Ed 250: Literacies and Education

The component of my group project on Ghanaian children's literature that I found most provactive returned to the notion of identity that we have already touched on throughout the semester. In researching the growth of children's literature in Ghana, the same emphasis on the necessity of familiarity came up. For too long, Ghanaian children, if exposed to age-appropriate literature at all, were confronted with stories of white children, apples, rain and snow--stories that in no way related to their own experiences. The content was irrelevant to their lives. Beyond the simple misfortune of this fact, I am sure such books were entirely confusing as well.

I tried to convert this issue of identity and accuracy to my own life. But as a white, middle class girl, the content of the literature I read was never an issue. The characters looked like me, talked like me, lived in houses like me and even faced the same challenges I did. The stories I read as a child acted as an affirmation of my life, proof that my appearance and experiences were shared and "right."

I wonder then, just what the impacts of irrelevant literature have on children. On the one hand, as mentioned, I think the affirmation of experience is entirely important at a young age. On the other, exposure to other lifestyles is beneficial. Ultimately, I think it can be agreed upon that a mesh of both is ideal. Yet for too many children in Ghana this was not an option.

We arrived after a delayed but easy flight to be met by our local guides. A taxi ride through the city to our comfortable hotel. Sights, sounds, and smiles too many/much to set down right now. This group is traveling beautifully! Paying games in the dc airport and taking turns writing and drawing in our group scrapbook are two standouts. We are freshening up before we go out to dinner together. Tomorrow we ride the bus North. Amazed and grateful, Alice

Best of luck to you all in Ghana!  My due date is this weekend ... but I will tune in whenver I can to the new Ghana trip blog.  And then... "see" you all online for the rest of the semester!

There's a timely feature on the NPR website coinciding with your trip... Check out this recent Black History Month spot on a trip back to the ancestral home in Ghana from Tell Me More:

http://n.pr/zB5i7t

For me one of the most fascinating aspects of sociology is the ability to study social problems on many different, seperate but interacting elements of people and power. One of my biggest frustrations when learning and trying to understand the unfamiliar is not knowing where problems or phenomenons are situated in and what elements influence them. I wish our education, was less linear but more cyclical, converging or intersecting. 

When I was in 10th grade I first learned about the IMF and World Bank in my humanities class. I did not fully understand what it meant. I didn't know just how powerful it was or how it was connected to and related to people across all levels of power, privlege, access and suffering. It is through my sociology courses that I learned about how the IMF and WB affect the Global South in detremental ways--feminizing poverty, exploiting labor, stripping access to resources and perpetuating neocolonial ideology and structure. I think it is important that how we learn, question and inquire goes beyond what is in front of us. Socio-historical context needs to be explored. Macro forces and institutions need to be taken into consideration just as much as micro forces and interactions between people. 

Oops! In all the pre-trip excitement/chaos I forgot to post my blog this week! I hope this reaches you all in a not TOO delayed fashion. 

This week, I am going to blog about my group presentation on language diversity. Riley and I both worked on the portion of the presentation that connected the theme of language diversity, specifically in Ghana, to the theoretical frameworks we had opened in class at the beginning of the semester.  Undergoing this process was highly valuable for a few reasons.  For one, it gave us a way to reflect back on the texts we had read and the theories we had come to understand as valuable contributions to the discipline.  Also, we were able to observe tangible situations for the theories and seem them more practically applied.  Theoretical frameworks always have the ability to expand our knowledge base and encourage a deeper level of thought, and this was a very valuable experience, for the presentation, and for ourselves as well. Now looking at it and our presentation as a whole, the theory we had uncovered as pertinent to the discourse only began to brush upon the frameworks we could have opened up.  Language acquisition theories would have also been a very interesting segment of theory to open up for discussion, and could have added to the overall message and value of our presentation. 

I really enjoyed doing the activity with everyone during our storytelling presentation. When we created the activity we knew it would be interesting but I was excited to see what everyone came up with (in such little time). All the presentations were so different in medium, style, content and presentation. They all showed something different about the individuals in the group and what was important to each of them. It got me thinking back to Gee and his ideas of discourse. While all the presentations were different they all seemed to fit the standard discourse we have in academia, rather than a discourse that would have been found in a place like Ghana.  What I mean is we have all been told stories throughout our lives, we have acquired (to use Gee’s word) a certain way to tell stories. They are through pictures or narrative and they all come from the narrator. We saw that in Ghana many stories involve movement from everyone or call and response, and those stories were not presented in our classroom. If they were it would have been a learned practice and the class would have been more aware of the choices they were making to tell their story in that way. I am now realizing even more how much our own discourses determine not only how we interact but also how we tell stories about ourselves (to bring in Rob’s class and Narrativity to tell about who we are). Our discourse determines how those stories look and the way they are told. Is it so crazy to ask us to step outside of our own discourse to tell our story? Perhaps it is.

I was really happy I chose the Storytelling theme for my group project. The research was somewhat difficult as it was challenging to find reliable sources that provided information from a Ghanaian perspective or at least from a non-biased or skewed perspective. The Storytelling presentation inspired me and it is really exciting to use the knowledge I gained from the project to create curriculum for the 4th graders I teach art to. On Friday when we taught the 4th graders we actually used the same Anansi book for their lesson. We then made “storysticks” where students drew pictures to represent a story on a cardstock piece of paper and we then folded it to make a cylinder or stick with their unique story on it. We then made spiders and students got to paint Adinkra symbols on the backs of their Anansi spiders. This project was very rewarding and the students loved it so I am thankful to have been provided information through the class and the project to share with my students. It also felt very rewarding to see how everyone engaged with our Storytelling lesson on Tuesday. I was really impressed with everyone’s stories and presentations even though there wasn’t too much time for the activity. We were able to see the many different modes stories can be told through- using drawings, words, technology, photographs. There is so much possibility and potential in telling stories.