces of writing they are producing. The donation was made possible by a grant from the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy.

Jackie Leigh, SELI's director, has been running the Young Writers club at Services since 2008, but this year, teachers from the school have taken over as its facilitators. Here we see one of the teachers, Mr. M. Kanu, with the principal, Mrs. S. Kenny (right), and the secretary of the school. The second facilitator, Mr. A. Sheriff, is not in the photo.

Heritage Writers is on the move!

Twice as many people as last year attended SELI's International Mother Language Day 2012 event on February 21st. About half were students, making very serious efforts to write in their mother tongues as these two girls are, writing in Kono and Krio.

Keep checking back for updates! Many participants were interested in the tutoring lessons for which we have been able to gain sponsorship. That program will be underway soon.

Sponsor a Writer! (a Heritage Writers initiative)

Let's Write in our Mother Languages

It is said that there are some eighteen indigenous languages spoken in Sierra Leone. Orthographies have been approved for four of these: Mende, Themne, Limba and Krio. Some junior secondary schools offer one or more of these languages as elective subjects, so there is a chance that a fortunate child might learn to read and write his/her mother tongue while in junior secondary school.

But what if that mother tongue is one of the many "unwritten" languages in Sierra Leone? What do children burning to write in their mother tongues do when educators tell them that writing programs cannot be established for languages that lack approved orthographies?

Read our article advocating for writing in mother languages: http://www.seli.co/seli-forum/seli-editorials