News of work and leisure

We are nearing the end of the third week of the new courses. We have worked really hard at learning the student's names and I am pretty confident not only that I know them all, but that I can pronounce them correctly and even spell most of them! During the first and second weeks we played a lot of name games and it has really paid off. I did a session on learning styles and multiple intelligences hoping that each student would find out about their own preferred learning styles and apply that knowledge to the way in which they approach their own learning. At the end we played the game where you introduce yourself using any alliterative adjective and at the same time step forward and do an action, thus giving, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic cues to help all types of learner to remember the names. The second person in the circle has to introduce themselves and then the first person, and so on, so that the introductions build up into a long string, until the last person has to introduce the whole class. It proved to be a hilarious process; it took a while before everyone worked out what alliteration was, although I thought I had explained it! We got through Marvelous Marian, Drinking Dave, Awesome Aida, which somehow got transposed into Osama Aida (?) and several others until suddenly we got Lovely Gloria! Jingle Jangle Jerman caused a laugh. One of the most serious members of the group will forever be remembered as Bouncing Blazio, particularly as Mother Maureen insisted on calling him Bouncing Baby Blazio! All went well until we reached Ruth who introduced herself as Raughable Ruth. Many Malawians are not able to distinguish between 'r' and 'l' and apart from me and David who became quite overcome with giggles, there were only a few people who could understand why we were laughing. The 'l' and 'r' confusion led to some amusement in the exam papers too. We had children frying kites and learning to skip with a lop! Also the rather delightful 'They were in a circle crapping hands!' and 'Abuse means inflingement or violation of one's rights!' My personal favourite is 'If something is long as a Care Giver I am not supposed to tell anyone but the supervisor.' There were a few other amusing errors in the exam papers, such as: 'My responsibility as a Care Giver be that if I suspect that the child in my care was being abused, is my duty to ask the children at light place on what was happened to him then I will comfort him, then telling their friends that they should love one another.' I never did quite work out what was intended there. There were one or two classic definitions of play: 'Play is any activity that involves muscles' and 'A play is any activity which makes somebody be happy, sad etc'. But, I digress!

The student's first homework was to research one of the pioneers of practical approaches to early years education that influence our work with young children today. We had presentations on Froebel, Montessori, Steiner, Malaguzzi and Weikart. The presentations varied from execrable to reasonably competent! They do not really seem to know how to work in groups. Perhaps the Malawian education system does not lend itself to preparing young people to work together. With classes in primary school including anything up to 200 children per teacher I am constantly surprised that children learn anything at all, apart from how to survive in a crowd! Most groups either nominated one of the better English speakers to present the whole thing or took it in turns to read brief paragraphs. In the latter case there was no apparent preparation and students stumbled over words that had obviously been written by other members of the group. I suppose we shall all learn as we go along.

We are putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of observation in work with young children and so following a lecture by David we asked them to observe a child playing for five minutes for the second week's homework. There were some interesting pieces of work, but I was struck as I walked round the class reading them while the students were discussing them, by how few had read the question properly, so I asked the whole class to stand up. The homework instruction was: 'Write up and present to the class a five-minute observation of a child aged six years or less, playing. First I asked to sit down all those who had not written anything down, then those who had observed for less or more than five minutes, then those who had written about more than one child, and then those who has observed children doing anything other than playing. I was left with five students standing. These I said to the class, were the ones who had done the homework that had been set!

We have now begun work on a series of sessions on play and a child-centred approach to learning. I am not sure exactly why but it has felt like a hard week. In some ways it has also been a very interesting week. We had a speaker from the Association of Pre-school Playgroups of Malawi on making toys and play materials from locally available materials at a cost of next to nothing. The students spent a happy afternoon making things from clay, macerating leaves and flowers to make paint, and making toys from packets, plastic bottles etc and also from fabric scraps left over by the tailor. Despite having to send my decent camera home with Jack for repair as it decided to behave very oddly after falling out of my handbag in the bag of the Land Rover and being severely shaken, I managed to take some nice pictures of the things they made.

One morning we split the class into three groups and borrowed 30 children from Standard 1 (5-6 year olds) and did a carousel programme involving parachute games with me, songs with Lindy and making paper aeroplanes with David. This is the first time we have seen the students with children and in some cases it was quite illuminating. It was not always the ones I expected to have a good manner with the children that actually demonstrated it. Children are viewed very differently in Malawi from the way they are at home and I am still learning about local approaches. In some ways our brief is to encourage a new approach to children for Malawi and of course we cannot do this in a day. Sometimes I worry that we should not be trying to make cultural changes and on other days I am certain that we should.

We have continued to work on observation and planning but I think that the students find it all very hard to understand. It is a short-coming of the course that they will have no opportunity for working on placements with young children and thus putting into practice what they are learning before the Children's Centre opens in September. As well as because it is far too much work for me and David to organize without further help, we decided against it because we are teaching such a different way of working from the rote learning approach that is so common it would not help the students to develop good practice to say the very least. There are several expensive, private nurseries that would probably be very good, but many, many local settings with up to 50 children per staff member and very little understanding of the importance of either play or sound relationships with key adults.

I have tried to explain what a story sack is to the students and how they are designed to encourage reading and language development. Everyone has embarked enthusiastically to make their own, but they tend to be in a great hurry and I am not sure how polished or how durable they will be, but I am looking forward to seeing what they produce. I have taken a few photos of story sacks in the making and some look quite promising. I explained the process of collecting items together to help in the telling and re enaction of the story and to support further learning about subjects raised in the story. I recommended that they start with a story book and build the rest of the sack around that. I was surprised by how many of the students were apparently unable to tell which books are stories and which non-fiction. I suppose it is simply that they have had very little access to books at all other than shared school text books. Lindy, who has been teaching English to primary school children from the standard textbook for the Malawian curriculum does not have a high opinion of the quality of the stories recommended to teach aspects of English. Perhaps it is even better an idea than I originally thought that we continue to start every day with a story. David and I are still reading these at present, but soon I plan to hand the responsibility over to the students so that they get used to reading aloud.

Next week we continue with the same theme and will have time to finish the story sacks, and think about how we can encourage play and exploration by the way we set up both indoor and outdoor spaces for learning. We shall also be looking at creativity and recording children's 'learning journeys', so lots to cover in couple of days!

What have I been doing apart from work in the couple of weeks since Jack went home? Well, Friday night in the Liquor Garden seems to be becoming a bit of an institution. David goes straight from work and plays Pool in the Drinking Den while I go home and have a swim and some dinner. Malcolm, who pops into the site to see the night shift, drops me off at the Liquor Garden on his way and then comes in for one or three when he is done at work.

Last Sunday Malcolm and I took the Land Rover and explored where the dirt road goes at the bottom of our drive if you turn right, instead of left which goes to Blantyre. I have been here nearly five months, and never been that way. The road was rough but the country was beautiful. I think I have previously described the view as one approaches the turn to Mitsidi where one comes over the brow of a hill and the mountains are ranged in front of you, each one appearing less green and more blue as they get further away. We were driving into that view and it was a clear sunny day. Even though as rainy seasons go this has been rather a dry one, everything is vividly green at the moment. The maize will be harvested in another couple of weeks and it is now way above my head. In between the maize plants pumpkin leaves and beans make sure that very little red earth is exposed and everywhere looks quite lush. There were wild flowers in the verges in abundance including quantities of large deep pink, daisy-like flowers that I had not noticed before. The road got narrower and narrower and more and more bumpy, at one point the maize was almost touching the Land Rover on both sides. We were never far from habitation though. Just as you began to think that you might be leaving civilization behind, another village or group of houses would appear, or a gaggle of children run out between the trees to wave at the Land Rover. It was not possible to go far without passing people carrying buckets of water or sacks of maize on their heads and what can be carried on a bicycle sometimes has to be seen to be believed: huge bundles of firewood or charcoal, all manner of produce on the way to market, sometimes whole families balanced on crossbar and carrier. Once I saw a man on a bike with no less than six chair frames in a huge fan behind him. The chairs had no seats, but nonetheless it was an impressive feat. We crossed a small river on a bridge that was under repair. Malcolm got out and cast his engineer's eye over it and pronounced it passable, but I was still a bit anxious until we were safely on the other side. We picked up a family of father, mother and little lad of about four years old, all in their best clothes, walking along apparently in the middle of nowhere on the dusty track. She looked stunning in royal blue, with almost impossible high heels and father and son wore pinstriped suits with sleeveless jackets and bright shirts. They were off to an important football match about three villages along the road. It was a good thing that we gave them a ride because when we got there the match was under way and I think it would have taken them at least an hour to walk, especially the mother in those shoes. The little boy asked his father if Malcolm was the preacher, but I said 'No, he is the engineer!' and that seemed to satisfy him. Eventually after about an hour and a half we came out a few hundred yards from Chileka airport, the other side of Blantyre. The road had led us along the back of a ridge of mountains and we were able to get back to Blantyre on tarmac in about half an hour. It was quite an adventure!

We have had a few idle Saturday mornings pottering about the shops and markets in Blantyre and indulging our taste for Mzuzu coffee in the Mount Soche Hotel, definitely an azungu extravagance! Mitsidi is filling up again. Jan, Lindy, Malcolm, David and I have been joined by Philip and Sharon an American couple who were in Malawi 20 years ago with the Peace Corps and are here for three months doing some work with the Bishop. I have not yet discovered exactly what, although I do know that Sharon's role is to do with 'spiritual direction'. I look forward to finding out more about that. Today Jonathan and Richard arrived for a couple of weeks. They are computer people and are going to set up the network for the IT Training College. I'm not a hundred percent clear what that involves either! In the next few weeks we get a JCB expert, another engineer and an architect, so that should liven up the place considerably!

Tomorrow at least five of us are off to Zomba plateau to have a look at Chingwe's hole, an allegedly bottomless pit down which enemies used to be thrown according to the guidebook!