welcomed us were immaculate in their green checked uniforms. Their eyes shone with enthusiasm. We soon learned why. Invited by Jacinta,1 the class teacher, to sit in for a Kiswahili language class focussed on grammar and vocabulary, we Kenyan adults expected the usual rote learning that had been part of our own primary school experience. In Jacinta’s classroom, however, exposure to TESSA had resulted in not only localisation and adaptation of existing materials, but also the joint creation, by teacher and students, of new learning materials. The class was interactive, making use of hand-written cards to test word recognition. When a student accurately surmised the missing syllables to complete the word on a selected card, she stood up and confidently articulated a definition of the word and then made up either a brief sentence or even an anecdote that put that word into its appropriate context. As students worked in pairs, all of this activity encouraged collaboration. Good humour, gentle teasing and an eagerness to get through their tasks were striking aspects of all that we saw that day. In this environment of “no resources”, Jacinta had created a resource centre. Within it, we found mobiles dangling from the roof to remind her students of the different grammatical classes, and along the walls, bright charts with clearly written examples of how these classes should be applied. That was not all. Unconcerned by an absence of story books, the students had written their own stories, in English and in Kiswahili, as an exercise in writing from different viewpoints or perspectives. Jacinta gave us samples to read. The handwriting was neat and the stories — which told of ogres, or black dogs in the night with scary red eyes — were created to steer the children towards an understanding of the impact of making scapegoats of those who do not look, behave or speak as “we” do. The Rift Valley of Kenya is a melting pot of every ethnicity, every race represented in Kenya. The beauty of its escarpments, the clouds that reflect from the lakes nestled in its valleys, and the crisp air make it one of the loveliest places in Kenya. It is also the scene of some of the most horrendous crimes Kenyans have perpetrated against one another in the name of politics. These children, young as they were, would have witnessed the post-election violence that had occurred barely four months before our visit. Through a problem-based creative writing project originating from one of the TESSA literacy resources (Module 1, section 5: “Ways of being a critical reader and writer”), slightly older children than those whose class we observed had been afforded an opportunity to discuss together and analyse what they had written and come to an understanding of tolerance: a new paradigm. At a different community primary school close by, Professor Keraro introduced us to another of his graduates, a teacher named Jonas,2 who had also been exposed to TESSA through his course at Egerton. Jonas, like other teachers before him, had struggled to teach his students abstract concepts such as temperature and velocity.
108