Reviving Traditional African Storytelling to Create Disorienting Dilemmas: A Case of the Association for Faculty Enrichment in Learning and Teaching (AFELT), East Africa
Conference Thread
Expanding Transformative Learning Contexts
CALL (Grandmother) RESPONSE (Children)
Paukwa? Pakawa!
Sahani? Ya mchele!
Giza? Ya mwizi!
These words were a call for many Kenyan children to gather for storytelling time. For the longest time, most African cultures used storytelling as a way of facilitating learning concerning life: a moral, the passing on of cultural values, the integration of the young into a desired way of life, and many other learning contexts. This was how education was done before the colonial era. Colonization brought a type of schooling based on learning by rote. This way of learning, foreign to our culture, caused a great disconnect between schooling and learning. Because our indigenous way of learning was not leveraged, learning ceased to be transformational. Schooling became separate from our way of life.
For the past two years, we, as AFELT leaders, have been part of the UK-AID funded Transforming Employability for Social Change in East Africa (TESCEA) project. Here we reintroduced culturally appropriate methods by using stories to create disorienting dilemmas for learners. All the participating universities in this project have responded very enthusiastically, with many faculty eager to incorporate transformative learning in their own teaching, to help their students integrate schooling with life.
In this workshop, we intend to use an African story to demonstrate how we have used a disorienting dilemma to facilitate critical reflective thought. You, as participants, will then create stories for your students that could facilitate critical reflective thought, a necessary step in transformative learning.