The subsections that follow outline the context and the methods adopted in carrying out and evaluating the project.
The context
The project was carried out in the Kitengesa Community Library, located in Lwannunda Parish near the trading centre of Kitengesa in Masaka District of the Central Region of Uganda. Kitengesa is only a few kilometers away from the District headquarters, but the road is bad and Lwannunda feels quite remote from the town. In many respects, it is a typical rural area. The people live mostly by farming, growing matoke, or plantains, to eat, and coffee to sell for cash. Most are not destitute, but many are poor and find it difficult to raise the cash needed to send children to school. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for education is great, and there are significant numbers in the community who can read. When the library entered its first phase of expansion in 2002, a house-to-house survey found that there were at least 2000 people in the parishes of Lwannunda and Kitengesa who might be interested in using it.
The library is, indeed, one of the most remarkable institutions of the area. It was established in close collaboration with Kitengesa Comprehensive Secondary School, which provided the land for putting up the initial library building and whose students and staff comprise the bulk of the library’s members. The library also supports and is supported by the school through the institution of Library Scholars. At any one time seven of the school students help run the library in return for having their school fees paid. But closely associated as it is with the school, it is not just a school library; it systematically reaches out to the community beyond the school by providing classes for adults, inviting children of primary school age to come for special reading sessions, and serving as a focus and meeting place for various groups interested in community development. It has also extended hospitality to researchers and volunteers whose work has introduced new ideas and skills to the village and who have been instrumental in raising funds for the library and for other village projects (for a full account, see Parry [2009b])
Participants
One consequence of the synergy between the library, foreign visitors, and the village community was the formation in 2007 of the Lwannunda Women’s Group. This group, originally comprised of nine women, began meeting in the library in 2005 for an adult literacy class in which they were taught by a visiting researcher, assisted by the librarian. The group began by studying basic literacy—the letters of the alphabet and so on—but soon the women became more interested in talking about the practical difficulties of their lives and considering how they could alleviate them. When the researcher left, she promised to raise funds for the group, and in the meanwhile, the women continued to meet while the librarian arranged talks for them by rural extension workers and other specialists. When the promised funds arrived, the women constituted themselves formally as a community-based organization and used the funds to finance a small project for each of them—a cow for one, a pig for another, and so on. They continued to meet for study, too, and so the group became increasingly cohesive.
This group became the basis for the Kitengesa Community Library Family Literacy Project. In 2008 Kate Parry asked the women if they would be interested in meeting every week for workshops on how to help their children in school. She proposed that Gorreth Nakyato should be the facilitator since Nakyato had already worked for the library as a Library Scholar and in 2008 was training as a primary school teacher. The library was supporting her in her studies on the understanding that she would return to work as a library assistant when she finished in 2009. The women were eager to participate, so Parry made the arrangements with Nakyato and set about securing the necessary materials. She also recruited Elizabeth Kirabo, who was then studying for a Master’s degree in Education at Makerere University, to assist in evaluating the project. Kirabo agreed to observe the sessions and to visit the women in their homes when the project was over.
The project began formally in May 2009. In the first session seven women signed up, to be joined a week later by two more—as well as by one man, a brother of one of the women, who said he was eager to learn, whatever the subject, and who, indeed, proved an enthusiastic participant until he went off to seek work in Kampala. The women varied in age from the mid twenties to the mid forties, and each of them had from two to six children in her home (not necessarily her own children, because a number of these women are caring for AIDS orphans). The oldest of the children was fourteen at the time, the youngest was ten months, and the average age was nearly eight. The older children were all in primary school but none of those who were under six was in pre-school. As for the women themselves, they all had minimal literacy, but at least one had had no schooling and had learned to read in the library. They all also had a little English, but only a couple of them could maintain a conversation in it, and the language of discussion in the workshops was always Luganda.
Materials
The Family Literacy Project in KwaZulu-Natal generously provided the project with course materials, specifically a twelve-week unit developed originally for a series of workshops held with women at Nieu Bethesda in South Africa in 2006. The tone of the series is set by the notes to the facilitator at the beginning:
-
i.
Do not worry if you do not finish a workshop in the time given. Don’t rush through the activities; rather carry on in the next workshop. If these workshops take more than 12 sessions, that is not a problem.
-
ii.
If you think that the group members are not enjoying the workshops, stop and spend time finding out what the problem is.
-
iii.
Arrive on time for the workshops.
-
iv.
Be prepared for each workshop.
-
v.
Enjoy yourself!
(Family Literacy at Bethesda Arts Centre [2006])
The series includes a variety of practical activities—drawing a map of the locality, looking at pictures, making patterns with small bits of paper, drawing pictures and arranging them, telling and reading stories, making books. These activities are interspersed with discussions of what children learn from such activities and how adults can help them engage in, and enjoy, them. Various techniques are used for organizing the group in the activities and discussions: sometimes the whole group talks together, with the facilitator keeping notes on a flip-chart; sometimes the participants work together in small groups; sometimes they work in pairs with one in each pair pretending to be a child; on one occasion participants are invited to bring one of their own children to the workshop so the adults are working with real children. After almost every session the participants are asked to do something with their children at home that is related to what they have been talking about.
Parry and Nakyato worked together to adapt this series to the Kitengesa women’s needs. Generally the adaptations consisted of removing references to things, like television, that members of the group rarely got to see. Occasionally, too, substitutions were made of materials that were more easily obtainable in Kitengesa than were those recommended for the Nieu Bethesda women: the Nieu Bethesda course, for example, calls for magazine pictures, but since there are few magazines in Kitengesa (the library has none), the group used newspaper pictures instead. In addition, the course was adapted to the local linguistic situation by including explicit reference to the bilingual literacy that the library tries to foster. For example, where the Nieu Bethesda course calls for a discussion of reading aloud to children, the Kitengesa version adds a discussion of the differences between reading to a child in Luganda and reading in English.
The greatest change made to the Nieu Bethesda course was the addition of three sessions devoted to the translation of children’s books from English into Luganda. This component was made possible by the Osu Children’s Library Fund, a Canadian NGO that establishes and maintains children’s libraries in Ghana. Shortly before we began thinking about our Family Literacy Project, Kathy Knowles, the director of the Fund, published a set of books based on colours: My Red Book, My Yellow Book, My Green Book, and My Blue Book. The text of the books is extremely simple: each begins with the sentence, “I like ____”, and in the blank is inserted the name of the colour featured in the book. The subsequent sentences describe items as being of that colour; the first few sentences of My Red Book, for example, are:
The lorry is red.
The school bag is red.
The uniform is red and white.
The bird is red. (Knowles [2007])
Finally, each book ends with, “Bye-bye _____”, and the appropriate colour name. Each sentence is written at the bottom of a page, and most of the rest of the page is taken up by a beautiful photograph (taken by Knowles, who is a highly skilled photographer) of the item described. All the photographs were taken in Africa, and many of them feature Ghanaian children. For example, the sentence about the school bag is accompanied by a picture of a child with the bag on her back; she is walking away from the camera but is looking over her shoulder at the photographer and has a warm smile on her face. These pictures are ideal for stimulating discussion with young children; and the fact that the children and scenes depicted are all African made the books particularly appropriate for the Kitengesa project. The Osu Children’s Library Fund generously donated twelve copies of each book (and some of their other publications as well, but they were not used for this project), and My Yellow Book and My Blue Book were used for the translation activity described below. Each participant received a complete set of books, including the two that the group had not actually translated.
Finally, the group received basic tools for practising literacy: flip charts, manilla paper, pens, scissors, and glue, and Nakyato was given a hard-backed notebook in which to keep a record of the activities.
Implementation
Nakyato began the programme early in May, making notes each week of what had been done. While the notes do not reflect the full richness of the activities, they do show that the workshops proceeded pretty well according to plan. The group moved from talking about families and literacy in the first session to drawing maps of the community in the second and discussing where writing was used—one of these maps was subsequently displayed in the library and was much admired. They also talked about pictures that had been taken by Parry for the purpose and then selected and cut out pictures from the library’s old newspapers to take home and talk about with their children. In the third session the participants reported on this experience, which led to a more general discussion in the fourth session of what had helped and what had hindered them in learning to read—and what this suggested about how they could help their children. The next session focused on telling and retelling stories, which the participants did with one another in pairs: one told a story in the first person, while the other retold it in the third person to the rest of the group. In the sixth session the participants brought their children, as requested, and worked with them on talking about and drawing pictures of daily activities. The pictures represented a sequence, and when they were done, the adults mixed them up and asked the children to put them back in order; the point of the exercise was to give the adults practice in guiding and encouraging their children in an activity. The next three sessions were devoted to translating the books and are described in more detail below. From there the participants moved on, in Session 10, to discussing environmental print as it existed in the village and in their own homes, and how they could use it to encourage their children’s reading. Then the participants made their own books, using pictures that they had cut out from newspapers and text that Nakyato had typed for them on slips of paper. These books were taken home, read with children, and reported on. In the twelfth session, they wrote plays and made puppets to act them. The activity in the following session was constructing time-lines of the participants’ own lives and making more books from that material; the children came to that session to make books of their lives as well. Finally the group wound up with a discussion of how the participants could help their children and what they had learnt.
The focus of this article is on how this project fostered multilingual literacy, so particular attention will be paid to the translation exercise with the “colour” books. This exercise went rather more quickly than expected. Three weeks were spent on it, as intended, but the group translated two books (the yellow and the blue one) instead of only one. The participants did not choose to translate the other two books, but they took all the books home, and from their reports to the group it is evident that they read with their children the ones they had not translated as well as the ones they had.
In the facilitator’s guide, the instructions for the first of the three sessions begin as follows:
Show the group one complete set of the “colour” books by Kathy Knowles. Ask the group to choose one of them.
Hand out one copy to each person of the book that they have chosen. Give them time to read or look at it.
Ask them what they like about the book. Do they think a young child will like the book? Ask them to give a reason for their answer.
Hand out an exercise book to each person. On the first page of the exercise book ask them to copy out the title of the book you have chosen. Meanwhile, write the title yourself on a piece of newsprint that you have put up on a cupboard door where they can see it.
Ask the group how they might express the title in Luganda. If there is more than one suggestion, discuss the question until you reach an agreement.
Write the Luganda title beneath the English one on your newsprint. Ask everyone to copy it under the title they have written in their exercise books.
(Family Literacy at Kitengesa Community Library [2009])
The subsequent instructions are similarly detailed, leading the group through a regular sequence of discussing pictures, translating the accompanying sentences, and writing them down. After each session, Nakyato was to type the Luganda sentences out and make copies for all the participants, who would then cut them up so that each sentence was on a strip of paper that they could paste on the appropriate page in their own copies of the book. Thus by the third session, each participant would have at least one bilingual book, and the session was devoted to practising reading the book aloud, both in Luganda and in English, the latter being for older children who were already in school. The final activity for that session was a discussion of the differences between reading in the two languages, while part of the next session was given to discussion of the experience of reading the books at home.
Nakyato’s notes of the first session in the sequence read as follows (the notes have been edited for spelling and punctuation):
-
i.
We translated the books as directed by the workshop.
-
ii.
They were 2 books, i.e. yellow and blue.
-
iii.
People copied the English and the Luganda sentences in their exercise books.
-
iv.
The Luganda translations were written beneath the English sentences.
-
v.
We were translating while talking about the picture as the workshop states it.
-
vi.
Luganda titles were typed and all the sentences in Luganda and enough copies were typed (Nakyato, Notes, Unit 1, Session 7).
She kept similar notes of the subsequent sessions. Here is her record of the discussion of the differences between reading in Luganda and in English:
… We came up with the following views:
Reading in English may [be] difficult because some words may not be easy to be understood while in Luganda there are few words which a reader may fail to understand.
In English you learn new vocabularies rather than in Luganda.
In English we also learn how to pronounce words rather than in Luganda.
When the translations were complete, the participants took the books, which were now theirs, home to read with their children. The feedback in the next session, according to Nakyato’s notes, was as follows:
-
i.
Books were read by the adults to their children.
-
ii.
The experience was successfully described by the adults.
-
iii.
Children were interested about the colour of the books.
-
iv.
They were also interested about the pictures in the book.
-
v.
They were interested because they saw them reading the books to them.
-
vi.
They asked whether their parents also use pencils when they come for the workshops according to the level of the books they took home to read for them.
-
vii.
Some children got involved hence learning how to read to the others.
-
viii.
Some of the children were requesting for the books to take to school because they are good so that they read them to others.
-
ix.
One of the children wanted also to make a catapult which is in the red book. (Nakyato, Notes, Unit 1, Session 10).
The group then moved on, as directed, to the discussion of environmental print.