Minutes by Nora
ATTENTION: SESOTHO WORDS AND PROPER NAMES ARE MOST PROBABLY MISSPELLED
Study the language education in church schools in Northern Lesotho, because influence oft he colonial administration is still huge, not so much in public schools. English and Sesotho education
Soofia - Muslim community founded
Leribe –
and English medium school
In Soofia, access was easy, the other was complicated, not allowed to talk to students.
Findings:
Soofia: more unconventional, committed. Others: follow prescribed curriculum, do not read for pleasure.
Bala: Sesotho word both for reading and study. This led to language issue in interpretation of question: Do you read for pleasure for the students
Why is this research done: colonial influence. Schools were foundation of missionary system. Reforms have not been as aggressively implemented. Important moment 1978, but not fully implemented. 2011 came integrated curriculum in primary schools. And creativity and entrepreneurship: they want to counter the division between school contents and lives of people. Traditional ways of lifes, like ritual in most Basotho families, are not discussed in school, because it is not Christian.
2nd phase: go to rural Lesotho, give schools the same questionnaire. To compare with the schools which are not at all influenced by the church.
Questions:
Patrick: is there a difference between the literature produced between church schools and public schools?
Lerato: Now only primary schools, this will be relevant in studying secondary schools.
Emma: you have not focused on historical dimension. But do you have some references on: who and how were the colonial approaches in curriculum introduced?
Lerato: we have some archival material. We want to know through the schools study what is persisting.
Ra: Word BALA, which is reading and studying. Relevance for bare ene re, whicb is a story, that is told. Speak to that?
George: In region movement of people. Shona ? in Zimbabwe, their words were moved through movement of people. Shiri … But the missionaries changed that.
Zulu influence in the north. Ra: “Bala” in Zulu is to write. Has this implications?
Lerato: All not Basotho are supressed. One category for all, also Zulu in them. They speak their language only at home. We are not interested in their language. Even when we say we want to include Sesotho culture in the curriculum, we still exclude the others in the country and languages.
Storytelling: we are doing this with Bar e ne re, focused on production of stories by people. here also colonial influence: the stories we got for an anthology, some sounded as if they were located in England. People feel that in order to write, they have to locate themselves in England. The own place and language is not deemed important.
English medium schools: Sesotho is taught in English, spelling is done used english rules. Ba re e ne re did spelling bee to address that. If you don’t have vocabulary, you can not properly write in Sesotho. Sesotho stories also produced inconsistencies between formalized writing and contemporary Sesotho.
I would be interested in how our oral traditions can be used for learning help intellectual capabilities. Now the focus is only on reading, reading.
George: in my school, I had to forget what was at home. I learned to love in Shona; but then it was English. Word WARA is associated to Work, and coloniality
Emma: just to share: Margaret Trowell publication 1936 ('?) Pictures for Africans.
Luganda: SOMA means read and study.
Nana: Asante also one word for read and study. Christian: ???means taste.
Your project is so practice based. Love the idea of oral tradition in the curriculum. Example: folk tales told, and then assessment: did you get it? I was always bad at it. Is it a colonial framework, the assessment. Do you have an idea about assessment of the capabilities you want to teach in alternative art education?
Lerato: We have to go back in history. Traditional: school, from puberty, Taganing for females, other for males. You would get life skills there. There is a traditional framework for this. Let’s see how this was done before.
Because now the life skills are there in the curriculum theoretically, but there is no emphasis on that.
Nana: A Christian school would be open for this?
Lerato: the spiritual content would be taken out.
Ra: Interesting at the festival poertry session in Ba re e ne re: women on stage poetry, many said: they promised to audience they would not be witched (NL: didn’t get the Sesotho term). How are young Lesotho poets using the term (witchcraft)?
Lerato: Holoa (?) young poets are drwawing power from it. If you are young women and have an opinion….it was a defiance, a deliberate use for getting power. Witchcraft is associated with negative. Now the story we were told doesn’t make sense for us any more. The spiritual element is everywhere when you find out who you are, ther eis a movement going on of taking this back.
Poet: had Christian upbringing. Something happened in her poetry reading, she is in the middle: should I go for it? Or listen to parents who say it is an evil spirit?
Nana: How do you go back to old traditions without re-installing the notion of authenticity? There is danger. Essentialism was there in negritude; and is there in the black art movement…
Lerato: we cannot look at identy as a silo, this is it who you are. In my case: I could back to my ancestors and say this is me, but that is not true, there is influence now.
Ra: Want to go Back to poet who has been called to another power that is not Christian. It is there, but people (?...)
George: traditions are fictions. But it is important to understand how this fiction comes into place. Identities are contested and in flux. We have been produced by this peculiar histories: the mark of the conjuncture is interesting: we are both planetary subjects, and the local. I am interested in the GENERATIVE aspect of the question: Who am I? (not the generational). Because The story of who I am has never been told by my.
Christian: respoind to the essentialist aspect Nana mentioned, and the impossibilities of the queer ion that. Sometimes the struggles demand an identification, whith the erasures this carries with it. Only calling negritude essentiualist is equally essentialist. Queer: could be in the life practices. Lerato used life skills. I would prefer practices (not emphasize the “learning”).
Carmen: Listening to Christian: coming back to unchronological timeline, the idea of it also refers to this group. We have different parts of knowledges in different ways in the room. For example: queerness as an epistemology, not referring only to sexual orientation. Important to take this into account.
Questionnaires: the methodology of the questionnaire, producing knowledge about people, also has a colonial history. Did you develop the questionnaires with teachers and students? Did you test if the questions actually produce only the knowledge that you want? The questions mirror a lot of assumptions-.
Lerato: The first application now was a test, if the questions produce the knowledge we want. The issue with “BALA” made us do the questionnaire in future in Sesotho as well. That we did not have dialogue with teachers is another weakness.
carmen: did not mean weakness, only that research methodologies in themselves have a content….let’s have a talk about questionnaire.
