Leading Young Writers Workshop Part Two

Just a year ago, with the support of funds from the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland, MI, SELI opened new SELI Young Writers clubs

in five rural primary schools in the Waterloo area, outside of Freetown.

Because we did this at a time when schools were trying to catch up after many months' being closed during the Ebola crisis, we were only able to provide a single day's training with the hope that our follow-up visits to the school could solve any problems they were having carrying out their workshops. We called it Leading Young Writers Workshop Part One, and we have great admiration for these teachers who forged ahead anyway.

Yesterday we held LYW Workshop Part Two, and it was a delightfully different group. They were no longer the slightly dazed but polite, brave learners from from last year but confident and outspoken process-writing teachers. Here they are doing self-editing on their own personal writing drafts we asked them to bring so we could carry out the editing process together—a stage that we had not had time to cover thoroughly in our first workshop.

We started the workshop asking for problems they were having in their clubs, and kept referring back to the list throughout the day, trying to work those through. When we asked whether they were seeing any benefit from the clubs, their enthusiasm nearly blew me away!

• The children have gained great confidence and skills in both reading and writing from reading their work aloud during conferencing.
• Any club facilitator who says a child who attends regularly is not improving, must not be taking them through all the stages. Every child who attends regularly, benefits.
• The children see themselves as authors: some even write creative work on their own now, and bring it to school to show the teachers.
• They have such self-confidence (boldness, it is called here)! When students are to conduct the morning assembly, it is the club members who always volunteer, and carry it out well.
• They communicate more: rather than sending someone to tell a teacher something, they will now write a note. They are much more willing to write.
• The club helps the teachers in their own writing tasks, with both skills and confidence.
• The club has changed how the teachers teach writing in the classroom. Even teachers who are not facilitators but only observe what is going on, now teach writing in class by telling students to draw on their past experiences for topics and by giving students choices of what to write on.
• The students in the club are more responsible in school, because of the club tasks that they perform and the understanding they have of management of the club.
• The club members are more able to read or answer questions written on the board during their regular classes than other students.

We have heard this before, but not so clearly explained and not from so many different angles. Maybe it is because their clubs started so recently that they are able to see the differences more starkly than club facilitators in a school that has had a club for several years. Or maybe it's because these are primary schools; we've always worked with junior secondary schools before.

2017 Update

The new year has been a busy one at SELI, what with visiting SELI Young Writers club schools and  giving daily Business Writing mentoring classes, an in-servicing we offer to businesses and organizations in Freetown.

In mid-March, we traveled to the Koinadugu District in the northeast of Sierra Leone on a trip made possible by support from Edward Davies & Associates Consulting Engineers Ltd. One of the things we do there is to check up on the progress of the Kuranko Karan (shown here), a mother tongue adult literacy class in Dankawalie Village. We have nothing but praise for this group, that meets three times a week from 8-9:00 pm after a full day's work and was asking for Books II and III of their text. We have been able to send them thanks to the resources of The Institute of Sierra Leone Languages (TISLL) who also trained the teachers (in the back row in orange and white shirts) and are monitoring the program. On its own, the group hopes to revise the text, as well as compile a Kuranko reader: they will soon need Kuranko books to read, and they are very hard to find!

We also go to the Northern Province to visit our writing clubs.

We found most of the schools involved in their annual sports competitions, but we talked with the teachers and delivered supplies they'd fallen short of. Here you can see Dankawalie Secondary School's red house (and supporters) heading off for the competitions.

While they had been practicing, I had been working in the school library SELI helped to set up several years ago with a grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives and continues to support, mentoring DSS's teacher-librarian in this very rural setting.