Working with parents to promote children’s literacy: a family literacy project in Uganda

In recent years, African governments have made strenuous efforts to make education available to more people and thus to expand the numbers of people able to read. Yet “the country lacks a reading culture” is a common lament; the expansion of education seems to have had little effect, so far, on reading habits.

The work reported here is based on the assumption that for a culture to develop in which reading plays an integral part, it is not enough to teach children how to read: adults need to read too, and children need to see them doing it. The promotion of adult literacy is, however, particularly difficult in the rural environments in which most Africans live. Apart from the fact that adults have other things to do besides attending literacy classes, an almost insuperable obstacle is that little written material is typically available in the languages that they speak. As for children, they may acquire initial literacy in their mother tongue, but to develop sophisticated reading skills they have to learn a foreign language—in Uganda, as in many African countries, English. Literacy as acquired through schooling tends thus to separate children from their parents and undermine cultural cohesion. The project described here aims to counteract that tendency by bringing parents and children together in a common literate activity, one in which bilingualism, for both generations, plays a pivotal role.

The effect of this view of literacy has been to focus attention on the social contexts in which writing systems are used and learnt, and on the family as one of the most important of these contexts. Heath ([1982]), in particular, demonstrated the significance of family literacy practices for children’s later performance in school in the United States of America. The children of the “townspeople” she studied benefitted enormously from their parents’ habit of reading them stories at bedtime. Even though they might not learn how to read, these children learned what to expect from and how to respond to stories and were thus much better prepared for school work than were the children of the working class communities that Heath also studied ([1982], [1983]). Other, later researchers have supported the same contention (for reviews, see Carter et al. [2009]; McCarthey [2000]; Ntuli and Pretorius [2005]).

A practical reaction to the emphasis on home literacy practices has been the development of family literacy programmes. In such programmes, children’s caregivers are brought together to work on their own literacy, sometimes separately from their children and sometimes together with them (Nutbrown et al. [2005]; Timmons [2008]). Whether the children are present or not during programme sessions, the emphasis is on equipping caregivers to prepare their children for school tasks; thus they participate more in their children’s education. There is some concern that such programmes may be imposing the practices of a hegemonic social group on those that are marginalized (Dudley-Marling [2009]); but practitioners have found that provided they are sensitive to participant families’ practices and values, they can successfully bridge cultural and social barriers and the participants themselves recognize the benefits of the practices that the programmes advocate (DeBruin-Parecki [2009]; Timmons [2008]).

In Africa, little work has been done on home literacy practices, though there are a few exceptions in Southern African countries (Dlamini [2009]; Onyewadume [2009]). Yet even without detailed ethnographic research, it seems safe to assert, as Ntuli and Pretorius ([2005]) do, that the establishment of fruitful relationships between home and school literacies is particularly challenging in African contexts. Most of Africa’s population is rural, and in rural African environments there is often little support for literacy: no television, few books or magazines in the homes, and although written signs may be ubiquitous in the trading centres, there is hardly any extended text to be found. In some areas many parents are non-literate, and those who have learned to read have little opportunity to maintain the habit. Studies in Uganda have shown that they use their literacy to read and write occasional letters, to read newspapers when available, to understand publicly posted notices, and, in some cases, to read the Bible or other religious material (Carr-Hill, et al. [2001]; Openjuru [2009]). Pawlitzky ([2009]) reports a similar range of interests among mother-tongue and bilingual readers in Kenya. Such uses are limited in comparison to what Heath describes in her “townspeople”, or even in the other two, less privileged, communities that she considers. Thus three of the basic factors that Baker ([1999]) identifies as facilitating the acquisition of literacy—having materials available, observing adults reading, and being read to regularly—can hardly be realized, nor can children see that adults value reading if there is no material to be read.

There is, in addition, a marked divide between home and school that is encoded in and maintained by language (Parry [2009a]). Even in countries like Uganda, where it is official policy to teach initial literacy in the mother tongue (Uganda Government [1992]), children are obliged after only four years to switch to English as the language of instruction. Once they do so, it is extremely difficult for parents who do not speak English to support their children’s learning; and typically such parents consider that they have neither the right nor the responsibility to do so—literacy is in the teacher’s sphere and not the parent’s.

In such circumstances, the benefits of family literacy programmes are likely to be particularly great. Desmond and Elfert ([2008]) have collected accounts of projects in Mali, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda which try to address these problems by helping parents to support their children’s learning. But the real centre for African Family Literacy projects is South Africa, perhaps because the literacy practices of Heath’s “townspeople” are already well established in some communities there but are notably absent in most others—those others being the ones that were, under apartheid, systematically denied full access to education. There is thus, in the post-apartheid regime, a particularly strong incentive to try to bridge the gaps between the literacy practices of home and school, since this will help address the inequitable inheritance of the past.

Examples of such work include the Families Learning Together Programme in Soweto (Mashishi [2009]) and the Family Literacy Project of the Children’s Literature Research Unit (CLRU) at the University of Southern Africa (Machet and Wessels [2006]). These are both township projects. However, the Family Literacy Project in KwaZulu-Natal is rural and as such is of greater interest to researchers in Uganda. This project began in 2000 by working in crèches and preschools, but it later developed adult literacy classes and set up libraries to serve them. The project’s founder reports that “many of the facilitators say that the provision of books has been one of the most exciting developments in their communities” (Desmond [2008], p. 38) and she quotes remarks from participants, emphasizing the importance of the libraries to the project as a whole. Here, for example, is what one participant said:

It has helped me a lot that we learn as a family, I no longer have low confidence around people and I can help my children with their school work and read books that I borrow from the library to them. These books are very helpful because the children often have homework and they allow me to be able to help them easily because I have read the library books and because I can teach my children to write English. (Desmond [2008], p. 34)

It was as a result of learning about this project and visiting a couple of the libraries in question that the first author of this article decided to initiate a similar project in Uganda, where she has been managing a community library project for over ten years and where there is now a national community libraries movement (Parry [2009a],[b]). The project, it was hoped, would help develop new ways of bridging the home-school gap in Uganda and of helping parents understand the importance of developing children’s proficiency in their mother tongue.

The subsections that follow outline the context and the methods adopted in carrying out and evaluating the project.

In describing the KwaZulu-Natal Family Literacy Project, Desmond ([2004]) emphasizes the importance of the sessions being enjoyable. The Kitengesa project certainly seems to have been a success in that regard. The participants came regularly to the sessions, and as they talked about what they were doing with their friends and neighbours, more and more people wanted to join. When the first unit was completed there was no question but that the participants wanted to continue with the second, thus committing themselves to another three months of work. There was a pause at the end of the second unit because no more material was immediately available and Nakyato had to take time off for personal reasons, but at a meeting with Parry in January 2010, the core members of the group said they wished to resume the project and asked her to get more material from South Africa. Such commitment is striking given that these people are extremely busy: all the women have several children to look after as well as their crops and animal husbandry projects, and the little time they have left is taken up mostly with church and community functions.

There are a number of interesting points about this list. First, the mention of the library may be significant. The sessions were always held in the library or in a classroom nearby, and the project was clearly associated with it in an organizational sense, yet there is no explicit mention of the library in the course materials; it would seem that the inference about its importance was the participants’ own. It is also interesting that the community map evidently made such an impact, as did the discussions of environmental print. Still more interesting is the remark about confidence, and it will be noticed how similar it is to the quotation, above, from Sibongile Dlamini of the South African Family Literacy Project.

Kirabo’s observations confirm the impression that the participants were becoming more confident. At the beginning she noted that they were rather quiet and reluctant to ask questions. In Session 2, for example, when Nakyato asked them to work in pairs and discuss when their family members read or wrote together, the participants did not know what to do and simply sat in silence. In Session 7, by contrast, when Nakyato first presented the colour books, the group was full of questions: How were they going to handle them? Should they take them home? Were they going to go through them with their children? At the same time, the participants became far readier to answer Nakyato’s questions. At first the answers usually came from only two people, but later Kirabo noticed that the hands were “shooting up”. Towards the end of the first series, the group was entirely relaxed, as Parry noticed when she attended Session 11 and recorded what she saw in her journal:

The work for that day [29 July] was making books. The women had identified pictures that they wanted to use, all related to a particular topic, and [Nakyato] had typed up text for them based on the previous week’s discussion. Topics included Wild Animals …, Houses …, Domestic Animals …, Birds …, and Number Rhymes.... A lot of the texts were songs and rhymes, which [one of them] sang as she worked. The task was to stick pictures and texts together into books (one for each participant), for which [Nakyato] had provided covers comprised of manilla paper encased in a plastic document protector …. So everyone sat around with scissors and glue, chatting, singing, all busy and in great good humour (29 July, 2009).

Another significant observation of Kirabo’s was that the participants were beginning to read more. The first ones to arrive for a session generally sat in the library to wait for the others. At the beginning of the programme, they did not do anything while waiting, but by the end they regularly picked up a newspaper (particularly the Luganda newspaper, Bukedde) to read, or else they looked at the books that were out on the tables—though it has to be said that they did not go to the shelves to pick out books.

It is impossible to say to what extent the work with the colour books was responsible for these beneficent effects, but there is no doubt that it was a powerful addition to the programme. The books were noted particularly when the participants reviewed their work at the beginning of the second series (see Nakyato’s notes cited above), and it is probably significant that much later in the second series, a discussion of what helped learning and what made it difficult produced reference to translation and the lack of it as important factors (Nakyato, Notes, Unit 2, Session 10).

As to the sessions in which the participants did the translation, they seem to have been particularly lively. After looking at all the books, the group decided to focus on My Blue Book and My Yellow Book. They translated both titles first and then worked through the yellow book, the title of which they rendered as Akatabo kange akakyenvu, using the diminutive form, akatabo, of the word for book. There was little discussion of which words to use—the translations were apparently fairly obvious—except when the group was uncertain as to what was shown in the photograph. For example, one of the sentences in the book is “The corn is yellow,” and the photograph shows an open hand holding some partially crushed grains, with more grains in what must be a mortar beneath. The participants could not decide whether to describe the “corn” as “maize” or “pop-corn”, because they said that the grain in the hand looked like the first, but the grain in the mortar like the second. In the end they chose the word for “pop-corn”, emberenge. “The fast food stand is yellow” also presented a problem, because the building shown looked like a shop, but the signs painted on the front suggested that it was a hotel. In the end they translated “the fast food stand” as omudaala gw’emmere, meaning literally “food stall”.

Often, Kirabo noted, the participants expressed their own reactions to the pictures: they liked the pig shown standing by a yellow bowl because it looked so healthy; a little girl holding yellow flowers was remarked on because she seemed to be happy. The picture that inspired most comment was one of a van, described in the text by the Ghanaian word trotro, “The trotro is yellow”. A woman is shown walking in front of the vehicle, wheeling a bicycle and carrying a bowl of loaves on her head. The word trotro caused some difficulty since no one knew it, but they decided the van must be a taxi (taxis in Uganda are that shape, although they are not usually yellow) because of its shape and the roof rack on top. But the woman was interesting too: she was carrying nice bread, they said, and was probably taking it to the market; and the bicycle suggested that women there work hard, since women rarely ride bicycles in Uganda except in the north where they are known to be hard workers.

The responses to My Blue Book were similar. There was only one real difficulty in translation, that being of the sentence “The provision store is blue”. The participants could see that the establishment depicted was what they would call a duka (shop, but always a small one, not a supermarket). However, they did not know what to do with the word provision. In the end, they opted to use duka alone. There were some difficulties in understanding the pictures, especially one of blue fishing nets with breaking waves behind them. In landlocked Uganda, none of the participants had seen such waves, and fishing nets in Uganda are always brown. Most of the comments arose, though, out of the participants’ relating the pictures to their own experience: the little girl in the “I like blue” page looked like the daughter of someone they knew; the uniforms shown in “The uniforms are blue and white” looked like the uniforms of a neighbouring school—but how did you keep the white clean? In short, the exercise did not give rise to debate about linguistic issues, but it did stimulate imaginative responses and encouraged the participants to see themselves and their own lives in the books.

Finally, how did the project affect the children? The children were not present at most of the sessions, but when they did come to Session 6, they were deeply involved in the activity. Parry wrote an account of the session in her journal:

Everyone [settled] in four groups, each comprising two or three adults and between four and eight children. [Nakyato] went round asking each child what she or he was going to do, the assignment being to identify all the activities involved in some familiar routine, like getting up in the morning or going shopping, and then to draw pictures of each. The children drew while the adults encouraged them and wrote labels on the pictures – except for [one] who most of the time was breastfeeding her baby.

… [Nakyato] went round all the time, putting her hand on a child’s head or round his chin and making encouraging noises. At one point she showed me a child’s drawing of incomprehensible circles and said, laughing: “Early in the morning he greets his grandmother – eh, this workshop!” Other pictures included picking up grass and taking the goat out. … The children also were looking at the pictures, very engaged (17 June 2009).

It seems clear that the children were enjoying both the activities and the adult attention that they were receiving.

When the adult participants had finished pasting the translated sentences into the blue and yellow colour books, they took the whole set home to read with their children and reported back at the next session. The children were apparently entranced by the glossy paper and bright colours of the books. They also responded warmly to the pictures. The question about whether the parents use pencils at the workshop, recorded above, was almost certainly stimulated by the picture illustrating “The pencil is yellow”; and the desire of one child to make a catapult was inspired by a picture in the red book—showing that this book, though not translated, had also been looked at by parent and child, and the picture of a catapult had made an impression. Some children, presumably the older ones, read the books to other members of the family, while some “were requesting for the books to take them to school because they are good so that they read them to others” (Nakyato’s notes do not record whether the parents allowed this). The participants themselves were clear that the main attraction of the books was the fact that they, and the children, could identify with them. Kirabo recorded one woman as saying, “Ebifananyi ebifanana nga bino ebyawano byebalaba bulijo”—“The pictures look like things here that they [the children] see everyday”—to which another responded warmly, “Munange, era ebifananyi obiraba n’obitegera bulungi”—“My friend, you see these pictures and understand them well”.

Perhaps even more significant, though, is the report that “[the children] were interested because they saw [the parents] reading the books to them” (Nakyato, Notes, Unit 1, Session 10). Kirabo recorded further that the participants said this was a new experience for both parties; hitherto, the only materials that they had read together were the children’s school reports. It seems then that there is a direct link between the work with the colour books and the participants’ comment at the beginning of the next workshop series that they had learned that reading aloud to their children was important. This supposition is reinforced by the fact that in a much later discussion, they listed as ways of helping their children in school, “Being a role model of borrowing the books and reading with them,” and “translating if possible, it might be of both sides either children or parents” (Nakyato Notes, Unit 2, Session 14). The fact that they said this does not, of course, mean that the “bedtime story” literacy practice is fully established among them, but it does suggest that the idea is there to be built on in future workshops.

When the KwaZulu-Natal Family Literacy Project was evaluated in 2001 and 2002, it was noted:

… that excitement was obvious when group members were asked to talk about themselves and their young children. The evaluator wrote that “the link with early literacy seems to be a success formula for literacy classes. Not only have the women carried out various activities with their children, but also their own literacy skills and use for the skill have been stimulated through the activities they have done with their children”. (Desmond [2004], p. 358)

The experience of the Kitengesa project endorses this view. The focus on their children seems to have engaged and maintained the participants’ interest, while giving them occasion to practise easy reading and writing tasks without feeling that they were beneath their dignity as adults. It has also brought home to them the value of the library and encouraged them to read more themselves, though it would be too much to claim that it has turned them into avid readers.

It seems equally clear that such a project is beneficial to the participants’ children. The Kitengesa project has not gone on for long enough for the effects to show up in the children’s school performance, but the evidence so far is that the children enjoy participating in literacy events with the adults who take care of them and that those who are old enough want to share the experience, especially of the books, with their siblings and school mates. By itself this does not make a reading culture, but it would certainly seem to be a step towards it.

The one significant departure of the Kitengesa project from its South African model seems also to have been beneficial. The activity of translating Kathy Knowles’ colour books was evidently interesting in itself and led to productive interactions between parents and children. The only problem here is that it depends on appropriate books being available and a recent shopping expedition for children’s books in Kampala (for the Uganda Community Libraries Association Workshop in January 2010) demonstrated that picture books of this quality are hard to come by.

One recommendation based on this project, then, is that organizations interested in promoting literacy in Africa should encourage the production of such books, with colourful pictures that relate to African experience. The books would be particularly valuable if published in local languages, but, as the Kitengesa Women’s Group found, they do not have to be. Provided they have good pictures and are in simple English, and provided that they are presented in a forum such as a Family Literacy Project with a competent facilitator, they can be translated and so made useful to local children and their parents.

As for the Kitengesa project, the library will certainly continue to support it as long as the participants are interested and Nakyato is available to facilitate it. Other members of the Uganda Community Libraries Association are also taking an interest, so we hope that Uganda more broadly, through its libraries, will follow in the footsteps of South Africa in the successful promotion of family literacy.

Kate Parry teaches Linguistics at Hunter College of the City University of New York and is an Executive Director of Friends of African Village Libraries. She does her research in Uganda, where she is the Director of the Kitengesa Community Library. Elizabeth Kirabo is a teacher by profession. She works with the Rwanda Education Board and acted as the evaluator of the Kitengesa Community Library Literacy Project. Gorreth Nakyato was, at the time of writing, facilitator of the Family Literacy Project, at the Kitengesa Community Library, Masaka, Uganda. Now she teaches at Lwaggulwe Mixed Primary School in Kalisizo.