The African Storybook Project

The ASP was initiated by the South African Institute for Distance Education and consists of an online repository for traditional and contemporary multilingual African stories that allows users to download, translate, adapt, and upload stories, not just download static files. The scarcity of appropriate reading materials in African schools is the major driving force behind the ASP, which is made possible by advances in digital technology, especially the Internet and Web 2.0 technology that allows user interaction. The stories are available in both African languages and English, and can be displayed on electronic devices such as cell phones or projected on a white wall or board. Desktop publishing and low-cost photocopying and printing also facilitate the making of inexpensive booklets. The ASP thus addresses one of the top priorities of the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All: universal primary education for young learners. In doing so, the project seeks to address the multiple educational challenges facing young learners in sub-Saharan Africa. As noted in the 2013/2014 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO, 2014):

• Nearly 30 million children are out of school.
• Over a third of children did not reach Grade 4.
• Over half of children who reached Grade 4 are not learning the basics in reading.
• 40% of children under the age of 15 cannot read a sentence.
• In some of the poorest countries, almost no young women completed lower secondary school.

The ASP and Language

At the core of education in Africa lies the question of language, particularly the relationship between the mother tongue and English (in anglophone Africa), especially when and how to transition to English (Norton, in press; Trudell, 2013). In the words of Romaine (2013, p. 6), language “is the pivot on which education and therefore on which all development depends.” Most African countries are multilingual, and there are inadequate educational materials and teacher training to meet curricular demands. The shortage of textbooks and reading materials in schools is a major challenge, since reading practice is paramount to developing literacy. Particularly detrimental is the dire lack of materials in local languages for lower primary schools that are required to provide students with foundational reading skills and make possible the transition to English/French usually halfway through, or at the end of, primary school.

ASP in Practice

Schools, libraries, and other learning institutions in 12 urban and rural sites across South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, and Uganda are serving as ASP pilot sites to gain knowledge about how teachers, young learners, and others respond to and use the ASP stories. The pilot sites have been equipped with battery-driven, handheld projectors, and some with printed booklets, and teachers and other users are being trained to navigate the website and use the stories. These 12 sites are providing invaluable feedback on the merits and challenges of using the website and the stories. Teachers’ lack of familiarity with digital devices and the Internet, and limited experience with stories using written local language in lower primary school, represent both challenges and possibilities for the ASP. More research is needed to better understand how teachers navigate these new resources and how they can support the curriculum and build literacy in students’ local language as well as transition to English as a medium of instruction.

ASP and Research

ASP has attracted great interest from practitioners and scholars, and a presentation by Norton, the project’s research advisor, “Questions for Research,” is now available on YouTube. A key question is how the possibility of participation, such as through creation, translation, and adaptation, can contribute to teachers’ and students’ use and appreciation of digital stories. To what extent does a website like the ASP’s create a meaningful space for teachers and students to engage with stories? What shifts of identity take place as teachers and students negotiate new educational practices? The role of technology, including technical skills, is related to this question, but as research has shown, successful technology implementation cannot be reduced to mastery of the technical skills alone (Warschauer, 2004).

Another challenging issue is that of content. In a multi-community, multi-country project, what constitutes appropriate content for children’s reading? This question addresses issues of identity, culture, and ownership. Many of the ASP stories come from rural communities, and the contexts for these stories are specific to the communities from which they arise. They are also designed for oral storytelling. If the project intends to use them as illustrated read-alone books for early reading, not only in the original context, but also for children in widely diverse contexts, how should they be translated into other languages, for other communities? Of central interest is how stories “travel” across both time and space. The intercultural identity issues that arise are profound.

ASP Research, Practice, and Policy for the Future

The novelty of the ASP invites diverse questions for research, practice, and policy. The opportunity to choose stories, and the encouragement to create, adapt, write, and translate stories, might engender a sense of ownership that will promote sustainability of the project. Previous research has provided examples of teachers creating meaningful and personally relevant texts with students in well-resourced countries (e.g., Cummins & Early, 2011), but in Africa such opportunities are few. Both learners and teachers may benefit from having greater ownership of meaning-making practices, with concomitant impact on teacher identities and investments. As Abiria, Early, and Kendrick (2013) have noted, if teachers are active participants in educational change, there is greater impact on classroom practices.

Nevertheless, for many communities across Africa, there is sometimes ambivalence toward the teaching of the mother tongue, given concerns that it will compromise efforts to promote literacy in the official language (Tembe & Norton, 2008). This position is prevalent, despite the large and persuasive body of research that suggests that literacy is best achieved in the mother tongue and that the learning of a second language is in fact enhanced if there is prior literacy development in the mother tongue (Cummins, 2001). The role of mother tongue literacy as a scaffold for additional language learning should be better communicated to parents, and the multilingual resources that many children bring to school should be more effectively harnessed. The validation of intercultural identity is the potential and promise of the African Storybook Project.

References

Abiria, D. M., Early, M., & Kendrick, M. (2013). Plurilingual pedagogical practice in a policy-constrained context: A northern Ugandan case study. TESOL Quarterly, 47, 567–590. doi:10.1002/tesq.119

Cummins, J. (2001). Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: California Association for Bilingual Education.

Cummins, J., & Early, M. (2011). Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. Stoke-on-Trent, England: Trentham Books.

de Fina, A. (2013). Narrative as practices. Negotiating identities through storytelling. In G. Barkhuizen (Ed.), Narrative research in applied linguistics (pp. 154–175). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.

Norton, B. (in press). The Millennium Development Goals and multilingual literacy in African communities. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

Romaine, S. (2013). Keeping the promise of the Millennium Development Goals: Why language matters. Applied Linguistics Review, 4(1), 1–21. doi:10.1515/applirev-2013-0001

Tembe, J., & Norton, B. (2008). Promoting local languages in Ugandan primary schools: The community as stakeholder. Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne Des Langues Vivantes, 65(1), 33–60.

Trudell, B. (2013). Early grade literacy in African schools: Lessons learned. In H. McIlwraith (Ed.), Multilingual education in Africa: Lessons from the Juba language-in-education conference (pp. 155–161). London, England: British Council. Retrieved from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/multilingual-education-africa-lessons-juba-language-education-conference

UNESCO. (2014). Education for All global monitoring report: Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/efareport/reports/2013

Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.