Almost five months completed of our Rwandan adventure! Time does not fly; it rockets! We had a very productive first semester getting our heads, shoulders, knees, and toes wet learning about and adapting to the Rwandan University culture. Wading into other academic waters, we also got our feet wet exploring community outreach activities.
The highlight of our educational experiences has been our delightful and motivated students in our English Language Teaching Methods course at the College of Education, University of Rwanda here in Kigali. Many of our students - not all, of course - gradually adapted to our active teaching environment in which they were required to collaborate, question and participate much more so than in their typical classroom environments in which lecturers preach to passive learners.
End of the Fall Semester
Group Assignments & Review
In Week 10 of the methods course in late November, group assignments began. Students were placed into groups of three with each member having a role. With a total of 56 students, there were 19 groups in all. One member planned a unit of instruction (scheme of work); another prepared a 45-minute lesson plan; the third demonstrated an 8-10 minute micro-teaching lesson based on the lesson plan and focusing on one of the 26 English language teaching strategies that were presented during the semester. Group members who did not micro-teach prepared a two-minute oral presentation summarizing the scheme of work and the lesson plan respectively.
Observations on the group assignment:
Students dressed to the nines on the day of their presentation. Several of the males in the class wore suits and ties, while many of the women were in their Sunday-best clothes.
The normally soft-spoken students projected to the back of the room clearly and distinctly.
The students supported one another and participated enthusiastically and actively in the micro-teaching lesson.
The micro-lesson teachers were all dynamic in their demonstrations.
These student teachers abundantly praised their model students with statements like, "Give flowers to your classmate" (hands up in the air with fingers wiggling).
Although the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation used in the presentations and the micro-teaching lesson were not error free and the English language teaching strategies were not always correctly presented, the joy of teaching and the love of learning was obvious.
A few students integrated technology into their micro-teaching demonstrations and made use of the projector.
In general, it was clear to us that the groups worked closely on the assignments and seriously prepared for their presentations. There was a lot of effort and coordination involved in successfully doing this assignment in one's second or third language, English. We appreciate this fact and wonder how our students in the States would cope with a similar assignment accounting for 25% of the course grade?!?
Two weeks of review followed the group assignments. The review consisted of traditional exercises on being concise and the use of articles to the more engaging Jeopardy grammar game and a cloze exercise on phrasal verbs using John Legend's song "All of Me" and Shakira's song "Waka Waka" (The Time for Africa) at South Africa's 2010 FIFA World Cup closing ceremony.
A truly beautiful moment occurred on the last review day when the electricity disappeared in the building and we were not able to use the projector. Reaching into the teacher's bag of tricks, we asked one of the female students to sing a song for the class. We had learned early on in the semester that she liked to sing and that she sang in her church choir. We never expected this shy and quiet student to take up the offer, but with a little encouragement from her classmates, she stood up, went to the front of the class and sang "You Are the One." We hadn't expected that she would sing in English. The students loved her performance and showed their appreciation as concert audiences do by waving their arms from left to right. Mark, in the audience, was oblivious to the 'wave' taking place all around him. Duh!
Last Day of Class
Everyone attended the last day of class, EVERYONE! (OK, we had promised a surprise to those that showed up?!?) After we gave them their grades on the group assignments, we handed out blue and green Florida Gulf Coast University pens and FGCU sunglass neck straps. Their excitement was barely containable, almost as if we were handing out $100.00
bills. Following the distribution of the coveted pens and straps, there was a photo session of group shots, group selfies, photos of the women, photos of us, individual one-on-ones with us, pairs with us, etc. Movie stars we are not but surely we felt the aura and the focus those in the limelight must experience...somewhat...to some degree. Our cheeks hurt from all of the smiling. It was the perfect ending to a semester of a lot of hard work, intensive planning and intercultural learning - on everyone's part.
Final Exams
School is school is school is TESTING! Here as elsewhere, there are final exams. All finals in the College of Education, University of Rwanda are essays. There is very little objective-item testing. So, on the fateful morning that our 56 students sat for their finals, we assisted in invigilating, that is, proctoring the tests. Students were required to respond to four question prompts covering course content. The final exam accounts for 50% of the total course grade so they had studied their own notes and the weekly Study Notes which lecturers give the Class Representative (a class president of sorts who liaises between the lecturer and students in all unofficial course matters) to share with students. These are the lecturers' notes and when compiled over the course of a semester, they amount to a small binder of materials. In Rwanda, as well as in other countries in which rote memorization plays an important role in the entire education system, these notes are carefully memorized word-for-word so that they can be regurgitated back verbatim on exams. Although competence-based curricula are now phasing into the primary and secondary levels of education here in Rwanda, critical thinking skills have not been focused on in the past and educators and students in the tertiary levels and in public and private schools are not familiar with this educational model and, therefore, do not teach these skills nor require their students to use them.
Trip to the Embassy's Information Resource Center With Students
The day after the last day of class, we met some of our students at the U.S. Embassy so that we could accompany them into the Information Resource Center (IRC) in order for them to obtain library cards and have access to the resources there. These resources include use of desktop computers with English language learning software, test preparation software, and various software programs on the many different aspects of American culture.
Here's an excerpt from a post in our class WhatsApp account after our IRC visit:
We want the truth (Joel).
Barack Obama heard that Fabian was in town and decided to stop by and say hello (Sheila).
That's wonderful. Please send our regards to him (David).
The President asked to meet you, J.D., but we told him you had more important things to do!! (Mark)
Hahaha. Sure? Please tell him I'm meeting him anytime from now unless I am out (J.D.).
It's too late! However, he said that he hopes you'll have time to meet him during his next visit (Mark).
All right. Extend my gratitude to him then (J.D.).
Debate Anyone?
In a conversation with our Department Chair at the end of the term, it was brought to our attention that as part of the Fulbright grant award contract agreement, Mark would help strengthen the debate club in the College of Education. Earlier in the semester, we had served as advisers to the club, had participated in a few club meetings and had provided support by attending an intercollegiate women's debate competition. (We posted photos and videos of this earlier.) The Chair informed Mark that this would be the main focus of his spring duties and responsibilities and it was decided that a non-credit mandatory class would be established for first-year students - initially all 857 of these first-year students!
Realizing the impossibility of addressing the entire first-year population, the administration agreed to administer a multiple-choice English language placement test which we would design to this student body. The aim would be to select students who scored at the upper-intermediate and advanced level and invite them to participate in a debate class that would be taught by us during spring semester.
We prepared the test but did not deal with the logistics of administering it to all first-year students. On the last day of class before the end of the year holidays, 782 students turned up to take this two-hour test which was invigilated by university faculty. Post test, we spent days scoring the answer sheets using one answer key made by using a push pin to create the holes for each correct multiple-choice item because in all of Rwanda, we could not locate a single hole punch. Afterwards, the 782 scores were entered on an Excel sheet composed of nine-digit registration numbers, e.g, 215014170.
In addition to the hours spent on scoring the language proficiency test, we also graded the 56 final exams. Lots of grading for...MARK!!! Where was Sheila, Mark's trusty teaching assistant? In the States celebrating the holidays with family and friends!
It now looks as though our debate class will focus on British Parliamentary Debate/World Schools Debate format and will begin in February with only 45 students (and not 800!!!), those who scored upper-intermediate (44) and advanced (1) on the English language placement test. Lots of learning in store for ALL of us...for sure!
SAT and College Application Essay Workshops
As part of our outreach activities with the American Embassy, we offered to conduct a two-hour SAT essay writing workshop and a two-hour workshop on tips for writing a university common application essay. Before these workshops, we had been asked and agreed to work online with three to four of these students who were working with the American Embassy on their applications to colleges in the States. Both workshops had about ten participants. Since the workshop, we have heard from a few students about their scores on the SAT and their early acceptances to universities. The students we have worked with have been very appreciative of the services offered by the American Embassy and we have enjoyed facilitating these workshops. In fact, an 8-week TOEFL Preparation course is being offered in early February at the U.S. Embassy's IRC that we have volunteered to facilitate.
Latest on Our Outreach Activity with AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences)
If you remember in Story 6: Reaching Out, we contacted the AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) program administrators to volunteer our services to teach English to those master's degree students whose language proficiency is not up to the standard necessary to succeed in the program.
We administered a language proficiency test which included a writing component to all 44 students in the program and identified 19 students who would benefit from English language instruction. At the start of the spring semester in early February, we will be working with these students.
The following 9-minute video captures all of the activities narrated above...and does it in a visually enjoyable way (yep, a bit of bragging here and hope you'll agree it IS fun!) The audio track is another of many current top songs playing in Kigali. It's titled Call Me by the Urban Boyz...... Enjoy!
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