By iobrien1093
This past week, I finally submitted an Independent Research Proposal to my Capstone Project supervisor. For my capstone I am creating a basic literacy curriculum for New Chapter’s After School Program in Phumlani Village, which does not have an educational component at this time. Since nearly 70% of Phumlani’s residents are unemployed and do not have the means to pay school fees, many children do not attend primary school. This reality exists in townships all over South Africa, and as a result, nearly 80 percent of South African learners do not develop basic reading skills by the time they reach Grade 5. Those learners will not likely succeed in secondary-school education, which will in turn compromise their options for post-school learning, career opportunities, and general wellbeing in life.
Phumlani’s literacy program will take place either at the community center or in the local library and will target primary school learners from Kindergarten to Grade 3, as well as children who have never been enrolled in school. I am creating a handbook with a curriculum that includes lesson plans for weekly literacy workshops as well as workbook activities and short stories that coincide with each workshop. I am also creating an Indigogo webpage that will provide the means for printing and for each child to receive his or her own workbook to bring home. Ideally, I would like this handbook to be the initial step in the development of a larger mentorship program in which New Chapter would partner with a local high school to form a one-on-one mentorship program using the handbook as the curriculum. The greatest challenge to this program is that most of the children speak three languages: Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English. Their levels of English vary drastically, so this program will not just be a literacy program, but a literacy program for ESL learners. As I speak neither Afrikaans nor Xhosa it would be nearly impossible for me to formally tutor the children myself, which is why I’m hoping that New Chapter will be able to partner with locals who speak the children’s home language. Thankfully, Malcolm Josephs, the founder of New Chapter, speaks Afrikaans fluently, knows nearly all of the children in Phumlani as well as their families, and will be able to help me establish the children’s English skills for the purposes of forming the curriculum.
Although I am creating the handbook for future purposes, I am also working with the children informally on a weekly basis, in order to better understand their learning styles and what activities are able to successfully motivate them to learn. I would like to get the name and grade level of each child who attends the afterschool program. Then I will create a log of their general literacy levels. This would be helpful to the future volunteers who will work with specific children. Once I’ve established the baseline literacy levels I will split the children into two groups based on reading skill, one group focusing on basic phonetic skills and the alphabet and the other more advanced group focusing on improving reading comprehension. I would work with each group for an hour each week. At the end of the semester I would interview the children to understand if their attitudes about reading have changed.
This week I am distributing consent forms to the parents of the children who will participate in the program. Later, this week once the signed forms are returned, I will distribute a short survey to assess the children’s attitudes about reading. I foresee that my research plan will change as I begin more hands-on work with the children. I’m expecting my greatest challenge to be the language barrier, but also that some of the kids are very shy about answering questions. These next few weeks will be hectic, and I’ll have to adapt my research along the way, but I’m relieved to finally have a foundation for my project and to be able to start working.
Isabel