Thank you, Alan, for setting this up. Speaking of braiding, did you know the earliest depictions of Ghana braids appear in sculptures carved around 500 BC, illustrating the attention Africans paid to their hair. For centuries, they’ve been an integral part of many different Ghanaian ethnic, social, and cultural traditions.
Braids have a long tradition in South Africa, too. Check out the braids on a couple of the artists performing these songs in the Xhosa language, which is the language that we’re translating some first year books into from English.
And while we’re on music here’s a selection from one of the proud sons of the Kingdom of Dagbon., Rocky Dawuni. Dagbani is the mother tongue of the students in Peter’s class in Ghana. This video was shot about 100 Km NE of Peter’s school in Tamale. In the video you might notices more braids and some dancing in a circle with drums which is not unlike a Pow-Pow in Alberta.
The professional development we’re doing with the teachers in Ghana and South Africa is not just in literacy. We’re also using math curriculum from Illustrative Mathematics and aligning it to the Ghanaian and South African standards for the respective grades of the students. And, we’re generating reports of student progress mapped to those standards. We’re just beginning, taking first steps, innovating teaching and learning with OER and an open source LMS.
And, the Lion Runs book actually aligns with South African standards in STEM for R and RR level students. Again, reports will be available.
Every time I meet with the team in Africa, I learn something new. Here’s a recent set of facts confirmed by Wikipedia:
“At least thirty-five languages indigenous to South Africa are spoken in the Republic, twelve of which are official languages of South Africa: Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, and English, which is the primary language used in parliamentary and state discourse, though all official languages are equal in legal status. In addition, South African Sign Language was recognised as the twelfth official language of South Africa by the National Assembly on 3 May 2023
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23 percent), followed by Xhosa (16 percent), and Afrikaans (14 percent). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%).”
The implications of those facts for early literacy instructors, well, any literacy instructors, really, is mind boggling, especially when you consider that it is now well established that teaching kids to read in their mother tongue first is far more effective than trying to teach them the dominant language first.
One of the other recent facts I’ve come upon is that depending on who you talk to there are either 5 times or 12 times as many K-12 students in the world as there are Higher Ed students. Which means policies, frameworks, initiatives, and ideas that are focused on Higher Ed students is a focus on only 20%, at most, of the students in the world. That’s not very inclusive, or equitable, or just, and it’s probably not sustainable. We’re making a start at tweaking that lens a bit. We invite your participation.