Writing Back

Happy New Year, everyone! SELI would like to thank each and every individual person who has contributed to its efforts in the past year. We are so indebted to you!

Ebola has hampered our activities in the past six months—and this is only an understatement of what being out of school for an entire school year has done to a whole nation of students. We live every minute of every day hoping that the Ebola infection rate will subside soon and desist from taking its terrible toll in Sierra Leone. 

SELI has begun a new Seli River Writing Project called Writing Back. Its purpose is to restart the writing activity of as many junior and senior secondary members of SELI’s Young Writers clubs as we can during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Because schools are closed, the conditions under which these clubs normally operate—the school settings, the workshop-style meetings, the box of supplies, and each person’s files of ongoing work—are currently unavailable.  Yet we’ll be writing to each other, and writing back. Watch the blog, and we’ll be giving you more information as it evolves!

Modeling the Ebola Outbreak

This video is a great explanation of what is happening in the Sierra Leone Ebola outbreak, and what some of our alternatives are.

The author, Sibyl Harleston, presents the mechanics of how EVD is spread, ways to interpret the results that models present, and suggestions for slowing the transmission rates.

International Literacy Day

It's International Literacy Day today! First conceived by UNESCO, it has been recognized since the 1960s, so today, nearly fifty years later, we should all jump up and celebrate!

Well, not really, because literacy is about development. The first image on the UNESCO infographic (pictured here) illustrates how vital literacy is to all aspects of development. And reading further down, and looking at the information in this link, tells us in Sierra Leone we should worry, instead.

Literacy happens in schools. Few could have predicted all the specific, immediate events in the past that have brought about temporary (but usually prolonged) school closings in Sierra Leone—Ebola being only the most recent.

Nonetheless, we all know that reacting to sudden events is neither an educational nor a development strategy. Education only happens where it is valued. We reveal what we value by what we spend money on. Instead of being buffeted out of school by every passing wind, children in Sierra Leone should be well buffered by an unshakable, well-funded educational system that offers alternatives when things get tough.

You Can't Talk to Ebola

Always rifle-shaped, the virus

used to ride on scowls.

Came in clusters piled snarling

on roofs and backs of trucks.

Shoulder-butted. Ready-charged.

We've come. Hand over your youth

or yield to our torch.

I'd greet them;

hail one, and they'd all turn,

distracted.

How's your mother?

Did the tablets ease her pain?

Mock their faces—

what frowns!

We've no food, sir.

They'd reach for my gifts and leave,

all those long gray barrels

resting on their knees.

And the virus

adapted. Barreled still, but earless,

piggybacking on smiles.

On children come to plead.

We love them,

we feed them.

And then we're cracked apart.

Our slain youth here, now,

wait for transport, laid out

upon the hearth.

© 2014 Jacqueline Leigh

Action Against Ebola

One of SELI's principal donors, Edward Davies & Associates Consulting Engineers Ltd, is taking action against Ebola. We're glad to be partnered with them: along with being a health crisis, Ebola is a humanitarian and educational crisis.

Won't you help to fight Ebola?

Koinadugu Young Writers Clubs

We've just returned from Koinadugu District and had a great time interacting with students who like to write, and with the teachers who are making that happen.

In this village pocketed among these magnificent mountains, we were so glad to find Young Writers in the SELI club at Dankawalie Secondary School reading their work aloud during teacher editing so the facilitator can call their attention if the written version does not reflect the pauses and word endings in their speech. Or call their attention when they change the idea they are discussing and need to start a new paragraph. The facilitators in this club, Ishmael K. Mansaray and Amara K. Tarawallie, have learned that when the students stay in possession of their writing throughout the editing process, they come to own their errors better and do something about them.

All the schools were conducting exams this week; DSS was one of the two that did not consider exams a reason to suspend club meetings. 

A Good Place for Writers

The Kabala Secondary School JSS SELI Young Writers club is a place where students like to be. The facilitators, Alieu S. Kanu and Fatmata A. Kamara, have done a good job of communicating the student-centered idea of a writing workshop.

The students understand what their role is. They stamp a heading on their papers, they staple content conference forms to their drafts, they move on from one writing stage to another without being told. . . they have to participate and they have to want to learn. They are engaged in personal experience topics and they are prepared to write and read and think and write and read and think until their writing improves.

We were pleased to visit the club last week, and we were also pleased to see that SELI Young Writers meetings continue in this school even though the school is taking examinations. 

Peace Corps–Sierra Leone Staff Development

During May, SELI has been conducting an eight-session staff development training in Business Writing for the Peace Corps–Sierra Leone staff.

We've all enjoyed the sessions, mixing writing skills (style, cohesion and paragraphs) with genre writing and ongoing job writing requirements.

This is a great group of people to work with and they perform such an important function in Peace Corps–Sierra Leone. Hope we've been able to enhance that a bit.

Process Writing for Researcher Trainees

SELI gave a presentation on process writing to the Institute for Development's Researcher Trainee program at the British Council on May 14th.

This morning's session was twice as long as the March session we conducted with IfD trainees. We therefore delivered less and interacted more—all good—and with the support of Maryam, the trainer today, our presentation linked into the whole training better.

Everyone was very engaged and they asked a lot of good questions. I very much like nonfiction writing and research, myself. I enjoyed the morning, and I hope they did, too! 

Discourse Politics

The world is full of discourse politics (otherwise referred to as business communications)—power stances people assume in meetings to acquire control. You can't disregard people's stances and keep reacting to the words they say—as if you're a representative in congress objecting to a telephone number a colleague read from a phonebook while he's filibustering.

Here are a few of the strategies that come to mind: 

• remaining behind your big desk when people enter your room, using the distance the size of the desk provides to gain power; 
• making people wait when they have arrived for a meeting you called, to make it appear as if they are the petitioners; 
• using Krio instead of English to convey that you hold casual regard for a topic someone else takes seriously; 
• asking people to repeat what they've already explained, or account for things unnecessarily; 
• or just asking questions (especially confrontational ones)—question posers are automatically in a position of power, but if you don't answer, or don't directly answer the question, you take some of their power away.

These strategies make it difficult to take minutes at meetings because what is accomplished by the strategies is often unrelated to the content that was discussed. Maybe they were just trying to acquire the upper hand. . . maybe they were trying to make the meeting come to naught so they could take decisions privately instead. . . .

Having Trouble Reading? Write!

There are a few schools in Sierra Leone that have shelves full of reading books (as opposed to textbooks). However, in nearly every case where SELI has found such shelves to exist in schools, the books are not being read. Not only does the school not lend them out, but the students do not ask to read them. The sad fact is, many students would not understand the books if they did borrow them.

Much has been said about the lack of reading instruction in Sierra Leone's schools. Many of our secondary students have very poor reading comprehension skills and lack successful, positive reading experiences. Programs are being carried out to remedy this situation by improving reading/literacy instruction at the early primary level, and some of these programs also provide reading materials. What SELI does not see being implemented is process writing instruction at any level at all of the educational system.

After decades of teaching process writing in Sierra Leone, we are convinced that developing academic writing skills through process writing also improves reading comprehension. The literature supports our view:

 "Writing practices complement reading practices and should always be used in conjunction, with each type of practice supporting and strengthening the other. . . .Our evidence shows that . . . writing activities improved students’ comprehension of text over and above the improvements gained from traditional reading activities such as reading text, reading and discussing text, and receiving explicit reading instruction. . . . Students who do not develop strong writing skills may not be able to take full advantage of the power of writing as a tool to strengthen reading." (p. 29) 

Graham, S., and Hebert, M. A. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Buttons at Sussex Junior Secondary School

The junior secondary SELI Young Writers club at Sussex village is functioning as a true process-writing writing workshop should.

As you can see from her button, Ramatu has just completed her final draft of a multi-draft personal experience and along with Kadiatu, is working on her next topic. Behind them, two boys are completing their journal entries.

Sussex JSS serves a wide area along the peninsula, and many of its students and teachers have long walks home, so we appreciate their willingness to stay afterschool twice a week to work on their writing skills.

Buttons are the newest motivators. You also see here a pen SELI has given students who complete their first final drafts. This student belongs to the senior secondary Young Writers club at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School in Yogomaia, Kabala.
Both the pins and the pens carry the same printed message: I am an author!

World Storytelling Day

Thursday, March 20th, is World Storytelling Day. Are you ready?

The theme for 2014 is Monsters and Dragons . Get started writing now, so you can tell your story aloud to someone tomorrow! Just in case you need help, click here for some good names for your creatures.

Happy writing, and let us know how your storytelling went! 

Where Are the People of Color?

"Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map."

In this quote from his New York Times opinion piece, "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" children's book author Walter Dean Myers is asking an important question.  The publishers of this catalogue of children's books written in Sierra Leone and Liberia, also wanted the children who read them to recognize themselves and their own "landscapes" as they read.

Kabala Secondary School Senior Club

The senior Young Writers club at Kabala Secondary School has been meeting in this well-lighted space adjacent to the school library.

This club, too, was overwhelmed by new intake last week because the SSI students, who have been waiting for their JSS exit-exam results since school opened in September, have now begun attending senior secondary school. Here you see one of the club facilitators, Abdul Karim Koroma, giving an orientation. The principal, Mr. H.B. Conteh, assured us that new accommodation would be arranged so everyone would have a place to sit and write.

One of the students is holding the Young Voices newsletter issue 4.1. The poem on the back page was written by a member of the group.

A Senior Secondary Club

The Seli River Writing Project now has writing clubs in two senior secondary schools in the Koinadugu district in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. Here you see the club members at work in their airy, spacious classroom at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School.

The two facilitators, Sheku Bilo Conteh and Mohamed Ato Koroma, in their soft-spoken way, run a well-organized club. Two events happened today.

One event was that the first-year students (SSI) have just begun attending the school: all this time they have been out of school waiting for their BECE results! Eighteen of them arrived to join the club today.

The second event was that heats for their interhouse competitions began today, so a number of regulars are absent. Many of those that went to the heats are boys so the club membership appears today to have a higher percentage of girls than is actually the case.

You see here one of several conferencing groups that was going on in the room. The students are listening to someone read her work aloud, and jotting down content questions they plan to ask during the discussion of her piece.

Kabala JSS Young Writers Club

This is what content conferencing looked like at Kabala Junior Secondary School last week. It's all about explaining and negotiating meaning in English, which is not easy for these students who have only recently left primary school. Still, they do it with spirit because they are writing about their own personal experiences, which they know very well.

Facilitators Alieu S. Kanu and Fatmata Kamara conduct well-organized Young Writers club meetings. This club meets at 4:30 in the afternoon, after students have had a chance to go home and eat lunch, wash their uniforms, and do some of their chores. This is why you don't see the students wearing uniforms here.

The photo below is a peer editing group in the same meeting.

Students knew how to help each other edit in this club. The authors read their work aloud for their peers, and they reached for dictionaries when they needed them.

Young Voices 4.1

Young Voices 4.1 is out! Click here to join these students sauntering home from Kabala Junior Secondary School reading their newsletters!