Malawi 便り Part2

Hi, this is Kyohei Takeuchi working as a JOCV in Malawi. As I briefly introduced last time, my work here in Malawi is to promote “情操教育” at primary school, which is similar to Ayaka’s activity in Senegal. My current activities are to conduct lessons by team teaching, to implement teacher training and to produce teaching materials (reference book for teachers) and visual aids (TV program). All of them are about “情操教育”. Of course, there are good practices and challenges but let me introduce one example of my activities.

Generally speaking, music is not at all taught properly at primary school in Malawi. It might apply to other African countries though. No matter what reasons behind that situation, there needs to be some actions. The workshop I have conducted is one of countermeasures whose objectives are to promote teachers’ motivation and sharpen their understanding of music. Workshop was implemented at zone level once and 12 times (12 schools in the zone which I was in charge) at school level as follow-up. At zone level, 4 teachers including heads teachers from each attended while at school level, those participants would facilitate under the facilitation of teachers who attended at zone level.

What needs to be taken account is the content of workshop. Contents should embrace information not far away from textbook, a strong connection between knowledge and their local life, and participatory activities. I discussed and discussed about them with some resource teachers. And we introduced many ways of easy learning. For example, learning beats of musical note in relation to the sounds of locally found animals, singing “do re mi song” by using local language and resources, learning musical scales with locally common songs, leaning rhythm with local dance and so on.

It is always difficult to evaluate especially because this type of subject focuses on non-cognitive aspects inside which people have. Those are of course so many challenges. It is not for certain whether or not participants utilize what they learnt into their daily lesson, how much they were motivated, whether or not their understanding was improved, whether or not positive effect would be seen in students’ result of exam as a reflection and so on. But, the biggest success seems that local teachers were involved in the whole process of conducting a workshop without any financial support from somewhere, and came up with ideas by themselves.
Anyway, this is just an example of my activities. Overall, my life with local people for 1 year and half is long enough to open and fix my eyes on the reality behind information. Let me share more about it next time. Thank you.

Kyohei Takeuchi from Malawi