This week has been a week of visits. We began with Social Services, the next day we saw Eunice who coordinates the National ECD training, and today we visited the boNGO project in a village about 20 Km from Blantyre just off the Chikwawa Road. This is run by local volunteers under the leadership of a Swiss woman called Simone who has been working with them off and on for about four years. The buildings are cool and attractive and the walls are beautifully painted with animals and other items familiar to the village children. There are numbers and alphabets around the walls, seasons, days of the week. Pictures are labeled with the Chichewa words. This is different enough from the other settings that we have visited, but what struck me immediately we got out of the car was the difference in the quality of the relationships between the teachers and the children. The children were busier with activities than at any other setting we have visited. We saw children making the no. 5 out of clay and later the clay numbers being carefully put out in the sun to dry. The children's efforts were really respected. We saw children lining up to wash their hands at a bucket with a tap, before snack time, we saw a group playing 'Ring a Roses', we saw a library lesson where the teacher engaged the children for fully twenty minutes with a discussion about the letter 'e'. She used an alphabet book, a blackboard and chalk, she acted out a story to much laughter from the children, she sang snatches of songs which the children joined in with, she encouraged the children to tell her which children within the group had a name that began with E. The children were animated and engaged throughout. The teacher called them by their names. I have only heard children called by their names once in all the other visits we have made. After the library lesson there was free play outdoors, another thing I have not seen before, here most of the children were in the shelter of a tumbledown outbuilding which provided shade and playing with mud and stones, plates and tins, making and serving each other with 'nsima' in a messy play session to be proud of! Most of the language spoken was Chichewa. Again this is unusual, mostly we have seen children spoken to in English in settings and in one the teachers proudly told us that no Chichewa speaking is allowed within the nursery. Simone was welcoming and informative. She is keen that we stay in touch and has promised to get me a copy of the ECD training syllabus. She is not the first to have promised this, but I suspect she may be the first to deliver on that promise! I am very pleased that we found this setting, it has helped me to visualize what a setting might look like that maintains its African identity while taking account of different teaching styles and new knowledge.
The visit yesterday to meet Eunice was also very useful and productive. I sensed at first that she was a little cautious about what we were trying to do, but she seemed to warm to us throughout the visit and next week she is going to take us to two settings which she considers to be examples of good practice, one village setting and one in Blantyre. This is very kind of her and I am looking forward to it. We also suggested that she might be interested in contributing a session to our intermediate course concerning making resources from local materials and she seemed very happy to accept the invitation.
We had a piece of excellent news today that a Malawian Early Years Professional who has had a very prestigious job with Unicef has decided to leave Lilongwe and come and work for the Pre-school Playgroups Association of Malawi in Blantyre. Vince is very hopeful that she might also work with us. She has a great understanding of local customs and beliefs and it will be great to have her advice and I am sure it will make our job a lot easier.
Tomorrow we have an appointment to meet the local chiefs in Chilomoni and to explain to them what it is we intend to do. I do hope that we get their blessing.
David and I have begun to put our course together and the first five of fourteen sessions have outline plans. We are going to have a very practical approach. Our students will be used to large class sizes and an approach which includes a lot of rote learning. If they are to build good relationships with the children and learn to support the children to become problem solvers they will first have to learn to play themselves and to reflect upon how the games and activities we use support the children in their learning of concepts, acquisition of language and use of problem solving and thinking skills. Our two and a half hour sessions will contain maybe 40 minutes of formal, lecture input and a lot of games, crafts and activities, with question and answer sessions to check learning and understanding, and opportunities for reflection on the use, significance and potential learning opportunities of what we have been doing. I hope the students enjoy the different approach!
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