Share Your Writing Project with a South African Teacher

By: Amy Bauman, Judith Baker
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 6, No. 1
Date: January-February 2001

Summary: Information about how sites can invite South African teachers to attend their summer institutes, and updates about what previous year's South African writing project Fellows are doing.

This is a critical time in southern Africa. The spread of HIV/AIDS threatens to do more damage to Africa than the slave trade did and to bring more death than all of its wars. With 4 million people infected in South Africa alone—over a tenth of its African (black) population—the catastrophe is too great to easily absorb.

So, you're probably wondering, what does this have to do with education and, more specifically, with the National Writing Project? How can NWP make a difference? The answer is simple in that education is at the heart of the fight against this pandemic. Educa-tors, in fact, are now among the main people spreading health information to families. As teachers join net-works comprised mostly of health workers and social workers, they are instrumental in getting kids and their peers in touch with testing help, in providing nutritional and preventive facts, even in arranging for children to receive needed treat-ment for related illnesses (although antiretrovirals, the AIDS drugs, are not available in rural areas yet).

The National Writing Project is part of that educational movement. As Judith Baker, an organizer of the endeavor and a teacher-consultant with the Boston Writing Project, explains, "Our teachers are bringing AIDS information into their classrooms, while many teachers have been afraid to do so because of the many taboos surrounding talking about, writing about sex, etc. Kids are writing about their fears, their experiences. . . . I think this will grow."

Baker points out that there is still a plain lack of knowledge about the disease—as well as huge misconceptions. As most information is in English, English teaching becomes important, because kids may be the only family members able to read the information. "Even more interesting is that kids in classes I worked with and our alums teach are writing about violence against women and girls, and this is a major factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS," Baker adds. Through work in progress, then, it is clear that NWP offers more than writing ideas to educators.

Although a South African Writing Project is still a dream, it is apparent that the National Writing Project is alive and well in South Africa. The organization's involvement began when NWP sites hosted South African invitees in both 1998 and 1999. The participating sites were the Northern Plains Writing Project (ND), the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, the Gateway Writing Project (MO), the Mountain Area Writing Project (NC) Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, the Indiana Writing Project, and the Boston Writing Project.

To set the program in motion again for 2001, Baker is looking for sites that would consider inviting a teacher from South Africa to one of their institutes. This time, Baker says, she is also looking for American educators who might consider packing their suitcases full of lessons and ideas to share with South African teachers in their schools in KwaZulu Natal. Baker, who is responsible for matching candidates with sites, will recruit and screen South African candidates to meet sites' criteria and help the candidates obtain visas and permission to take leave from their schools. Hosting sites will be asked to provide accommodations and tuition waivers. For the sites' efforts, their institute participants will be treated to an inspirational experience working with a teacher whose dedication to children will remind them of why they first went into teaching and why the skills they teach matter so much to children.

Of their experience as a host site, Carol Long, director, Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, wrote, "Tamara [Mabentsela, exchange teacher,] was a wonderful visitor here and added so much to our summer institute and to our site in general. . . . Tamara's gracious presence, her extraordinary teaching situation, her excitement about learning all meant so much to us."

Through previous years' efforts, the NWP now has a total of twelve South African alumni. Here are updates on the work of just a few of them:

• Gugu Mvubu is the principal of Besters School, a remote "farm school" in rural KwaZulu Natal Province. She is also an alumna of the Indiana Writing Project summer institute and an NWP teacher-consultant. Mvubu means "hippo" in Zulu. Get between an mvubu and its child, and you will regret it. When Baker visited Mrs. Mvubu's school in July, she saw firsthand that Mrs. Mvubu is living up to both her surname and the credentials she earned at the Indiana Writing Project. Although she had just been assigned the position of principal, she was already busy trying to get books and a phone line for her new school. In addition to all this, Gugu Mvubu had helped organize a workshop for the twelfth grade English teachers from 40 surrounding schools at which she and Emily Mbhele, alumna of the Boston Writing Project summer institute, were about to introduce her peers to writing project ideas.
• Moses Biyela bears the surname of an important Zulu princely family and teaches in the Zulu tribal heartland in the city of Eshowe, a historic site of the Boer War. Moses's students come from "locations," far rural settlements to which Zulu people were banished during the time of apartheid. An alumnus of both the Indiana Writing Project and Boston Writing Project summer institutes, Moses has been instrumental in his school's phenomenal success. Even though the modern library contains only a few boxes of donated books, such as Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, many students whose families speak no English are reading very well in English. In fact, seniors in the past three years have registered 98 percent, 83 percent, and 90 percent pass rates on the national matriculation exams required for entrance to "varsity" [university]—no mean feat in a country where the national average for African students is under 25 percent passing.
• Krishnee Perumal, alumna of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, is now assistant principal in an Indian township elementary school near Durban. Baker was not able to visit Perumal's school while traveling this summer, but did learn about the reading contest the assistant principal is organizing (with prizes from businesses), her extensive plans for writing instruction and counseling in her new school, and the many new programs she had created at her last school that will be continued there by teachers with whom she shared her ideas. Perumal is eager to organize a writing project in her district if she can get the support for one.

Sites interested in hosting a South African teacher should contact Judith Baker at Madison Park Tech/Voc High School, 50 Melville Avenue, Dorchester, MA 02124. (Phone 617-825-3612/email judithbakr@aol.com.)

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URL: http://nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/voice_quarterly_issue.csp?pub=The%20Voice&vol=6&num=1&year=2001&or=resources_other_pubs