Long weekend

Today is a National holiday. I am sitting at the khonde table at Mitsidi, enjoying the view and the birds in the garden, and getting very excited at the prospect of my trip home which begins in ten days. Most of the other volunteers have gone on a trip to Majete, but although this is a place I have never been I decided to stay at home. I realize that as I am here for so much longer than the average stay for a Krizevac volunteer that I have plenty of time, and anyway, there is such a lot of work to do and my life will be so much easier next week, and the students will get a better deal if I am properly prepared! However there is more to life than work alone, so here I am blogging again. It is so hard to draw a line between what is work and what is not. When I write about what has been happening during the past week of the course it is a vehicle for reflection that helps me in planning not to make the same mistakes next time! It also helps me to be aware of what has gone well, and reminds me to feed back to the students how proud I am of their achievements, as well as the ways in which I want them to work harder, question more and consider the feelings of each other as practice for the way I want them to relate to the children! I am struggling to find time to work on my MA dissertation. Is this work? Is it leisure? On Saturday I had a lovely lazy day which included cappuccino and biscotti in African Habitat, which is run by Italians; an amble round Chichiri Shopping Centre while other volunteers did bits of shopping; a light lunch on the khonde; an afternoon of baking bread and buns, and I rounded it all off by cooking a chicken for everyone in the half bottle of white wine left over from last weekend. Yesterday I spent most of the day on the khonde of my own little house, preparing lectures and discussion sessions, reviewing the course so far, marking Easter holiday assignments. It was a pleasure to be interrupted by a visit from two of the students one of whom is about to go away for a fortnight 'to work in the field' and who wanted to bring me her homework to be marked before she went. In the evening I enjoyed phone calls from home, one of which was interrupted by Tony bringing me a glass of red wine (that's wine twice in a week, and this is Malawi!). Later, after a scrambled egg supper, I returned the glass and he obligingly refilled it and I spent a relaxed hour listening to him talk about the origins of Krizevac and the journey that brought him where he is today. I shared some of my feelings about the training and I think we each came to understand the other a little more.

The theme of the week has been 'Fostering Creativity'. To develop an environment in which the creative and problem-solving skills of Malawian pre-schoolers can be nurtured and supported is the reason why David and I are here. It is a huge challenge. Our students are the product of an education system that cannot easily promote either, because of sheer force of numbers. Many, but by no means all, of our students have never had access even to the limited range of materials that we can provide on our course. Our feedback interviews from the introductory course show that the chance to play games and do art activities were the parts of the course appreciated most by a significant number of the students. Even now, after six months there are many students who still need more time to explore the materials and allow their own creativity and confidence to develop before they will be ready to stand back and let children explore and discover for themselves. This week we arranged two sessions for each class of students to work with groups of children from standards 1 and 2 of the primary school within which our classroom is situated, i.e. four sessions in all. The plan for the first session involved setting out the construction kits that have been donated by Children's Centres in England across the concrete floor of an empty classroom, dividing the students into 'observers' and 'care givers' and letting the children choose which resources they played with, allowing them to explore in their own way and move between activities as they chose. After an initial brief hiatus where the children stopped in the doorway with eyes popping out of their heads with astonishment at the quantity, colour and variety of resources in front of them, they did not seem to have a problem with the plan. It was the students who struggled with it. The 'observers' did pretty well, managing upon the whole to stay at the edge of the room and note 5-minute observations of what individual children were doing, but some of the 'care givers' could not help intervening. One seemed to think that it was necessary to have roughly equal numbers at each activity and tried to move children bodily from busy to unattended activities, others raised their voices to bellow instructions to individual children across the echoing room where the target child would have been quite unable to discriminate that the message was meant for them; one woman soon had her group sorting Mobilio into heaps of pieces of a particular colour, which was not the inclination of the children themselves at all; others managed to watch until a child had a difficulty and then jumped in and finished the whole model for them rather than just providing enough help to set them off again on their own voyage of discovery. On the other hand I also saw examples of good practice everywhere. I saw children looking to students for support and being passed quietly exactly the piece they needed to get over their immediate difficulty. I saw children leaning trustingly against students sitting on the floor at their level and heads together in conversations in Chichewa that I could neither hear, nor could have understood, but I knew that the child was being listened to and gently supported. I saw one tall male student crouching on the floor supporting a huge trolley being made by a six-year old girl with a clear idea in her head of what she was trying to do. One student drew my attention to a little boy building with large wooden bricks. 'Look at him,' he said, 'he has been at this activity for the whole session and he is completely absorbed in what he is doing.'

The second practical session was a carousel of activities around which groups of students and children moved together, so that in an hour they spent 20 minutes with David doing blow painting with straws and runny paint; 20 minutes with Lindy listening to a story about the sun and the wind, and learning a song with dance moves and actions to go with it; and 20 minutes with me, making 'snowflakes' from folded paper. My activity was problematic in that I had assumed, wrongly, that children aged 6-7 years would have had the opportunity to use scissors before. Some obviously had done, but many others had not, and a cutting activity involving cutting through several layers of paper at once was much too difficult for those who had not had previous practice in cutting. However the difficulty brought out the best in several students. I observed one young woman sharing a chair with a child so that she could put her arms around her and cut in front of the child to demonstrate an easier way to hold the scissors. The little girl was snuggling in and the student was talking quietly into her ear. Of the thirty children, my attention was drawn to two who persisted in attempting to cut with the scissors in their left hands and in both cases the student near them noticed and provided left-handed scissors. I helped several children who had not used scissors before by holding the folded paper for them while they concentrated on manipulating the scissors and I saw several students doing the same. There were one or two students who took over, rather than scaffolded the children's progress, but I saw much to be proud of. I was very concerned that I had chosen an inappropriate activity for the children, although incidentally it did provide many learning opportunities for the students, but I was comforted later by David whose activity followed mine. He commented that the children arriving at his room were pleased and proud to show him what they had made. He also remarked that he was glad his activity followed mine as there was much interest in his activity from children from other classes, and if it had not been for the fact that the children he was supposed to be working with were carrying snowflakes he would not have known who to let in to the classroom. There is much food for thought in this simple observation. The children coming to my activity had just left Lindy's and the third group arrived marching in a long line singing a couple of lines from the song she had taught them over and over, being enthusiastically led by a couple of students doing the actions with energy and enthusiasm and singing at the top of their voices. Broad smiles and sparkling eyes showed the children's pleasure. I loved it!

The rest of the input this week has involved the students in considering what they have observed and reflecting upon it. I had the unenviable task of relating what we had been doing to the milestones of the Malawian Curriculum and pulling in extra Development Matters from the UK curriculum to help students to check that they will be providing the right sorts of experiences for the children in their care to have the chance to develop creative skills. It did feel a bit like reducing creative opportunity to tick boxes, but I did my best! Note to self, do not keep such sessions for the last input of the week, especially with group 2 on a hot Friday afternoon. At the point when I counted three students actually asleep I made them all stand up and move about for a minute or two!