Evaluation of the Workshop

Summary: Workshop Kigali June 2006

• Can there be development without a sustainable literacy culture ?

• In a culture where many parents are illiterate, the role of the teacher and education system is vitally important.

• Governments need to take specific steps to support and encourage literacy. One such step could be to reduce taxes on books and other literacy materials.

• The language issue also plays an important role in the establishment of a reading culture. The legacy of colonialism has hindered the develpment of African languages.

• The national language and/or the mother tongue is a source of national identity.

• We have seen that language is a political issue as it gives power and status.

• Teacher training is also political and Afrrica needs a supportive education sytem.

• Publishers play an important role by using certain criteria in the careful selection of texts and illustrations. They can develop and preserve our culture by promoting the reading culture.

• We must remember that books have to be commerical and cannot continually rely on external aid, they must be able to stand on their own.

• Literacy is not only the act of reading, it is also the art of decoding or deciphering words and images. The best place to start the process is as soon as as child is born and begins to recognise its own mother’s face and should continue long after the child has started school.

• A child learns by doing, playing with enjoyment.

• At the heart of literacy is emotion : learning by rote or by drilling can destroy the pleasure of reading. A person who enjoys reading will read well.

• To reach literacy a child needs : opportunities, recognition, interaction and positive role models. At the centre of all these lie stories.

• Images are important, they should help to tell the story, expand it, and show the emotional aspects of the story.

• Images existed in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans and their symbolic values enrich not only the illustrations but also the text.

• However, there is a great need for training young authors and illustators. Among other things, they must learn that the text and image must not pass negative mesages on to the child.

• The school library was shown to be an important link in the chain to developing a reading culture.

• Learning to read early is vital. Once a child has reached adolescence learning and reading often take second place to other activities and for those who have not learned to read proficiently their so called – window of opportunity – diminishes.

• This shows us that the school library has a very important role in the early school years.

• A long-term sustainable national policy of school libraries needs to be put in place at all levels.

• UNESCO produced a manifesto of guidelines that can be adapted for different situations that can be presented to ministries of education and culture.

• Specific departments should be organized to implement school library policies.

• This workshop has reinforced the importance of using the mother tongue in schools, leading to a bilingual education where the introduction of other languages is not to the detriment of the child’s first language.

• Without this, development of a reading culture, as well as the development of the child, is greatly hindered.

• We urge you to go back to your districts, colleges and schools and tell people that story books are core materials in the school curricula and should never been considered as supplimentary materials. Tell your teachers to include reading for enjoyment in their timetables and in this way you will be working to enrich cultural development.