In a previous post, Story 6 - Reaching Out, we noted that we had volunteered our services to various organizations, such as the Peace Corps, the American Embassy, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and more.
In this post, we would like to take you on a short, 3-minute narrated Google Earth tour of the work places we have been going to since the new year began. Afterwards, we'll delve into more detail on each of the sites.
Fasten your seat belts! (Thanks, always, to Dr. Seuss.)
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Kimironko
Kimironko is a sector in Kigali where the College of Education, University of Rwanda is located. During the spring semester, this is where we go every Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for our year one LIT 103 Introduction to Literature in English class. It is about a 10 - 15 minute drive from our apartment depending on traffic. Our 46 first-year students are divided into three different majors (or combinations): English/Kinyarwanda/Education, English/French/Education, and English/Drama/Education. We have finished seven weeks of the course and have just invigilated (administered/given) the midterm, which is called the CAT (Continuous Assessment Test), and have two more genres of literature to cover - poetry and drama - before the end of the term in early May.
Our classroom on the first floor of the building is very spacious. No more treks up four flights of stairs with a loaded backpack and projector. Unlike our whiteboard last term, the one in GF 6 is spanking clean and mostly undamaged. The outlets work and the room is furnished with more desks than students to occupy them. Ah...the simple pleasures of life.
Finding appropriate materials has posed a big challenge for us. Although the course description recommends teaching novels, such as John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island, or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, we knew that our low intermediate English language learners would struggle with these books. Besides, students in the College of Education do not purchase textbooks for their courses. The solution? Simplified and adapted readings and excerpts that are online. And of course, Youtube! The students loved Ruskin Bond's short story "The Thief" along with a 7-minute short film based on "The Thief." Edgar Allan Poe's narrated, adapted short story with captions, "The Black Cat," was also a big hit.
Group work assignments have also been distributed and are due at the end of April. This semester, students are simply required to research an author and then analyze an excerpt of his/her work in respect to one or more of the elements of literature,e. g., setting, theme, plot, tone, covered in the class.
Another challenge this semester has been addressing the needs of our two visually impaired students in this class. We have reached out to Emmanuel, a technician who works in the Adaptive Services Resource Room. He explained what is available to students with disabilities, and gave us a tour of the room showing us the assistive technologies and some of the software used to read and write Braille.
Observations on Working in Kimironko:
The English level of the first year students seems better than that of our second year students perhaps due to the additional year of English the first year students have had in the public school system, that is, they have been instructed in English one year more than our year two students since English became the medium of instruction in 2009.
Students with disabilities at the University do not have access to state-of-the-art technologies to assist them in their learning. However, they are assisted as much as possible and seem to do fine.
Photocopying instructional materials at the University is always problematic and having exams copied should be done well ahead of time - certainly not the day they are needed.
Test booklets (similar to the "blue books" some of you may remember from your school days) are readily obtainable through the registrar's office and are used ubiquitously here as most test questions are essays.
Remera
Remera is close to Kimironko and is the location of our once-a-week Tuesday afternoon English language class for about 20 master's students who are struggling with their English language skills at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences . The students are in lectures all day and then, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., they attend our class which focuses on a listening and speaking lesson one week and a reading and writing one the next (with homework exercises in between). The listening ones are 3-minute research presentation videos on the topic of mathematics and/or science. For example, they watched a video on a study done on dementia patients and a computer program to help them regain long-term memory.
The presenters are winners of The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) research communication competition involving PhD candidates. It is an international competition in which presenters have three minutes to present their thesis topic and its significance to an audience who are not subject matter experts in the topic being presented. Using the framework and language of these and other research presentations, our students are slowly constructing their own which they will be required to give as capstone assignments in their master's program.
The readings are short one-page summaries from academic journals for the general public on math and science topics, for example, they recently read an article on the elimination of malaria using a mathematical model.
Their writing thus far has focused on summaries. They will also need to write an abstract of their thesis that will be completed in May.
The bottom line is that these students are hungry for English and will do whatever is required to be successful in this rigorous and intensive 10-month master's program. Check out the program at this link: African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Kacyiru
Kacyiru is a nice neighborhood not far from us and is the location of a lot of the embassies in town. President Kagame's very strictly guarded offices are also here and, in fact, pedestrians are not allowed to walk along a whole stretch of road in front of these offices.
Since September, we have offered a few workshops at the American Embassy and more recently, held a Tuesday afternoon Conversation With America session at the Information Resource Center (IRC) on the topic of gender. Since the March talk coincided with International Women's Day and Women's History month in the U. S., we focused on some of the highlights, challenges, and successes regarding women's issues, and the future of women's rights in America. Our audience of approximately 25 young men and women actively participated in the discussion and asked many questions. The greatest eye-opener for most of them was learning that America still has a long way to go to reach gender equality. The one-hour talk extended into 90 minutes and could have gone on for another 30 minutes but the IRC was closing. We are scheduled to do two more of these Conversations before we go: the culture of volunteerism in America and sports in America.
Gishushu
Gishushu is an area in Kigali that is also very close to us and the location we travel to every Thursday afternoon. Our class is on the new campus of the Adventist University of Central Africa (AUCA). The University has given the American Embassy a state-of-the-art classroom for us to offer a 10-week upper-intermediate/advanced English Language Skills, Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) Preparation, and College Application Essay Writing workshop. (Whew! What a mouthful of...jargon!)
Our 23 students are all at the upper intermediate English language level and were chosen from a group of 50 who took an English language proficiency test. Many of them are recent university graduates who wish to pursue studies in the States and plan to take the iBT (internet-based) TOEFL (test) later this year. A few have jobs, but many do not. In fact, as of 2016, 13.5% of college graduates in Rwanda were unemployed. Many of our students have told us that job seekers with fluency and excellent communication skills in English and Kinyarwanda have better chances of obtaining employment than those without these communication skills. Additionally, many of our students are interested in pursuing their studies at universities in the U. S. Depending on the U. S. university, scores of 70+ are required on the iBT for students to qualify for English language acceptance; 120 is a perfect score.
Although the American Embassy is offering this course for free (as are all of our teaching services), the cost of the iBT is $175, which is prohibitive for most Rwandans. A student we had last semester asked, "If I take the test and don't pass it, will I get my money back?" Not quite!
Kanombe
Kanombe is an area of the city close to the airport where we have given a 90-minute in-service professional development presentation to primary and secondary public school teachers on the relatively new Competency-Based Curriculum. The presentation also included some teaching strategies that instructors can use as interactive learning activities.
The questions and discussion during and after the presentation were engaging. We will follow up with at least one teacher who works at a secondary school in Kigali and visit his class in May. We also hope to run into some of these dedicated teachers at the Africa TESOL 2017 Conference in May and share ideas and best practices.
Kamonyi
Kamonyi is both a district and a town located about an hour's drive southwest of Kigali. We visited an inclusive primary-secondary school called G.S. Rosa Mystica with one of our students from last semester who is passionate about working with learners with special needs. He is working on a project to address the needs of learners with physical and mental disabilities by adding educational materials and equipment to the existing resource room in the school. The main goal of the project is to seek long-term, sustainable financial assistance in order to support the needs of a growing population of special education students at the school.
With a permission letter in hand from the College of Education to visit the school, we arrived at the school and met with the headmistress Sister Crescence Uwarurema who told us about their model school for inclusive education. She then gave us a tour of the Resource Room and talked about the locally-produced educational materials and projects produced by the students. An interesting factoid is that every student in this school learns sign language. She suggested that our student work closely with the volunteers and administration in the School of Inclusive and Special Needs Education at the College of Education, University of Rwanda to ensure that the project is not only sustainable but is aligned to the strategic plan the school has developed with Rwanda's Ministry of Education.
We left the school with a better understanding of our student's project and the direction he needs to go as far as working with G.S. Rosa Mystica, the volunteers and administration in the School of Inclusive and Special Needs Education and the College of Education.
Oh, the Places Mark'll Never Go!!
Below is a photo of our Conversations with America, Gender in the U. S. presentation at the U. S. Embassy in March. Note the special guest. When called on to give his views of gender equality in the U. S., he responded, "We're gonna make girls great again!" Ha!
Suggested Reads
In mid-March we attended a cultural evening of song, dance, and readings at the Inema Arts Center in Kigali. There were awards given at the end of the evening by Huza Press which, in the last three years, has been curating Rwandan writing in the form of short stories. We didn't stick around for the awards ($1000 for first prize and $500 for second prize), but did purchase The Huza Press Anthology 2015 Versus and Other Stories. It is a book of 8 short stories by Rwandan writers. The place of woman in contemporary Rwanda is dealt with in quite a few of the stories in the anthology. Our personal favorite is a story called "Verses" by Daniel Rafiki, the 2016 award winner. The story deals with gender conflict and has an interesting twist at the end.
Suggestions to offer about any information in this post? Please comment and click here to contact us directly and/or receive future posts.