Feed A Hungry Mind

Greetings to you all and I hope this finds you in good spirits.

The schools in both Tanzania and Rwanda are near to closing for the holidays. In Tanzania this is the long mid-year break and in Rwanda the end of the school year.

In Tanzania the teachers at Bright School are enjoying using the New Original English Course (NOEC) books and the Jiandae (Get Ready) books with their pupils. It is the use of the Jiandae which is motivating pupils so much. After a short training with the Standard I and II teachers who are using the books with their 7 and 8-year-old pupils, the teachers have really taken to the course and are using the techniques in the books to elicit ideas and information from the pupils. The pupils like being made to think, and, as the course is conducted in Swahili, they enjoy the freedom of expression in their own language. At first the pupils were a bit self-conscious doing role-plays, or being asked to imitate animal noises, or greeting each other in any tribal languages they know etc. It didn’t take long before they were clamouring to have a go, and now the teachers often have to resort to ‘hands on head’ to indicate that the class should be still and silent in order to curtail the over-excitement. Teacher Janeth said to me, “I adore the course, and it’s helping the pupils a  lot”. 

Bright School is one of many English-medium primary schools that have opened in the last decade or so. The parents want their children to learn English but, to my mind, this overlooks the need to embed the native language for both cultural and pedagogical reasons. 

It is essential that young children develop their thinking skills in their native language, and that development is one of the main aims of the Jiandae course. Written in Swahili the course also looks at different Tanzanian traditions and so tries to make sure that these continue to be known by both teachers and pupils. 

As an English-medium school, the teachers at Bright are finding the use of the NOEC books a bit more difficult. The curriculum introduces English as a subject in Standard III. The English-medium schools have to follow the curriculum and so, although they try to teach using English from Standard I, it is not until Standard III that actual English lessons are on the timetable. This means that, unfortunately but inevitably, mistakes have crept in. The teachers have to gauge how to correct the misuse of sentence structures without losing the attention of the pupils and risk giving boring lessons. This is all the more difficult as it is the teachers who taught the incorrect English in the first place! This is something we are working on. It will get easier as the teachers become familiar with the content of the NOEC and get used to judging the ‘pace’ of a lesson in order to know when to move on and speed up and when to continue with the practice of an item of language.

In Rwanda back in late February Damian, Ivan and I finally had our meeting with the Honourable Minister for Education, Mr Gaspard Twagirayezu. It was a very good, and at times fun, meeting. The Minister knows us well and at one point imitated my English which was nicely cheeky and hilarious! He said that he had read all the papers I have written on various aspects of the primary curriculum for teaching English together with examination papers etc., and that he agreed with most of what I had written. My reports highlight areas of weakness and concern, and in many cases make suggestions for improvement.

The Minister asked if I would consider working with him in an advisory capacity. It was left that he would write to me in about ten days and request me to respond with a proposal. It was, we felt, a very good meeting. However, despite sending some follow-up emails we have heard nothing. I am going to wait for next year’s national budget approval which is in July, in case the Minister is waiting for a budget line for his new proposal, but the likelihood of his following up on his plan seems slim. What a shame. 

It is even more of a shame as our work in Rwanda is so very much appreciated by the schools in which we work, the teachers and, crucially, the pupils. Not only that, but Damian bumped into Dismas who is the Sector’s Director of Education. He told Damian that he always knows when he’s in a NOEC-using primary school because of the pupils’ confidence and proficiency in using English. Dismas would like our programme to be in all the primary schools in his Sector.

Teacher Josephine helped us with some teacher-training in the use of the NOEC with teachers at Murambi primary school which is new to our programme. This was hugely successful, and the follow-up sessions in the school show that those teachers new to using the NOEC are already adopting the in-built methodology and are giving good and lively lessons. 

Teacher Claudine is so used to using the NOEC (she has been using the books with us since 2017) that the techniques, methodology and language are second nature to her. A recent lesson in which her pupils stood individually to read a passage from the Pupil’s Book was impressive, with all reading confidently, clearly and with correct pronunciation, stress and intonation. This is helped each pupils having their own NOEC Pupil’s Book.

I have written before about the motivation this success in the use of English brings. The teachers use the methodology to ensure that the pupils are working and thinking, and the pupils love being pushed that bit to prove that they can do more than they thought. The teachers and pupils strive for success and find that actually it is fairly easily achievable.  This is because the NOEC introduces only one thing at a time, gives sufficient practice in it, and always revises and uses what has gone before.

Our visits to the schools bring joy in unexpected ways. The very young pupils in pre-primary love seeing our car at such close quarters and linger by it probably in the hope of being offered a lift!

It is your kind and generous support that enables our work to continue and flourish. I am most grateful to all of you who make donations. I hope that in a world of dismal news the joy and success of learning in the schools where we work is a bit heartwarming and uplifting.Many, many thanks and all good wishes,

 Katy

Update Winter 2024

Greetings and I hope your new year has begun well.

The new school year started in Tanzania on 8^th January, and in Rwanda the second term started on 15^thJanuary.

I arrived in Tanzania with three large bags full of books, wall charts and posters for the new schools we are working in in Rwanda and for my new work with the teachers at Bright School in Tanzania. A very nice woman at check-in at Heathrow ignored the fact that each bag was over its weight limit, and so 200 books, 80 black and white wall charts and 22 colour posters larger than A1 size all arrived intact. I had a 46kg baggage allowance and ended up taking more than 75kg for the cost of one extra bag. The black and white wall charts accompany the NOEC (New Original English Course) Book One and the charity’s printer found new roll-able material that is indestructible. The colour posters accompany the Jiandae course and they are printed on roll-able paper only a little less robust than that used for the wall charts. 

The Jiandae course is a language awareness course that I wrote some years ago as an introductory course before the use of the NOEC. From my experience in the primary school classrooms I could see that the crucial development of thinking skills was lacking across the primary curriculum, and also that the pupils’ knowledge of their own country and culture was limited. Not only that, but knowing that later education would all be conducted in English was no motivation at all for the young pupils to learn English. The course comprises a teacher’s book for each of the two year course and 11 colour posters for year one and 9 colour posters for year two. The course uses extensively the ‘think-pair-share’ technique and so encourages expression and confidence. It is all conducted in Swahili, but the pupils learn English words which have long been adopted into the Swahili language, and so they find the learning very easy. For instance, koti = coat, jaketi = jacket, soksi = sock(s), posta = post office, benki = bank, reli = railway, treni = train, chokoleti = chocolate, and so it goes on. This gives ample opportunity for the pupils to explore their own language and life. Then they are introduced to the English speaking countries of England, America, Canada and Australia, and the people, clothes, animals, money, flags, inter alia, by way of comparison. It is a full course, and the books were piloted with great success some years ago when we ran our project in the Manyara region of Tanzania. The Tanzanian government is considering introducing English into Standard One. This was done in 1998 and then stopped in 2015 as it produced no better English results overall. English is now taught from Standard III, as it was pre-1998. The Jiandae course would be an excellent substitute for introducing English in Standards I and II, as it concentrates on nouns, and so avoids any sentence structures which the Standard I and II teachers would find hard to teach correctly. Anything learned incorrectly by young learners can take forever, if at all, to un-learn and re-learn.

Before I left England I had the great pleasure to meet the Honourable High Commissioner for Tanzania in his London office. He gave me over an hour of his time and was very interested in the books I had taken to show him, and to hear of my comments and views on the current English syllabus and the need for more help to be given to the teachers. We talked about both the Jiandae and the NOEC books, and he listened and understood the need for each. He was enthusiastic to the extent that in my presence he telephoned the deputy Permanent Secretary to the Minister for Education in Tanzania and asked him to help me to get an appointment to see the Minister. After the meeting the High Commissioner poster a picture and a summary of our meeting on his social media pages. His summary read:

‘It was a pleasure to meet Ms Katy Allen-Mtui (MBE), the author of JIANDAE – a language awareness course for Standard I and II in Primary Schools, and the co-founder of Education East Africa charity. We exchanged a wide range of issues related to skills development in Tanzania……..Education East Africa charity believes that in primary education, besides introducing fundamental skills – literacy and numeracy – the overriding set of skills that should be introduced are thinking skills. Those include the skills of logic, analysis, explanation, problem-solving, sequencing and creativity. I believe the Education East Africa charity can provide valuable input to the UK’s development work supporting the education sector in Africa. I commend Katy and Dilly Mtui for their noble work in Tanzania.’

Upon arrival in Tanzania I pursued a meeting with the Honourable Minister for Education, Professor Adolf Mkenda. That was arranged for Tuesday 30^th January in the political capital of Dodoma. It is a nine-hour coach journey from where we are in Kilimanjaro to Dodoma and so two whole days were spent travelling to get there and back. Our meeting was scheduled for 3pm. Unfortunately, the Honourable Minister was delayed in getting to our meeting and had to rush to another meeting. He had very little time to spend with us, and his lament was that his Ministry has no spare money to spend on books. The trip was a disappointment. However, if we use the NOEC books and the Jiandae course at Bright School we can once again prove the value of the two courses for learning English as well as developing important thinking skills.

I was in touch with the Honourable Minister for Education, Mr Gaspard Twagirayezu, in Rwanda before I left England, and he hopes that he will be able to meet us soon. We are working on that, and we hope to take some of the teachers and local officials to the meeting so that the Honourable Minister can hear first-hand how much the use of the NOEC books helps not only the pupils but the teachers as well 

The 18th January 2024 marked the 30^th anniversary of my coming to Tanzania to live and work. For the first seven years I lived with James and Dora and their children in their homestead with no electricity or running water. Dora helped me considerably to settle into life in the village. At the beginning she would come into my small one-room house every evening and sit with me and speak to me. I would sit with my dictionary and try to expand my use of Swahili. One evening Dora told me that a neighbour had had a baby. I did not know the words for baby girl or baby boy and so used what I knew for girl and boy. I ended up asking her if the neighbour had had a girl or an umbrella! Mwavuli (umbrella) was confusingly similar to mvulana (boy) for me at that stage. To mark the occasion of my thirty years we met for lunch and reminisced and caught up.

Thank you once again for your generous support of our work. With predictions of a quarter of the world’s people in 2050 being African, it seems more important than ever that the young children should have a good education. Regrettably, primary education is not fully understood by some leaders as they lack experience of how children learn and the development of their cognitive ability. In our small way we keep fighting, and that is only possible with your help. Every penny and cent that you find for our work makes a difference. 

Thank you, and all good wishes,

Katy