What does a volunteer in a FAVL library do?

Check out Chelsea's blog entry from her stay in the village of Bereba.

Kathy Knowles on CBC

Kathy, who as director of Osu Children's Library Fund has been a supporter and inspiration for a lot of our work at FAVL, will be profiled in a CBC story.
The story of Kathy and the Ghana libraries she initiated will be on Sounds Like Canada. This Friday at the top of the show - that is 10AM (EST). CBC radio one.
http://www.cbc.ca/soundslikecanada
People can listen live anywhere in the world on the net.....or on Sirius radio across North America ....or on the CBC Sounds Like Canada podcast http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/index.html?newsandcurrent#slc

Family literacy, storytelling at home... should we be skeptical?

It is an truism for most people like me, who work a lot helping to establish and sustain small community libraries in rural Africa, to think that the model of literacy I practice with my own children (lots of shared reading and storytelling through age 6 or 7, until they are firmly reading on their own) is going to be replicable in African villages. But it is painfully obvious that our librarians in Burkina Faso and Ghana have, most of them, a hard time doing that kind of shared reading. Most village parents have even further to go.

So do I (and FAVL) have to work a lot harder to change the librarians and the village reading culture? Or is it I (and FAVL) that needs to change?

I've been reading a nice collection of essays, edited by A. van Kleeck, S. Stahl and E. Bauer (the E stands for Eurydice, which makes me like her automatically), called On Reading Books to Children. Many of the chapters are essays by left-leaning deconstructionist types... lots of dominant paradigms being tilted at. But there point, that my model of literacy acquisition may not be the most effective model to promote, is not lost on me. I confess, though, that I am disappointed in that no alternative models are proposed. What would an alternative literacy model look like? Whenever I try to imagine alternatives, I use as a touchstone the family/convent alternative of much of Europe for so long (yes, an aunt was a nun!). So the nuclear family isn't for you, what do you do? Join a convent. Very different living arrangements. So what's the parallel for literacy? The One Laptop per Child is going to bypass book reading? Television and radio in rural areas? Does anyone honestly think that promoting these at the expense of promoting shared book reading is the right course of action?

So the answer to my earlier question: I'd love to change, but I really have no good idea of how to do it! I'm stuck in the family literacy-shared reading rut and I don't have a machete to make a new path.

Recommended reading....

I am not a book critic, just an avid reader, and over the past several days I have been re-reading Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People . It's just fantastic, in the ambiguity of the theme.... is politics really character? The writing is sharp, wonderful turns of phrase here and there, and the characters are memorable and never overbearing. Chief Nanga... simply amazing. I was in western Sudan in a small village during the time that General Omar al-Bashir in Sudan was just consolidating his power, in 1989, after a coup d'etat. The local reaction to the coup and the new military rulers was so exactly like Odili's father... wise resignation.

Uganda Community Libraries Association

The Uganda Community Libraries Association now has its own website. Visit it at www.ugcla.org

Uzo and his father - Ernest Emenyonu

A very nice short novel for children... Exactly the kind of father I would like if I grew up in a village in Africa!

Dinaw Mengestu - "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears"

Pass the PLE...

In 2005, Kate Parry did an analysis of all the books borrowed to date from the Kitengesa Community Library. There was plenty of activity, and people of many kinds were borrowing books, but there was one worrying feature: very few children were included. So the librarians, with help from friends in Kampala, organized a Children’s Reading Tent. Books were put on display, local dignitaries were invited, and a lot of speeches were made. More to the point, children from six different primary schools were invited with their teachers, and when the speeches were over, they spent the day reading, drawing, and otherwise engaged in activities to do with books. Since then, the Kitengesa Library has held a Children’s Day about once a month. A single primary school is invited each time to send a class with a teacher, and, as at the Reading Tent, the children read, draw, paint, play games, and have stories read to them. In this picture, the children are playing a game called “Pass the PLE (Primary Leaving Exam),” made by a company –Mango Tree Educational Enterprises (http://www.mangotreeuganda.org/) – that specializes in simple and inexpensive educational materials for Ugandan schools.

Another Barbara Kimenye title

Wow! "Pretty Boy" by force of circumstances leaves his parents when their shanty home is demolished, makes his way to Mombasa , the sex trade, and AIDS... and his mother dies too, from the shame. Brutally frank, nicely written. Want an insight into the real Africa? Pick up some Kimenye.

Do African community libraries have to be justified?

From a report Libraries, literacy and poverty reduction: a key to African development by Professor Kingo Mchombu, University of Namibia and Nicola Cadbury, Book Aid International

One justification: Stop adults who have gone to school from relapsing to functional illiteracy...

In sub Saharan Africa adult literacy levels are now 61% (UNDP 2005). But without regular use literacy skills can be lost within a few years. A large percentage of participants in adult literacy programmes lapse into illiteracy within just a few years if they don’t have access to follow up support and appropriate reading materials (Abadzi 2004). The Association for Literacy in Zimbabwe finds that most of their adult illiterates are lapsed literates rather than people with no educational background. Unless literate environments are created which can sustain literacy for life, then education investments will not deliver the lasting benefits required to change lives and reduce poverty.

And there is more interesting stuff:

One of the most significant challenges facing library services in reaching the poor comes from the very limited coverage of most of the library services surveyed. Because of lack of government investment they are unable to achieve anything like full coverage of the population. For instance, Kenya, with its population of 32 million and large literate population of over 15 million, has only 36 public libraries. Malawi has 10, and Uganda 30. Most library service points are located in urban areas where population is highly concentrated and there are few branches in rural areas where a greater proportion of the population live in dispersed settlements.

The Uganda survey response noted that four libraries (Buikwe, Kyabutaika, Nakaseke and Katengesa) have established collaborative arrangements with NGOs and groups to provide economic empowerment information and other community-led information-sharing activities using the library as their platform. Such initiatives are important first steps towards optimising partnership between libraries and their beneficiary communities. Really effective partnerships will happen when all sections of society are able to request and receive the information they need, while at the same time libraries are equipped to record and disseminate communities’ local knowledge.

That's right, our very own Kitengesa...

Mark your calendars- we will be at CIES in New York March 18, 2008

Kate and I will be presenting in a panel at CIES meetings... more info is here.

Complementing Formal Education: Village Libraries in Africa
March 18, 1:30-3:30
Group Number: 125
Session Time Block: 2.4
Session Type: Panel
Chair(s) Kim Parry, City University of New York

Presenter 1 A. B. K. Kasozi, National Council for Higher Education
The Uganda Higher Education System and the Lack of a Reading Culture
Presenter 2 Kate Parry, City University of New York
The Promotion of Reading in Rural African Populations
Presenter 3 Valeda Dent, Rutgers University
One Book at a Time: Libraries in Village Communities
Presenter 4 Michael Kevane, Santa Clara University
Rural Students are Doing Fine: Reading and Schooling Attitudes in Burkina Faso
Discussant 1 John Paige, Congregation of the Holy Cross

Summer reading... how much does it help?

FAVL is looking for funding to run some reading programs this coming summer, and be able to get a good idea of the effects of various summer reading programs compared with a low-cost alternative of simply giving children some books for summer reading. How much would it matter if the kids participated in a book discussion program, or some out-loud reading, in a community library, versus simply have the books? The programs gets kids to the library, where books are shareable, the book distribution gets books into kids homes, but the books are less shareable.

Turns out there is no evidence that I have been able to find of studies like this in the rural African villages that we at FAVL care about. The closest study I can find is by James Kim, an education specialist now at Harvard. Here's the abstract for one of his papers:

The Effects of a Voluntary Summer Reading Intervention on Reading Achievement: Results from a Randomized Field Trial

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention were assessed in a randomized field trial involving 552 students in 10 schools. In this study, fourth-grade children received 8 books to read during summer vacation, and were encouraged by their teachers to practice oral reading at home with a family member and to use comprehension strategies during independent, silent reading. Reading lessons occurred during the last month of school in June, and 8 books were mailed to students on a biweekly basis during July and August. The estimated treatment effects on a standardized test of reading achievement (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) were largest for students who reported owning fewer books at home, less fluent readers, and minority students. These findings suggest that a voluntary summer reading intervention may represent a scaleable and cost-effective policy for improving reading achievement among lower-performing students.

See also: Literature Review on the Impact of Summer Reading Clubs

Apologies to Chinua Achebe...

I tried to get my 9 year old son to read Chike and the River, Achebe's short novel for children. I read it myself, and found the writing crisp and clear (what else was I expecting) and interesting enough to keep me going. A lovely thought to hold in your mind, of a young boy's dream to cross the river. But apparently to a Goosebumps, Tintin, Harry Potter, Inkheart, Dragon Rider, etc. 9 year old, it didn't seem to cut it! What if Achebe were to write a more fantasy-oriented children's book? Let me think... On the very first page Chike's parents are killed by a nuclear-mutated spider while they are watching Godzilla on their TV set. Chike runs off to his uncle, who turns out to have a dragon stored in a bottle. The miserly trader Mr. Peter Nwana is really a powerful witch who... cuts off people's heads and turns them into gold! Mr Nwana tries to control the spider to his own nefarious ends, and Chike and his uncle save the day, and Chike teaches his uncle that dragons are really just like humans.

Young Fluent (African) Readers

Someday a bright anthropologist, sociologist or littéraire will write the Africa-based equivalent of Margaret Clark's Young Fluent Readers. I think it would be so fascinating. The little girl in our promotional video (on the webpage www.favl.org) seems like she probably would be a great candidate for inclusion in the study.

Dan Ahimbisibwe, the librarian at the Kitengesa Community Library in Uganda, with the library’s new eGranary

With its solar electricity the Kitengesa Community Library is able to support several computers, and it now has three laptops of various ages. It has used them chiefly for maintaining the library’s database and for teaching a few students basic computer skills. Now it has gone a step futher. This January the library received as a gift from Teachers for East Africa Alumni (www.tea-a.org) an eGranary—that is, a hard disk with some 10 million texts on it, including the whole of Wikipedia. Most of the texts come from the internet, and the eGranary comes with software to enable searching the material by keyword as well as by subject. Thus, although the Kitengesa library can offer no internet access, it can now offer something that looks and feels like it. There is a “history” function too, so Dan is all set to record in systematic way the most frequently visited sites. It will be invaluable information for the Widernet Project, which has developed the eGranary, as well as for anyone interested in African villagers’ responses to IT. For more information about the eGranary and Widernet, visit
http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/index.htm.
Kate Parry
26 January 2008

Talking about libraries …

The Uganda Community Libraries Association (UgCLA) held its first workshop on January 16-17 at the Pope Paul Memorial Hotel in Kampala. More than thirty people attended and fifteen libraries were represented. The workshop, paid for by a grant from the U.S. Embassy, was on how to write a proposal—a topic of immediate relevance because the same U.S. Embassy grant will enable UgCLA to distribute, on a competitive basis, six grants of $1000 each. The participants had a fine time talking about what their libraries are already doing as well as dreaming up new $1000 projects—so much so that this group was still talking when I came across them outside the dining room after lunch.

Kate Parry
26 January 2008

Article about Uganda libraries in Edutopia

FAVL co-Director Kate Parry has a great article, "It Takes a Village -- and a Library: Developing a Reading Culture in Uganda" in Edutopia, a magazine funded by the George Lucas Foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools.

More from Niankordodougou, Burkina Faso

Meghan Coughlin, a dynamic Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina, sent us some more pictures as the library makes progress. Check out the pictures on the FAVL Flickr site.
Meghan writes:

The library is really coming along. A gold mining company donated the money to buy furniture and bookshelves, which were just put in this past week. I'm really happy with how everything looks. Attached are photos of the library as well as a few pictures from the primary and secondary school. It might not look like a lot to everyone back home, but the fact that we have the building and furniture says a lot about how motivated my community is. Our mayor is organizing the library committee to hire a librarian and oversee logistics. Hopefully we will soon have funds for the books and librarian salary. Friends of African Village Libraries is going to make a trip to village to work with the library committee and librarian. I'll keep you all updated with how the library is coming along. Thanks to all of you who have already made contributions towards the library project. If anyone else is interested in helping or has any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Your donations needed!

What reading programs work? Some evidence

The “Sunshine in South Africa” literacy project
Warwick Elly and Brian Cutting

International Journal of Educational Research
Volume 35, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 193-203

Abstract

In South Africa, most black students are expected to learn in English, their second or third language. READ Education Trust, a non-government organization, has introduced book-based programs in many schools, and trained thousands of black teachers in methods of using the books constructively. Several formal evaluations have been conducted to investigate the impact of the READ programs. In the “Sunshine in South Africa” Project, a New Zealand publisher, Wendy Pye Ltd. donated 4000 books from her “Sunshine” series to 22 schools, in six different provinces, and READ staff trained teachers of these schools in the Shared Reading methodology during short workshops. Students in Year 2 and 3 were tested at the beginning and end of 1997, and their progress under the new program was compared with that of matched control groups, who followed a traditional textbook approach. The findings showed that Year 2 students in the “Sunshine” programs improved their reading skills at twice the rate of control groups, and showed impressive gains in listening comprehension. Strong significant improvements were also found for Year 3 Sunshine pupils. READ staff are extending these programs to many new schools throughout the Republic.

The “books in schools” project in Sri Lanka

International Journal of Educational Research
Volume 35, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 181-191

Lionel Kuruppu
Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Abstract

In Sri Lanka, English is taught in the primary school, by language specialists, starting in Grade 3. During 1995, staff at the National Institute of Education investigated the impact of a “Book Flood” of 100 good quality English reading books per school, in 20 small disadvantaged schools, at Grades 4 and 5. Half the schools were urban and half were rural. The books were donated for the project by Wendy Pye, a New Zealand publisher. In preparation for the project, teachers were trained, in short workshops, to use the Shared Reading method, and to read stories to children. The books were used for 15–20 min daily during normal English periods. The achievement levels of the pupils were tested before and after the program, which continued from March 1995 until January 1996. In comparison with matched control groups, the project groups showed highly significant gains in reading achievement, approximately three times that of control groups, and substantial improvements in writing and listening skills. Apparently, the daily practice at reading and related activities contributed to a marked improvement in English literacy acquisition. The Ministry of Education recommended extension of the program to all schools, in English, Tamil and Sinhalese. Teachers in over 400 schools have now been trained in the approach.

Conclusion: what have we learned?

International Journal of Educational Research
Volume 35, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 237-246

Warwick B. Elley
12A Kiteroa Terrace, Rothesay Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

The results of the nine studies reported on in this special issue suggest quite clearly that a book-based program consistently accelerates the language acquisition of school children in situations where (1) they are learning a second language; (2) they have minimal access to interesting reading materials; and (3) their teachers are themselves teaching in a second language. In this closing chapter, a set of generalizations derived from these studies is presented. More specifically, three areas are discussed: (1) the link with other empirical studies; (2) theoretical issues raised by the results of the studies; and (3) policy questions raised by the results of the studies.

Which educational inputs to primary schools in Zimbabwe have most impact on the reading achievement of pupils?
International Journal of Educational Research, Volume 23, Issue 4, 1995, Pages 361-371
Saul Murimba, Manasseh Nkamba and Christopher Busang

Blogging from Burkina

Chelsea, a university student volunteer in the Bereba library in Burkina Faso for the next three months, has just started a blog after arriving in Ouagadougou at the start of her stay.

Read -a-thon at Sligo Creek Elementary School

The third graders at Sligo Creek raised an impressive sum from their Read-a-thon, and teacher Anna Weaver writes, "Our third graders were motivated readers as a result of the inspirational work you are able to do in Africa. As teachers, we were not only able to encourage fluent reading in out classrooms, but we were also able to extend this valuable quality to students in Africa though this donation." Thank you!

Google.org's philanthropy

Chris Blattman says why don't they organize/distribute information to Africa... but I say ... (always did want to say that)... I say, what good is information if you have no idea where it is... so I suggest Google.org establish and run a small community library in every village in Africa. The start up cost to establish 100,000 libraries would be about $500 million, and the annual operating budget around $300 million. Those are big numbers, but amazingly there are a dozen people for whom it is 1/20th of that person's wealth. Imagine that, one person or one organization could establish 100,000 village libraries, and run them for a long time.

Brings up another one of Chris Blattman's posts... the one about the high real wages in Africa. Definitely you have to do something like what we do at FAVL. A librarian gets half the salary of a primary school teacher. What would happen if aid agencies paid salaries according to the local teacher scale? Hire seven people instead of one...

Beauty Queen - Barbara Kimenye

This is exactly the kind of book that a secondary school student in English-speaking Africa would love... a quick Jackie Collins-like tale of a village girl transformed, and her eventual downfall from HIV/AIDS. The book is remarkable for the absence of explicit moralizing... you could have imagined it quite differently. There are flashes of great writing and story-telling, which keep the more sophisticated reader interested. The ending is dramatically abrupt. She's wasted away, and dies. You knew that from the beginning, that she was not going to a pretty end.

The book is part of a series developed by East African Educational Publishers for secondary school pleasure reading. It is available through Michigan State University Press. Buy an copy, read it, and then send over to an African village library, why don't you?

Two books that look worth reading

Regionalism and the Reading Class
Wendy Griswold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Pub. Date: January 28, 2008

Publisher blurb: Globalization and the Internet are smothering cultural regionalism, that sense of place that flourished in simpler times. These two villains are also prime suspects in the death of reading. Or so alarming reports about our homogenous and dumbed-down culture would have it, but as Regionalism and the Reading Class shows, neither of these claims stands up under scrutiny—quite the contrary. Wendy Griswold draws on cases from Italy, Norway, and the United States to show that fans of books form their own reading class, with a distinctive demographic profile separate from the general public. This reading class is modest in size but intense in its literary practices. Paradoxically these educated and mobile elites work hard to put down local roots by, among other strategies, exploring regional writing. Ultimately, due to the technological, economic, and political advantages they wield, cosmopolitan readers are able to celebrate, perpetuate, and reinvigorate local culture. Griswold’s study will appeal to students of cultural sociology and the history of the book—and her findings will be welcome news to anyone worried about the future of reading or the eclipse of place.

And then searching on who Griswold is, I come across her other book, which looks terrific:

Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria
Wendy Griswold

Publisher blurb: Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These--together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe's writing--are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa's most populous nation. Drawing on interviews with Nigeria's writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels--from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces--Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern. Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.

The importance of books and writing

Many years ago I read Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, and always remembered his paragraph about how Pizarro was able to conquer the Inca in part because he and his men had, most probably, read accounts of battles and conquests and how to defeat with "unfamiliar people", while the Inca had not. Here is the relevant explanation, from the PBS video... just the first two minutes are relevant. The transcript is below if you'd rather... READ!

Voiceover: Pizarro and his most trusted officers debate their options for how to deal with Ataxalpa. Some advise caution, but Pizarro insists their best chance is to launch a surprise attack the next day. It’s a tactic that’s worked successfully in the past. Twelve years before Pizarro went to Peru, another famous conquistador, Hernan Cortez, had gone to Mexico and encountered another formidable civilization; the Aztecs. He conquered the country by kidnapping the Aztec leader and exploiting the ensuing chaos. Cortez’s story was later published and became a bestseller, a handbook for any would-be conquistador. It can still be found in the great library of Salamanca University in Northern Spain.

Jared Diamond: This wonderful library here can be thought of among other things as a repository of dirty tricks, because in these books are the accounts of what generals had been doing to other generals for thousands of years in the past and across much of Eurasia, and here from this library we have a famous account of the conquest of Mexico with all the details of what Cortez did to the Aztecs and what worked. That was a model for Pizarro to give him ideas what exactly to try out on the Incas, whereas the Incas without writing, had only local knowledge transmitted by oral memory, and they were unsophisticated and naïve compared to the Spaniards because of writing.

Voiceover: But if books were so useful, why couldn’t the Incas read or write? To develop a new system of writing independently is an extremely complex process, and has happened very rarely in human history. It was first achieved by the Sumerian people of the Fertile Crescent at least 5,000 years ago. They pioneered an elaborate system of symbols called cuneiform, possibly as a way of recording farming transactions. Ever since, almost every other written language of Europe and Asia has copied, adapted or simply been inspired by the basics of cuneiform. The spread of writing was helped enormously by the invention of paper, ink and moveable type, innovations that all came from outside Europe but were seized upon by Europeans in the Middle Ages to produce the ultimate transmitter of knowledge – the printing press. The written word could now spread quickly and accurately across Europe and Asia. The modern world would be impossible without the development of writing.

New library in Niankorodougou, Burkina Faso

Meghann Coughlin, a Peace corps volunteer in Burkina Faso, is organizing a library in the village where she is doing here volunteer work. Pretty remote! She recently sent us this message:

The gold mining company in my village donated the money to have all furniture made for the library and that should be all finished by this weekend. Once everything is set up inside I will send you some pictures. I am in Bobo at the moment but will be meeting with my mayor to finalize details for the library committee next week. I am still waiting to hear back about the grant proposal from Friends of Burkina Faso. I will talk to Rose Armour, Associate Peace Corps Director, about following up with them. It would be great to have Chelsea and Dounko come and visit Niankorodougou.

Yes, gold is big business in Burkina... thank heavens for small mercies, because with the rise in oil prices Burkina is being seriously hammered economically. Chelsea is a University of Montana student heading off to Burkina tomorrow to volunteer in the Bereba library. We'll be looking forward to hearing about her experiences.

Since I am an economist

I had to put this in the blog, even though it has only a small connection to reading... Steve Levitt tries desperately to explain to Jon Stewart what applied economists do - regression analysis...


So the small connection is that Freakonomics famously mentions that reading bedtime stories to young children has no benefits... which would seem to argue against shipping children's storybooks to African villages...

Fortunately, a quick Google search reveals the skeptics of the skeptics... Here's one:

Read-Alouds are Good for Literacy Development: A Comment on Freakonomics

Stephen Krashen
Reading Today, vol 23 (2) Dec 2005/Jan 2006, p. 19

Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, is a very good book, but it contains a mistake, one that can cause a lot of harm. The Freakonomics authors claim that parents' reading aloud to their children does not predict the children's academic achievement.
This statement is based on data reported in a journal paper by Levitt and another colleague, Roland Fryer (Fryer and Levitt, 2004), an analysis of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Levitt and Dubner concluded that frequency of being read to by parents was not a statistically significant predictor of scores on tests given to kindergarten students when they began school.
There is, however, a good reason why Levitt and Fryer got these results: Nearly all parents in the sample said they read to their children quite a bit. On a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 = read to "not at all" and 4 = read to "every day," parents of black children reported an average of 3, and parents of white children reported at average of 3.4. This produces a ceiling effect, with scores bunched near the top.
With data like this it is impossible to determine if those read to more did better than those read to less because so many children in their sample were read to a lot. (Of course, with self-reported data it is hard to be sure how much reading aloud really took place.)
Thus, Levitt and Fryer's study cannot give us any useful information about the relationship between reading aloud and school success. It does tell us, however, that read-alouds are now very popular among parents and/or parents feel it is something they should be doing. This could be due to the efforts of writers like Jim Trelease, whose book, The Read-Aloud Handbook (Penguin, fifth edition, 2001), has sold over two million copies since it first appeared over 20 years ago.
Freakonomics does not cite the considerable amount of research that shows that read-alouds do help, studies that do not suffer from the same methodological problem that Levitt and Fryer's study does.
http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/freakonomics/01.html

Alice Hoffman - Here on Earth

Just finished this page-turner... have to say though I was left at the end a bit unsatisfied... I liked the character Gwen, although the horse theme (she loves them, Hollis kills them) was a big heavy-handed. Did I miss something?

Why we are called to the challenge.... the situation is grim

From a report, Understandings of Education in an African Village: the Impact of ICTs, principal author John Pryor and Ghartey Ampiah J.... produced for DFID... This extract is from the executive summary- the team did an intense qualitative assessment of education in a single village in Ghana... everything in the executive summary is right on target for what I have seen in Burkina and Ghana, but may be quite different from eastern Africa.

This extract lists the "general [village] understanding of education" that emerged from the research:

Pupils
• Most children are unable to follow the main ‘text’ of school lessons, which is constructed by the teacher assisted by one or two higher achieving pupils and by ritual responses from the rest of the class.
• Understanding is especially bad when English is used, as most children cannot speak more than a few basic phrases.
• Most children do not follow schoolwork because they do not possess the understanding from previous work that is a prerequisite for the syllabus of the higher grades of primary school and junior secondary school.
• Corporal punishment is frequent, routine and not administered according to official
guidelines. Though accepted as normal, it is very unpopular with children.
• Some children’s schooling is interrupted by migration and lack of clarity over whose responsibility their schooling is.
• Payment of school fees acts as a symbol for children that their parents value their education.
• Remaining in school is especially difficult for girls as they often receive less support from parents.
• Poverty is a strong constraint on children’s success in basic education, though still most of those who are relatively well off in the village fail to achieve good results.
• Facilities (especially light) and support for home study are a crucial factor in the success of the small number of children who are able to benefit from village schooling.
• Even where children perform relatively well, lack of facilities and opportunities in rural schools prevent children from gaining both vocational skills and academic advancement.
• Children see the amount of household chores as a constraint on school learning.
• Work on farms is used to supplement children’s income. For some this provides extra cash, for others it supports their basic needs and enables them to continue in schooling.
• Children are expected to provide payment in kind in the form of farm labour and
firewood for the teachers. This is also unpopular but accepted by most children.
• Children in Akurase choose to drop out or attend infrequently, because they can see few real returns to basic schooling.
• Teenagers find little social or cultural stimulation in Akurase and are keen to leave the village.

Teachers
• The issues and conditions for teachers posted to rural areas have remained relatively stable throughout the last thirty years.
• Teachers find the material conditions, as well as the attitudes and expectations of pupils and parents demotivating and blame these for the lack of success of their work.
• Some of the teachers in Akurase are young men from an urban background who intend
to leave at the earliest possibility in order to move to a town. These teachers express disdain for the rural situation and are at pains to differentiate themselves from village people.
• Older men who have settled in the village tend to pursue work as farmers alongside, and sometimes in competition with, their school work.
• The two male teachers who no longer had hope of an urban future nor were the
assimilated into farming were consistently drunk.
• It is difficult to attract and retain women teachers in the village; the only established one has moved there with her husband and regrets it.
• There is a great deal of absenteeism amongst teachers, which is seen as normal and
justified as a necessary corollary to the problems of living in a rural village.
• It is difficult for heads to supervise teachers because of:
- the social costs to themselves of strict enforcement of the rules;
- fear of losing staff;
- fear of compromising their own position with the authorities.
• Lack of effective supervision means that teachers do not work to their potential. Thus, for example, they see lesson notes as a bureaucratic obligation rather than as a teaching aid.
• Teachers in Akurase do not rate the schools highly and educate their children privately when they can.
• Teachers consider the main advantage of private schools to be that they insist on English as the medium of instruction and of informal communication from the beginning. This enables children to understand the curriculum better.
• Teachers welcome opportunities for in-service education, especially where it encourages them to reflect on their practice and analyse actual classroom events. This kind of activity enables teachers to learn from each other.
• Understandings of professional practice articulated in workshop settings are not put into practice. Teacher centred pedagogy is seen as a coping strategy with pupils who do not understand the content of the lesson or the interaction which is supposed to carry it.
• More structured and planned peer interaction would give pupils a chance to practise the interaction of adults in a democratic society, rather than learning to be obedient children.
It would be a helpful way of making lessons more accessible for the majority.
Community
• Education is not an aspect of village life that is seen to be particularly important by the majority of the adult population.
• There is a general perception that village schooling is failing and that standards are declining.
• Teachers’ lack of regard for the villagers is mirrored by the villagers’ low opinion of the teachers.
• Many villagers consider that education in Akurase is not worthwhile because:
- It is not relevant to the children’s future prospects as farmers.
- The schooling in the village is not of sufficiently good quality to warrant investment of time, energy and economic resources.
- People are too poor to afford the relative luxury of schooling.
- Some are indifferent to the progress of the children in their care.
• Migration and the policy of successive governments have eroded traditional matrilineal family structures, so that the responsibility for children’s care and education is blurred.
• Poor families often rely on child labour to survive, and even when they do not, expect a strong contribution from children who are often only loosely connected to their guardians.
• Many people question whether there are any returns to education for children who do not leave the village and gain post-basic education. Many are also contemptuous of those who ‘waste’ education by returning to engage in farming.
• Successful education is seen purely in terms of examination passes and migration out of the rural context.
• The failure of the system to address problems raised by parents is seen as a disincentive to parental participation. For example, the fact that two habitually drunk teachers have remained in post despite long-standing and numerous complaints, is especially resented by parents.
• Parents therefore feel that schools and teachers are responsible to the state, not to them.
• Many parents do not pay school fees and PTA dues, whereas a minority is keen for
contribution levels to be increased.
• Wider community involvement in schooling is not working because the notion of
community on which it is based does not conform to experience. Many people in Akurase
are settlers and owe allegiance to other places. They are therefore not keen to invest in the school or any other village structures.
• People’s lack of identification with the place where they stay and educate their children appears to be more common in Ghana than is generally recognised and militates against community participation.

Syankombo

This interesting story book was produced in Zimbabwe using a story from a couple of local storytellers. It is a little "absurd" (the girls fly home in a hollowed out tree) but pleasant enough to read, and I can easily imagine the children in a village library thinking it fascinating and having it "stick".... what books from early reading do you remember, anyway?