Young Voices 3.1

The four-page March 2013 issue of Young Voices newsletter is out!  Read here what members of Young Writers clubs in rural schools on the Freetown peninsula and in the Koinadugu District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone have to say about things that have happened to them.

Seli River Writing Project

The photo on the left is from the SELI Young Writers workshop that meets at SELI twice a week. It has turned out to be a mix of junior and senior secondary students. Mr. Allieu Sheriff, a workshop facilitator from Services Junior Secondary, Wilberforce is doing content conferencing with students here. You also see a student doing self editing at Goderich Comprehensive Secondary School in Funima.

Would you like to know more about the aims we are working toward in the Seli River Writing Project? Many of them are brought out in this article in the February 2013 issue of TESOL International's SRIS Newsletter.

Tutors Needed in Sierra Leone Languages

On International Mother Language Day 2013 (February 21st), a meeting was held at SELI of tutors interested in teaching potential mother tongue authors to write in their own mother languages.  Here are the details:

The Sentinel English Language Institute (SELI) is resuming its Five Writing Lessons programme, in which five writing lessons are offered free of charge in each Sierra Leonean language. The students in this programme are educated adults who wish they could write stories or poems in their mother tongues but do not know the correct spelling.

SELI is seeking tutors for the Five Writing Lessons programme in all Sierra Leonean languages. If you feel that you are qualified to teach native speaking adults to write in your language and would like to participate in the Five Writing Lessons programme, please call SELI at 076 547540 or email jackie@seli.co . The students will already speak the language well; they just need to learn how to write it.

Five Writing Lessons supports mother tongue literature, whose importance is celebrated throughout the world every February 21st on International Mother Language Day. As a tutor in the Five Writing Lessons program, you will be doing a great service to your culture by enabling authors to write in your language. An honorarium will be paid to the successful tutors upon completion of the initial student interview and the five lessons.

Again, contact the Five Writing Lessons programme at 076 547540 or jackie@seli.co .

Conferencing at Sengbe Pieh

We have hopes that soon we will start seeing final drafts from the Young Writers club at Sengbe Pieh Memorial Secondary School in Hamilton, on the Freetown peninsula.

Many of the members of this club, such as the group doing content conferencing here, are senior secondary students. This ups the ante! We are setting higher standards for seniors in the Seli River Writing Project, as is appropriate for their abilities and academic needs.

Stay posted!

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!