L’école

10Oct09

If you were to walk out of the garage that serves as the front door of our compound, make a left turn, head two blocks east, then two blocks north, you would probably find yourself facing a large pile of rocks decorated with thousands of bits of colorful trash. But walk 20 feet up the hill and then up the small cement ramp, and you would find yourself in main courtyard of the Ciwara (pronounced chi-wara) Community School. Behind the school is the office of the IEP (for those of you with insomnia, here is an interesting link: http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/ls3_coumba.htm) the foundation for which Ciwara is a basically a laboratory for experimental curricula and teaching methods. The middle school, where I have spent most of my time so far, has three classrooms and an office. The students got new desks this year, along with matching chairs, but the only other object that would signal the space a being a classroom is the blackboard on the front wall (one of the three rooms is the open-air first floor of a three story cement block, thus the tableau just leans on two pillars).
The movement in Mali for the last decade or so has been to part from the colonial system of French-only instruction and to move toward bilingual education at the elementary school level. The idea is to begin teaching kids in their local language (here, Bambara or Bamanakan according to Malians) and then by about sixth grade conduct almost all classes in French. For this reason, I have been spending my time wandering in and out of the middle school classrooms. The students stay in the same room the whole day, and unlike in America, teachers rotate between rooms. Each class is an hour long, with a 20 minute “recreation” break after the first two classes and a two hour lunch break during the hottest part of the day.
Though there has a been a ten-fold improvement since the first two days that I was here (I am not suggesting that it has anything to do with my presence) many of the problems in class stem from an almost complete lack of order or organization. Students walk out of class while the teacher is talking, there seems to be at least one person constantly erasing the already-clean chalkboard, when the 7th graders raise their hands they stand up and shout for the teacher to call on them, and “les profs”, obviously overwhelmed by the situation, try to just continue talking over the racket.
Speaking of the teachers, a lack of them is by far the biggest problem facing not only this school, but Mali as a whole. To add to the list of educational problems, the small number of teachers that the training centers produce have been taught to use the Classique style, the same one they had gone to school with. Essentially, this method is French and instructor centered, the opposite of what the IEP is hoping to encourage. Unlike in an American, student-centered, environment, classes here are basically just copying sessions for the students. They are dictated phrases, often from a textbook they already have, and sit there half listening while they underline their titles with rulers and don’t ask a single question.
Today (Saturday), Debbie organized a group of teachers and workers to clean up the ground and take care of things that should have been done before school started. We cleared out the office where a man nicknamed “le commandant” (who, coincidentally was often dressed in robes with Obama’s face and “Yes We Can” printed prominently on a red, white, and blue background), would sit all day with his feet up surrounded by crumpled maps and unused school supplies. He was supposed to be the superintendent. The room was completely cleared out and given a fresh coat of paint to usher in its new life as the only special ed. classroom in Kati.
More on the school later, I’m off to eat (chicken, I think).

There is a link to a photo album on the left ===>

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