We’re back at Addis transit lounge, on our way back from Rwanda after a week working with the young journalists at Ni Nymapinga. This time we’re in the modern part of the airport and the mix of passengers is much closer to what you’d normally see. There are tourists, business people, families travelling – not the slightly surreal, smoky NGO-ness of our transit stop off on the way out. There is one connection point though: the video screens are still showing a photo gallery titled ‘Endemic birds of Ethiopia’ and we still can’t remember any of them.
The airport lounge is a kind of decompression chamber between Kigali and London and to be honest, there’s a lot to process. We got to see exactly how Ni Nymapinga create their youth-run magazine and highly popular radio show, and we got to see how it exists within Rwandan culture. Ni Nympinga isn’t just something for young people to do – it’s part of a concerted attempt to build a more positive future by empowering girls in a culture where the ideas like men-only foods (mostly high-status meats like chicken or beef) existed in the relatively recent past.
In Rwandan culture girls are expected to be shy and many of the girls we met out in the villages spoke so softly that it was almost hard to hear them. Ni Nymapinga, which is run by Girl Hub is designed to create a conversation between Rwandan girls, delivered in a tone that Rwandan girls will be inclined to hear and absorb. It starts a conversation in a way that respects Rwandan culture, and highlights the brilliant things that girls are doing in the country: the unusual and brave girl who has taken the traditionally-male job as a motorbike taxi driver, or a girl who built her grandmother a house.
The focus is on interesting and inspirational girls rather than celebrities, and the absence of the background status anxiety that so much of our media generates is palpable. The large-scale format of the magazine is more than just an artistic decision: it’s designed to sit over two people’s laps so they can both read it at once. Ni Nyampinga is a complex and multi-layered medium for promoting and supporting pride and positivity amongst Rwandan young people. It might be primarily for and about girls, but the team are now thinking about how they can connect with boys too, and the pieces we created with them included vox pops with boys about their friendships with girls.
This point about connecting with boys is an important one. We met the lady behind Gahaya Links, a social enterprise that supplies woven baskets and jewellery to Macey’s in the US. They were founded by two sisters after the genocide left a gender imbalance, with many women widowed or left alone after their husbands, sons or brother fled the country or received long jail sentences in genocide-related cases. The lady who showed us around the workshops said that empowering women economically had a positive impact on their relationships, too. Men saw that local women were learning skills and were bringing in money and they began to relate to them differently. They saw the women had value – and began to ask if they could learn to weave or sew, too. If Ni Nymapinga want to improve the lives of Rwandan girls then they’re aware they have to do it in the context of talking to everyone, and that includes the boys.
We had such a great week and there’s way too much to communicate in one, or probably a hundred blog posts. A few snapshots: the day when Live Editor Celeste and our International Editor Keisha learned a local dance where girls mimic the movement of a cow, with the last girl still dancing and smiling being named ‘best cow’ – a compliment in a country where those sweet beasts are held in high regard. Or our encounter with the security guard outside the Rwandan Agricultural Bureau where we tried to ask for directions to a food place and confused the word for ‘where’ with the Rwandan word that represents the sound of laughing. Or our glimpse into Kigali high society at a club at the Mille Collines hotel where the DJ played Tinie Tempah and CEOs danced with ballons at a party run by a Rwandan who grew up in Canada, or any of the hundreds of conversations we had with the girls about the differences between their lives, and average lives in London. Or the fact that there’s so much more to Rwanda than the genocide, but that it’s there, waiting behind almost every conversation, because it affected everyone, and still affects everyone. How could it not, when over a million people were killed and the country destroyed, less than two decades ago?
The cultural exchange will continue to colour our thoughts and actions here in London, and hopefully it’s just the start of a beautiful friendship between the teams at Live and at Ni Nyampinga. I think we have a lot to learn from each other.
18
Nov
London Festival Of Education 2012 #Gove
I went down to the inaugural London Festival Of Education yesterday, with Live Magazine politics editor Omar Shahid. It was clear it’d be an interesting day when we turned the corner onto Bedford St to the end of a queue that snaked all the way to the Institute of Education and to the expected handful of protesters in Gove masks, handing out leaflets with suggested questions for the Secretary of State for Education.
The attendees, a mix of students, teachers, heads and the miscellaneously interested, didn’t need much help with questions for Mr Gove, the best of which was one from the front which asked the famously erudite Scot whether he was aware of the truism that weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to blog about the festival in two parts because there’s a huge amount to reflect on. First up, then, the opening session, where Michael Gove was in conversation with journalist and writer David Aaronovitch for a talk titled ‘What does an educated person look like?’
The festival was opened by a Year 10 student, who spoke eloquently about wanting to be a barrister. It was the right note to open on, as you really can’t talk about 21st Century education without involving students, and the Festival did a good job of starting to get the recipients of education involved – although I hope next year they get more students running or adding to sessions, interviewing big names, and being visibly at the centre of things.
Gove came on stage to a few muted boos. “Don’t boo me,” said Aaronovitch with a neat line in diffusion. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
I’m waiting to hear if the session will be hosted online, but it was fascinating, depressing and vaguely tragicomic all at the same time. At the start, Gove used an unlikely example: the British Communist Party of the 1950s, with their libraries and demand for education, was, he said, “quite admirable” . I imagine this was the quote bone he was throwing to waiting journalists, and he even brought a book along as a visual prop should this be required for photographs.
There were a few specifics points worth commenting on. It looks like he wants to introducing individual purchasing power into sixth forms, saying that every student over 16 should have cash and be able to say to schools and FE Colleges ‘you have to tell me which course will get me a job’ and chose on this basis. He claimed that the EBacc is the encapsulation of what happens in other countries that have been successful at raising achievement, particularly Poland, and said that his proposed examination system would not preclude the teaching of arts, although @localschools_uk claimed that 187 schools have dropped Art GCSE in the last year which may suggest otherwise.
Gove was unrepentant, as you’d expect, on Academies, claiming that he’s never met an Academy head who wants to go back, although I imagine that the increasing use of Non-Disclosure Agreements for staff in both academies (and in the state sector) may be influencing this. “Resistance to academies is with people who want to swim at the edge of the pool, not strike out to the centre. To them I say come on in, the water’s lovely.”
He appears not to believe that schools focus aggressively on exam results to the exclusion of everything else: “Someone people say some schools are exam factories and are prisons of the soul. These schools do not exist”. The audience murmured and occasionally heckled their dissent.
It also looks as though education will remain ring-fenced after the Autumn budget. “The Lib Dems have helped me argue that education remains well-resourced.”
The most instructive moment (apart from when Gove experienced what body language experts call ‘leakage’ during a discussion about the sense of making hormonal teenagers do exams, when he talked about things ‘going wrong hormonally’ during teens and stiffened his left leg in a most peculiar fashion) was during the Q&A session. He was asked about over-assessment.
Gove: “You can’t have education without assessment.”
Audience: “Why not?”
Gove: “We need it. Education without assessment is just play”
As someone pointed out to me later, what does he think happened in Primary Schools before SATs?
It’s a classic example of why politicians shouldn’t get involved in the content and mechanics of education. Governments need assessment, in order to prove they’ve raised standards, and whilst students need some assessment, there’s plenty of evidence, particularly at Primary Level that too much assessment is bad for students.
For what it’s worth, my cod-psychological take is that Mr Gove is involved in a powerful psychological projection in which he wants to replicate his own schooling. I once read an interview with his mother who described her son being so brilliant that teachers would invite him up to the front of the class to take the rest of the lesson.
I think it’s ego leading this, not evidence about how young people learn, nor 21st Century requirements. This is a shame because on today’s showing he’d be a most entertaining conversational companion – and a damn dangerous person to have in charge of education for a generation which is more diverse, in all senses of the word, than any before.
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Education/social commentary/Uncategorized/youth
David Aaronovitch/EBacc/Gove/London Festival of Education