Content Conferences are at the Heart of it All

Content conferences are where voices are drawn out. Middle school authors are reading their work aloud for feedback from their peers and from teacher Abu B.S. Marah in this Young Writers content conference at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School, Kabala in Sierra Leone. It's the first month of a new year for the SELI Young Writers club at AMASS, and half the group are newcomers just arrived from primary school.

The students are either getting feedback on first or second drafts, so they can move on to better revision or editing. All the clubs have new editing corners this year, with SELI's donation of two new dictionaries. It's rough this year with no grants to support the Seli River Writing Project,but we are carrying on!

Young Voices 2.1

Find out what all the SLWP Young Writers clubs are doing by reading the latest edition of Young Voices here:

There is a need for writers!

SELI is pleased to be a member of this steering committee, otherwise known as the Opportunity Schools Project, and Books Sierra Leone, of which CODE Canada is one of the implementers. Learn more about this project here: http://www.codecan.org/blog/?p=126.

International Mother Language Day 2011

On Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 4:00 pm, SELI celebrated International Mother Language Day 2011. Anyone who wants to stretch his or her writing life and support those Sierra Leonean languages that are not being taught in schools is welcome to come and write! This is the 12th year of this UNESCO day, which actually falls on the 21st of February each year. It was established to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, particularly encouraging the development of literatures in endangered languages.

This year most of the participants wrote poems, and we all sat in one group to read our work aloud. Can you read this poem by Annie Moses that was written and read on that day? SELI's celebration is part of its larger Heritage Writers program. Participants spend the first 45 minutes writing a poem, story, or nonfiction narrative in their primary language. They then gather in language groups to read their work aloud for appreciative feedback and comments. Tutors from the Writing Tutors Registry are always present in case any participant would like to make an arrangement for lessons to improve their writing skills in their language.

The students on the cover of the book, Fostering Young Writers in Sierra Leone, which you see here, are writing on International Mother Language Day.

Voices from the Village

The Young Writers in the Seli River Writing Project (SRWP) are writing from both urban and rural areas. Since they are writing personal experiences, their environments greatly affect their topics. Check out the voices from the village, at http://www.seli.co/seli-forum/voices-from-the-village

The map shows the watershed area of the Seli River, which gave its name to the SRWP.

We're hosting the TLRC!

SELI hosted the first meeting of SL PEN's Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, or TLRC, on Tuesday, March 29th. Keep your eyes on this space and expect big things of this committee! The next meeting will be on April 12th.

New Site: www.seli.co!

Check out our new website at http://www.seli.co.

The writing is published!

Students push for the chance to read what the authors in their school's Young Writers club have written, now that some final drafts are published on the club's notice board outside the principal's office at Kabala Secondary School's Junior Secondary School.

And the clubs are underway!

Four Young Writersclubs are underway in the Koinadugu District, and here we see two authors doing peer-editing in the Dankawalie Secondary School club. A thunderstorm was going on while we were visiting this club on October 18th, but the drafting, conferencing, and revising all went on nonetheless. You can also see here a content conference going on at Kabala Secondary School's club. The author made a statement in his piece that one of the students thinks he needs more evidence for, and he will have to think about this when he writes his second draft.
I visited the four clubs in the Kabala area in the third week of October in the company of one of the facilitators of a Young Writersclub in Freetown, and we joined in the facilitating wherever we went. We have nothing but praise for the way these new clubs have begun.

Leading Young Writers in Kabala

SELI has just finished conducting the second 40-hour teacher training Leading Young Writers workshop, this time with ten teachers in the Kabala area, in the far north of Sierra Leone. The teachers will be facilitating process-writing Young Writers clubs in four schools there: Kabala Secondary School, Loma Secondary School, Dankawalie Secondary School, and Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School (AMASS). AMASS provided the venue for the workshop. It was a lively one and we were all sorry to see it end. Every activity added to the participants' expertise in one of three areas: the theory of teaching writing; the role of the facilitator; and participating in the writing process. The afternoon writing sessions simulated the Young Writers clubs themselves. The participants, many of whom had not known each other before, are determined to continue writing with the ongoing encouragement of their fellow participants and SELI.
SELI donated to each school a box of supplies to be used by the writing clubs.
Here, supplies are being handed over to the vice principal of Dankawalie Secondary School, Mr. Kargbo.
Young Writers clubs aim to develop young authors while they also improve the communication, cultural awareness, and thinking skills of junior secondary school students in the schools where they operate. SELI believes that writing is best taught by teachers who write, so as we visit the clubs during the year we will also be doing all we can to encourage the teachers in their own writing.