Pondering our Week 1 design
As we come toward the end of our first week in South Africa
(I’m writing this on Thursday, our 4th day of 5 participating in
joint seminars with graduate students from the University of Pretoria and other
southern African universities), I find myself contemplating the unorthodox
design of our program. In brief, our
16-day travel study effort has started with multiple days of participating in
joint workshops with advanced African students.
This design was necessary (the reason we were invited to the University
of Pretoria was to lead these week-long workshops), but I am also finding that
it is authentic and serendipitous.
Why these last two adjectives? I write ‘authentic’ to highlight the
fascinating dynamic of watching UNL students work in small groups with African
peers. With English as a common language
(although it is not the first language of many of our African peers), I am
watching our group form preliminary friendships; wrestle with concepts that the
African students are expected to master (and shouldn’t our students do the
same?); and joke, question, and suggest with each other because there is
authentic work that needs to be completed.
In other words, our UNL students have a reason to interact with their
African peers and vice versa. I want our
students to build their understanding of mixed methods research and language
planning/language policy (the foci of our two seminars), but I think the real
power of this first week experience is the interaction.
I use the adjective ‘serendipitous’ to point out how much of
this first week is unscripted. I don’t
mean the content of the workshops; Carolina, Debbie, and I (in one case) and
Theresa and I in the other have worked hard to create Powerpoints, stand
up/sit-down activities, and the like, which give the workshops structure. Rather, I am talking about the moment by
moment interaction. There was no advance
script when three women in the workshop (two from Zimbabwe and one from Uganda)
worked with me to think through research designs related to HIV patients’
responses to medical treatment and to obstacles/hazards negotiated by African
students in their transition from primary schools (that allow them to live at
home) to secondary schools (which are often boarding schools, because their
scarcity means they are distant from most of their enrollees). I had no idea I would have such a
conversation until I was having such a conversation, but it was fun, as well as
substantive and illuminating.
Although there has hardly been time for reflection, if I
think about it, isn’t it amazing that me, a guy from New England who teaches in
Nebraska, can go half way around the world and find people with whom I have
something to share (and vice versa). No
doubt, globalization has its complications and perils, but there are upsides.
Reflecting on rulers
On our first afternoon at the University of Pretoria, all 14
of us were given folders by our hosts that included a pen, a notepad with the
University of Pretoria logo, a brochure/short magazine that described the
university, and a 15cm-long plastic ruler.
A ruler? OK….Fast forward to
Thursday and we are sitting in the mixed methods morning workshop and the task
Carolina assigns (Carolina Bustamante, co-instructor extraordinaire) includes
tearing apart a handout into six rectangles (like flashcards) that will be used
to complete an exercise. I watch the man
and woman in front of me. She takes out
her University of Guateng plastic ruler, which is green and longer than our
University of Pretoria rulers, but otherwise largely similar. She starts to precisely tear the sheet of
paper, holding the ruler along the edge of the tear line to make neat ‘cuts’
without scissors. It’s a silly little
thing to notice and it would be an overgeneralization of substantial magnitude
to ‘decide’ that we were given rulers because it is common in South Africa to
use their straight edge to assist tearing paper. Still, I wonder, is this an intriguing, if
unimportant, glimpse into an educational difference? South Africa, the land of rulers as an
educational technology. Or America, the
country that forgot about its rulers.
On translanguaging
As a second language education specialist, I teach classes
that instruct future teachers on strategies used to help their multilingual
students understand the English curriculum better. Negotiating the South
African language planning and policy class I am co-teaching with Ted, and
sitting in on the Mixed Methods seminar led by Ted, Debbie and Carolina, I have
realized that I am continually witnessing translanguaging as a meaning-making
process, something that I regularly advise my teacher candidates to use to help
their students. As Carolina presented visually and verbally today about mixed
method procedure design (entirely in English) I witnessed groups of South
Africans and other African students (such as a group from Botswana) break into
language groups and help each other learn the English material. It occurred to
me while watching this that this small adaptation (letting the students break
into groups to make sense of the material in their first language) did wonders
for their comprehension of the material. In our language planning and policy
class we have studied about how many South African teachers have expressed
doubts about their role as facilitator (as opposed to knowledge-giver) in the
classroom. Watching the combination of a lecture and small group multilingual,
multimodal activities, I am impressed by the effectiveness and simplicity of
this small adaptation. In our one lecture we had first language speakers of
over 20 languages, and although minority language speakers were still
disadvantaged, they had found a way to help each other because the teacher gave
them the chance to break into groups and work together. This use of cooperative
learning elevated the level of understanding. As a linguist, I continue to be
amazed every day by the multilingual finesse with which students move fluidly
each day from one class or activity in various languages (most are fluent in at
least 4) and I am amazed that the multilingual research community has not fully
embraced all that Africa has to give regarding language learning. Having
participated in many international language related conferences, I have always
noticed the absence of African language experts and researchers and I wonder
why we have not done more to include African language speakers and researchers
as I feel we have so much to learn from them.
Theresa, really thoughtful observations. We have received a lot of 'thank you's for the amount of interaction planned into our workshops.
ReplyDelete