Asante!! (Thank You!!)

After another successful summer in Arusha, Tanzania the LTP staff would like to extend many thanks to DukeEngage, the Center for Documentary Studies, Sister Cities of Durham, Friends of Arusha and the Arusha Municipal Education Office for supporting our program.

We’d also like to thank our eight DukeEngage students:

Marissa Bergmann
Rachel Blum
Emily Hadden
Andrew Hibbard
Esther Jeohn
Nick Wiesner
Anne Rhett
Kaitlin Rogers

Their important work helped extend and deepen the LTP program in Tanzania. We trained 130 teachers, led LTP projects with over 1800 Arusha students, and took the program in new directions such as working with a Teachers’ College and designing new secondary-level photography projects related to math and history curricula. Our students made generous contributions to Arusha’s growing Teacher Resource Center, which is essential to the program’s sustainability. They collected cash donations and supplies, including film, cameras, digital paper and printers, construction paper, notebooks, pencils, folders and other art supplies.

The LTP staff would also like to thank the following individuals and families for their generous donations:

-    The families of Nick Wiesner and Rachel Blum

-    Rainer and Carolyn Bergmann
-    Bart and Joni Patton
-    Tamako Izu
-    Jim and Cheryl Izu
-    Kelly and Luke Czabo

-    Helan Kim

-    Ron and Louise Rogers
-    Karen and John Crotty
-    Vera Rogers
-    Peter and Val Rogers
-    Pam and John Preschlack
-    Jennifer and John Murawski
-    Lynn Preschlack
-    Jim and Susan Kauss
-    Mark and Susan Tupper
-    Betty and Mike Bailey
-    Karen and Grant Bogle
-    Dennis and Lisa Nash
-    Ariel Landvick
-    Jim and Leigh Moss
-    Lily Dasso

Finally, we would like to thank all the teachers with whom we worked during June and July,  and especially Pelle Shaibu, who coordinates the LTP Arusha program year round.

more about “Asante! (Thank you!)“, posted with vodpod

 

Arusha School Magazine

DukeEngage students Kaitlin Rogers, Esther Jeohn, Rachel Blum and Andrew Hibbard designed a writing-based afterschool project with students at Arusha Primary School. The Arusha students created a school magazine, which features their poems, essays, photographs and drawing. Please click “Arusha School Magazine” below to view a PDF of their magazine. This work anticipates the upcoming 75th anniversary of the school.

Arusha School Magazine

The Things We Carried, a reflection by Anne Rhett

When our LTP crew arrived in Arusha, we were collectively quite a heavy bunch. After all, our suitcases were stuffed to the brim with supplies intended to carry out a not-so-dainty objective: to provide dozens of schools, hundreds of teachers, and thousands of students with enough equipment and understanding to practice photography in their classrooms.

Surely, one might assume the trip home would be a simpler, lighter affair. But lo and behold, on departure day, we arrived at the airport again with bloated baggage, again sweating the weight limit.

And who could blame us? After eight weeks of adventure and Arusha living, we had accrued quite a collection of African treasures.

That final day we bode farewell to Tanzania, bearing oddities of all sorts: plaid tribal blankets like those worn by the area’s fierce Masai warriors, swords like those they supposedly wielded to ward off lions (or so the market vendor would have us believe), bangles and boxes bought at intersections of narrow, winding alleys in Zanzibar, shells collected on the island’s bleach-white beaches, yards of kanga fabric printed with traditional African patterns and pity Swahili phrases—in short, if it was beaded, carved or batiked, chances are it made its way into one of our suitcases.

Everything we carried seemed to simply gush with delight: “It was exotic! It was exciting! We were there!” And we lugged it all back—desperate for tangible evidence of this summer we summer spent oh-so far from home.

But I remain convinced that far more important than what we each brought back is what we collectively left behind.

We left a burgeoning program – Literacy Through Photography- a whole year stronger and more developed. We left a group of highly devoted teachers with a real grasp on the LTP concept as well as access to cameras, printers, film, paper and more. We left pictures and visual aids on walls that were once bare. We left with friends and homestay families who had once been strangers.

And we left literally thousands of children- many of whom had never touched a camera before–with the ability to create beautiful images. What’s more, we left them fully capable of repeating this process on their own, without any help from “first world” visitors. As of the city of Arusha continues to develop, photography is becoming an increasingly important and accessible form of technology. As LTP students, these children might just be poised to be ambassadors of this phenomenon.

These are the things we truly want to show our friends and families back home. And, unfortunately, these are things we couldn’t stuff in our carry-ons if we tried.

It’s obvious: the things we will cherish most about our DukeEngage experience aren’t the ones we bought at the market, aren’t the things for which we haggled with street peddlers, and isn’t the stuff we had to declare at customs. It’s the people we encountered and the change we might just have affected.

And although I’m sure I’ll indulge in some souvenir show-in-tell, I hope that I can find a way to express how I really feel—that our project, our summer, our group are so more than the sum of our mementos.

Working with large classes and lots of enthusiasm, a reflection by Kaitlin Rogers

I chose to write about this photo, taken by Anne Rhett, because I think it very accurately illustrates my experience working at Elerai, a primary government school. Each day we would pull up to the school and…BAM!…kids flew from every classroom and corner of the playground to greet us with tremendous enthusiasm, broad smiles, and many, many “hellos.” For me this image really captures the intensity of the energy we faced at Elerai. Of course such excitement is wonderful, but it was also very draining. At the end of each day working at Elerai, I found myself utterly exhausted. I was also overwhelmed. The government schools are of course where the students are most deprived, so we want to focus our resources there, but figuring out the best way to do so is tricky. Leading LTP projects was very difficult because we did not speak Swahili and the students did not speak English. Furthermore, the classes were enormous (100+ kids in each classroom), and the class periods were short (just 40 minutes). The quantity of children, the short window of time, and the struggle to communicate made for a very challenging week. We quickly identified that right now in the government schools it might be best to focus more on producing great quantities of curriculum materials (posters, flashcards, pictures, etc.) and less on having the students take photographs themselves. This may seem to go against what LTP is all about but really so much of LTP is about closely studying photographs, noticing details, drawing conclusions from clues in the photographs, and writing; all of which be done without a camera.

Elerai Primary School, examples

WHEN I WAS YOUNG I USED TO PLAY FOOTBALL WITH MY FRIENDS. THIS IS THE GROUND WHERE I USED TO PLAY FOOTBALL.

Students at Elerai Primary School used photography to study English grammar. They made pictures enacting common verbs, and learned about about verbs and the past tense by showing things they used to do when they were younger.

TO SMILE

TO CALL

WHEN I WAS A BABY I USED TO CRY. WHEN WE WERE YOUNG WE USED TO CRY. WHEN WE WERE FIVE YEARS OLD WE USED TO BE UNHAPPY.

TO LOVE

TO DECIDE

TO COOK

WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD I USED TO CLIMB TREES WITH MY FRIENDS

Connecting math to real life with LTP, a reflection by Rachel Blum

Math has often been classified as one of those subjects that students either have a gift for or will never fully understand. But what if this is more reflective of the teaching style associated with math rather than the subject itself? The photo above was taken at St. Joseph’s secondary school for girls with the Form 3B math class. The teacher had attended the LTP workshop and believed photos could be used for math but just did not know exactly how. He handed us the textbook, discussed the current topics and left the details of the project in our hands. We flipped through the pages to find distribution graphs followed by the definitions of mean, median, mode and range –topics that lend themselves to participatory learning by simply using the facts from the students’ lives for data. The idea of a human distribution graph as seen in the photograph arose as a solution to incorporate photography into a math lesson.

The next day the teacher first lectured to review the material. The girls raised their hands reciting perfect definitions and correct equations for each of the measurements. They seemed to have a great grasp of all of the concepts. The activity would be simple—a quick assembly into lines according to their number of siblings and then easy calculation using the familiar equations. However, when we met the class in the courtyard and finished explaining the instructions and outlining the project, we were met with blank stares and still bodies. We pointed to the imaginary x- and y-axis, but it seemed that when we left the paper and pencils in the classroom, we also left behind much of the familiarity of the material. Their comprehension of the subject was sufficient to answer questions on the board comprised of arbitrary numbers with the use of the different equations but did not allow them to arrange themselves according to their personal information. The process took much longer than expected and included many questions that required the students to make the connections between their work in the classroom and the human simulation.

The project proved to be a success on a variety of different levels. The human distribution graph introduced the students to a highly participatory learning experience that enhanced their comprehension of material from the actual curriculum. In theory, the involvement in this type of simulation followed by the calculation and analysis of data could ultimately improve some individuals’ test scores. Furthermore, the activity identified the limitations of the current style of teaching. One student claimed this project finally allowed her to see an application of math in the real world. Too often math is taught on the abstract level of arbitrary numbers with examples that have no connection to the real the world. Many students simply need a way to view the numbers in the context of their daily lives.

Take a step back, a reflection by Esther Jeohn

Take a Step Back

It is always interesting to see LTP working in people of all ages, whether it is in teachers or students. We have been working mostly with younger children in primary school, so I was a bit apprehensive as we went into St. Joseph’s Secondary School this week. We decided to work with Form 3, or the equivalent of 9th graders in the United States.

Not only was I apprehensive about the age group, but the subject matter was also a concern. We decided to work with Math and Biology, two subjects in which I had never worked with LTP before. However, we came up with a great idea for Math. The students were learning the basic principles of statistics like mean, median, and mode. Why not make a human frequency graph of the students?

So we decided to make a visual graph of the number of brothers and sisters that the students had. I was designated as the photographer and walked up four flights of stairs to try to fit all the students in. As I stood on the fourth floor and watched Kaitlin, Rachel, and Emily explain to the students about these concepts, I got to see a different perspective from what I usually see. I am usually involved in the teaching, but this time I got to observe what was happening.

The highlight was probably seeing the “click” go off in some students’ heads. I might have mentioned before that this is my favorite part of LTP. But I had never seen it from this angle where I would see students’ heads bobbing up and down as they nodded, showing that they understood the concepts.

St. Joseph’s showed me that first, LTP works at any age, and that second, sometimes you just need to take a step back and observe.

A reflection by Emily Hadden on St. Joseph’s LTP Math project

I believe this photograph to reflect our time spent at St. Joseph’s Secondary School quite accurately- the organization, the linear peacefulness, and the poised young women. In what was a much-needed change from the chaos of our work at several government primary schools, St. Joseph’s allowed us to appreciate the discipline and intelligence of each individual student. For Form IIIA Math’s project, we did a “human frequency graph”, in which each student represented a data point of the number of siblings they had in their family. This graph highlights the girls’ obedience and dedication to education, which was evident from our first entrance into their classroom, but was even more obvious when they neatly and quickly found their place on the “graph”. In addition to showing off the girls’ admirable traits, it also shows off how we learned from each other. That is to say, the graph showed us how families can come in all shapes and sizes. For St. Joseph’s girls, the average number of children is around three or four, and most notably, a girl in our class was one of twelve. For the majority of our DukeEngage group, our nuclear families are much smaller, and none of us come close to having eleven brothers and sisters. Thus, this project not only helped the girls learn statistics but it helped all of us learn about the cultural differences in family size and dynamics. It was a great way to wrap up our time spent working at schools in Arusha.

The need for visual classroom resources, a reflection by Nick

These photos, I think show how currently public schools in Arusha have very limited visual resources in their classrooms. These pictures were taken when a teacher brought in a visual aid he had stored away in the office. The only place in class for the 80 students to see was atop the blackboard, nailed into a cracking hole in the wall, hammered with a rock. This process alone took about 10 minutes—from finding the poster, to figuring out how to nail it up. The students then had to take turns in groups of three or four to come up and then balance on top of a rickety desk to catch a three-second glimpse of the visual. This method, although useful, I think can be dramatically improved through a simple application of LTP ideas. In this class, our project was to make individual photographic examples of the same visuals presented in similar posters or in their lecture books. Instead of having penciled or drawn sketches, the students could see actual living examples of the plant samples. This also allows the students to stay at their desks, and pass the images around without creating such chaos.

If public schools like Daraja mbili began to print out or photocopy simple visuals, such as maps and pictures, and have these available to pass around each desk, the classroom dynamic would be greatly improved. I think that at this moment, the idea to have each student go out and photograph is a bit idealistic, and mostly impractical. The school and students would reap greater benefits if they had reusable laminated visual aids. These could be produced by the LTP club for example, which Daraja Mbili has implemented. Also, when students are presented with a camera, especially at the secondary school ages, their attention shifts to a recreational one, and they would sneak out and take glamour shots when unsupervised. The visual concept of having themselves in the picture masks the creative and instructional aspect of their work. Taking this out of the equation, and presenting an already completed visual aid, although not as involved/participatory, still has a positive effect in the public education system.