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.