Career Writing I

Today was certificate day at SELI for the four students who made it to the end of our pilot  Career Writing I course for post-secondary students, which was held twice a week for a minimal fee at SELI's Tengbeh Town facility.

The participants had a good nine weeks from mid-March to mid-May, mostly learning to write persuasively in multiple drafts, discussing each draft and moving on to revise it. They were challenged to use genres and styles of

writing that students rarely meet until they join the working world. They submitted most pieces handwritten but one by email and one orally. One common thread in their evaluations was that SELI teaches writing differently than secondary schools do. They also found our insistence on driving wordiness out the window very difficult to get used to.

Going forward, our certificate holders are looking forward to signing up for the sequel, Career Writing II, in October. We'll have to plan our timetable more carefully, because this course had to forge headlong through college exams, school holidays, national holidays, and major religious events which resulted in altogether too much absenteeism. It took real dedication from these four to make it all the way through.

Congrats to all four, Kewulay, Kaprie, Foday and Yeabu!

SELI Young Writers Club

The SELI Young Writers Club for JSS II (Form II) students now meets at the Sentinel English Language Institute in Tengbeh Town, from 11:30 am -12:30 pm, four days a week (Mon., Tues., Thurs., and Fri.), allowing students to reach their schools in time for the opening bell at 1:00 pm. As usual, this activity is being offered at no cost to the student. We hold our mini-lessons in a 415 sq ft palaver house first (shown here), and then move on to the classrooms to write! We've set up a display board for final drafts, and any member who has produced four final drafts (Whew! They produce 3-5 drafts per topic just to reach the final draft stage!) can choose her/his best to publish in the club's newsletter.

No one doubts the need for developing writing skills in our junior secondary school students. The clubs offer some children their first experience in a cooperative, collaborative instructional setting. It's unfortunate that the problem of facilities in the schools (see previous post) made it too difficult to carry out the clubs in the schools themselves. The presence of community activities such as clubs is vital if our schools are to succeed. The clubs which, decades ago, schools in Sierra Leone used to offer were not frivolous, but played a vital role in broadening and developing our children.

SELI Writing Clubs

Under the auspices of Sierra Leone's Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, SELI is running several writing clubs conducted as writing workshops, in selected junior secondary schools during the 2008-2009 school year. The two goals of the clubs are to improve the written communication skills of participating students, and to attract interest among language arts teachers in using process writing to teach English communication skills. Assessments of learning growth are matched to what we teach. The leader/facilitator for the clubs is SELI's director, whose teaching specialty is teaching English as a Second Language and who has substantial experience teaching writing in Sierra Leone.

In both schools where clubs are being offered during this term, a primary school fully occupies the classrooms during the mornings. The junior secondary school that occupies the compound in the afternoons is an entirely different entity from the primary school and also fully occupies the facility. Since the school day ends for the junior secondary schools at 6:00 pm, our clubs are held at 11:00 and 12:00 am, before school begins and during the time the primary school is in session. Clubs meet two times a week in classrooms provided by the participating schools (pictured here) at no cost to the student or to the school. Schools were selected according to need.

Our writing workshops operate on a set of beliefs about writing and learning:
• writing and reading are recursive activities--we go back and in and out and revise and re-see and re-think things
• our language and literacy develop best when we are carrying out real-life activities
• our backgrounds and experience shape the way we learn and can enrich the learning of those around us
• language and literacy learning is social, and workshops promote it because they are collaborative and supportive

We all need formative evaluation tools to improve instruction in the classroom. They're best when they're descriptive, so students can use them to improve, too. SELI has been consolidating the West African Examinations Council competency expectations for writing with ERB's WrAP rubric, and NWREL's Six Traits writing rubric. The result is the four-trait, five-point analytic SELI Writing Rubric, which we'll refine as we go.

Pilot Project: Community Adult Project in Education (CAPE)

From February - May, 1994 SELI conducted a pilot project teaching ESL literacy to a class of ten women living in the Tengbeh Town area. Our group was mixed in terms of education (from preliterate to semiliterate) and age (teen to middle age). The class wanted to gain literacy in English, not in the language we all were speaking to each other (Krio).
Our problem was community-based beginning reading materials in English. Could a beginning literacy class prepare a book, not knowing how to read? By cooking in Sierra Leone one develops a sharp eye for identifying different kinds of leaves. I brought a lot of cooking leaves in to class one day, and we spread them out on the table. Before more than a few moments had passed, I realized the conversation had moved from cooking to medicine! This was a better topic, because although we all knew how to prepare the same dishes, each one of us had different herbal knowledge to share. To my surprise, many of the women had admired the rich assortment of useful herbs in the SELI compound as they had come and gone from classes. We all went out collecting. Here you see four leaves that we found: mango (common), fig nut, guava, and sour sop.
In subsequent classes I taped these discussions, and recorded who offered each bit of herbal knowledge. We agreed on short medicine-preparing recipes. I recorded them in English and printed up a booklet which I brought to class and pantomimed my problem. I'm sick, and I need to find the right recipe! How should we organize the book so I can find what I need quickly? We talked about organizing it by the suggestor's name, by the leaf, or by the sickness, and they decided it would be most useful to organize by the sickness. In that session, we drew up our table of contents, and settled on Keep Well as a good title.

Couldn't we draw on students' acute visual leaf discrimination skills to enhance literacy learning in a community-based project? What if we drew up a beginning literacy book in which each letter had a different array of + or - distinctive features? It would be far less complicated than what they use every day for recognizing leaves: shine, curvature, veining, hue, shape, margin, texture. . .!

Student goals changed in these few months. Some who'd said their main goal was to learn to write their names, now could see a future when they could read a book they had written. They were all sorry to see the end of this project. Learning had become a possible and important thing for them, and they did not want to give it up.

Pilot Project: Writing Workshop I

From July to December, 1999, class 4-6 children from several primary schools in Freetown took part in SELI's Writing Workshop I pilot project.
Were you in Sierra Leone at that time? Those were the days of the "Intervention" of February, 1998 and the "Invasion" of January, 1999, and the students' dialogue journals and writing drafts were full of their personal contact with these huge events. We focused on personal experience writing, in multiple drafts just as adults do their writing. In these draft records, you can find pieces called "Fire Balls Passing Over the House," "February 13," and "January 6."
The gate from one draft to the next was through peer conferencing. In their pieces about conflict, the children were writing about astonishing violence. We first had to recognize the authors' turf of knowledge; that they knew what they saw and heard, and that we could help them explain it better by asking questions about it. However, stating to everyone what they were going to do in their next draft was a different question altogether--now that they'd explained it to the group, why put it on paper? Publishing was the answer to that! Publishing what everyone looked forward to. What excitement! We had a good-bye party on December 23, 1999 with a hope that we could continue our workshop at some later date.