Embassy Work: RELO

Another aspect of my Fulbright is working with the Public Affairs Section (PAS) of the US Embassy and the RELO (Regional English Language Office(r)), assisting them in their efforts to support English programs and teachers in the area. So here are a few things I’ve gotten to participate in connected to the RELO:

Access: Conference in Saly (I wrote a blog about Saly already, so you can read about it here) and Graduation: The Access graduation was a nice little ceremony to honor those students who had completed the two-year Access micro-scholarship program (to learn more about this program, you can read my blog on Saly, or see the description on the State Department’s website). Safi, the RELO assistant, was the Master of Ceremonies, and the acting Chief of Missions (the person who stands in for the Ambassador when they’re absent or we don’t have one, which is the case right now) was there to speak.

Each group of students does some sort of performance and there are a few speeches given. A student representative spoke, as well as a representative of the parents. Pictures were taken of each school’s group with their certificates and Martina Boustani (the acting Chief of Missions). It was a nice little ceremony and I’m sure some of the students who graduated are future English teachers!

ATES Annual Conference: ATES is the Association of Teachers of English in Senegal (yes, it’s an awkward word order because it uses the French word order, but English words). Once a year they have a big conference for Senegalese English teachers. This year it was held in Bambey, which is a small town a few hours east of Dakar. In recent years the Fulbright ETAs have done presentations for the teachers, either at the actual conference on Saturday, or at the workshop that is offered by the RELO on Friday. For the RELO workshop Safi gave a presentation about project-based learning and then I gave a presentation on teaching academic writing.

I am certainly not an expert in academic writing, but it was a subject they had specifically requested, so I did some research and my best. The workshop was very well attended… maybe too well! We had originally expected 80 participants because usually the workshop is specifically for the English teachers of the local chapter that had the task of organizing the convention that year, but people from other areas came as well, so there were almost 200 people. The room wasn’t really meant for that many people, so we were pretty crammed in there. Unfortunately it was already quite hot out, so that didn’t help increase the comfort level, but we all made it work. The next day was the actual convention, and since I presented at the workshop, I didn’t present during the breakout sessions. None of the other ETAs presented, but the two ELFs, Lea and Liam, gave presentations, as did a few of my students, supervised by Mathiam Thiam. One thing the conference showed me was how motivated, dedicated, and interested the English teachers here are; they really seem to have a thirst for knowledge and ways to improve their teaching.

Mathiam and Myself with two of our students who presented in Bambey

ELF Conference

The English Language Fellows had a regional (sub-Saharan Africa) conference here in Dakar and Eran asked ATES if they wanted to have a workshop day with them. Of course they were very interested, and they decided to hold it at FASTEF where I teach. Not being an ELF, I was not presenting, but I was “hosting” since I am part of the English department at FASTEF. I arrived first (of course) and was able to give the ELFs a tour of the campus while things were getting set up.

Three breakout sessions were planned, with teachers being able to choose the subject that interested them the most. I ran around a bit at the beginning making sure everyone had what they needed (projectors, whiteboard markers, etc.) and was a “moderator” for one of the rooms. Because there were breakout sessions, the moderators are in charge of taking notes and recapping, briefly, the presentations to the whole conference at the end.

English Language Day (ELD)

English Language Day is a day to honor English teachers in Senegal, especially the one chosen as teacher of the year. There are presentations on teaching and information booths in order to inform English teachers of the resources available to them. ELD was held at the local university, which made it very convenient! I knew many of my students would be there and the RELO had a table. Anthony, the other Fulbright ETA in Dakar, was slotted to do a presentation and I was ‘moderating’ his presentation (meaning I introduced him and did the Q&A session afterwards). In typical Senegalese fashion, it started a couple of hours late, but I didn’t mind because it gave me a chance to catch up with Safi, the assistant RELO, who I hadn’t seen in a while.

I ended up helping her man the RELO booth for the day, which was nice. They honored the teacher of the year, as well as Ngouye Mbaye, the sweetest woman who has just retired from running the English office of the Senegalese Ministry of Education. It was a very nice tribute to her and generally a nice day among English enthusiasts.

Embassy Work: PAS

Another aspect of my Fulbright is working with the Public Affairs Section (PAS) of the US Embassy and the RELO (Regional English Language Office(r)), assisting them in their efforts to support English programs and teachers in the area. So here are a few things I’ve gotten to participate in connected to the PAS:

Language Resource Center (LRC): Every Wednesday I host a conversation club in the multi-purpose room of the US Embassy. This is for Senegalese members of the LRC, which is basically a library where they can access materials in English. Based on the theme of the month (Such as Women’s or Black History month) an article is chosen for discussion. At the beginning I would have about 10 people for conversation, but the number is growing, so now it’s more like 20+ participants.

Brainstorming about Activism

We have some interesting conversations. It’s not really an English class, it’s just for conversation, but being the teacher that I am, I usually approach the reading like I would in an English class because I know how much pre-reading and while-reading activities can help with comprehension.

A lot of times we do a brainstorming or discussion before we read, then compare what we already talked about to what we read. It’s usually a pretty good discussion and they don’t want it to end. But it has to end, because right after that we have the Meet Me in the USA film screening. A film or documentary that is usually connected to what we were discussing is screened and then discussed. We did a lot about Martin Luther King Jr. in January & February, along with women in politics, girl’s education, etc. We did one discussion recently about Misty Copeland and basically talked about how awesome she is, ha ha!

Sometimes the LRC organizes other events instead of the conversation/film clubs, such as a speech competition they hosted in February for the end of Black History Month. They had a bunch of speeches by notable Black Americans that the participants could choose from. Some of the speeches included sections of President Obama’s 2009 inauguration speech, some of Maya Angelou’s poetry, Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream, Langston Hughes’ “I Too” and “Let America be America Again”, as well as Jesse Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive.” It was pretty cool!  The embassy compiled a video, which you can see here if you’re interested.

ILEP Orientation

I was asked to take part in an orientation for the ILEP program. ILEP stands for International Leaders in Education Program, another US State Department program that is for teachers. Teachers from the Near East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Hemisphere, who specialize in English, Math, Science, or Social Studies are eligible to participate in the program. They’re invited to spend 5 months studying at the Graduate level in an Education department at a university in the US. They continue to develop their expertise not only in their subject matter, but in teaching and knowledge about the US. They take courses as well as guest-teach at a local high school. (Learn more about that program here). There were 5 Senegalese teachers chosen this year and I was helping them with their pre-departure orientation. This was back in December and they were going to be leaving mid-January. A few were going to Ohio and others to northern Pennsylvania.

I was there for a general Q&A session about campus life and living abroad in general. One thing they asked about and that we talked about a lot was how cold it was going to be.  Some said they'd bought some sweaters, so they were set... In the end I realized that there’s really no way to explain how cold it really gets, it’s just one of those things they’ll have to figure out when they get there! Reminded me of when my Delaware Dad Tunde, who is from Nigeria, tells the story about the very first time he arrived in Wisconsin directly from Nigeria… it was January. Nothing anyone says can prepare someone for that, ha ha! All part of the experience I guess!

YALI MWF Applications

Most of you know that I worked with the Young African Leadership Initiative’s flagship program, the Mandela Washington Fellowship, for the last two summers at the University of Delaware’s Institute for Civic Leadership. I was able to continue my involvement with MWF here in Dakar by being part of the group that screened applications. Senegal is allotted 30 slots for the fellowship, ten for each track (Civic Leadership, Business and Entrepreneurship, and Public Management), and the Embassy received somewhere around 600 applications (which was the number after the initial weeding out done by an office in New York that, if I remember correctly, received over 1,000 applications). A group of us read applications and rated them so the committee could choose about 100 for interviewing. Then they did interviews every day for a week. I wanted to be part of the interview committee, but unfortunately it conflicted with my teaching schedule. I do get to meet those who were chosen soon, so I’m looking forward to that!

FASTEF: New Program

Another class, or level of students, has been recently added to FASTEF: A master’s degree. Originally, and until this year, FASTEF was a training institute that awarded certificates in teaching, not degrees. It was under the umbrella of the local university (Université Cheikh Anto Diop, or UCAD) and was not accredited on its own. Last year it became its own entity, so can now offer a master’s degree in teaching whatever specialty they decide. I had heard about this change from Michelle, the Fulbright who was here last year, but hadn’t really heard anything about it until one day they told me we were going to have a meeting about the applications to the new program.

I come in for the meeting (I’m still on American time and show up annoyingly on time) and no one is there, but there are stacks of papers on the table. Our head of department (HOD) Dr. Mbaye comes in and explains that the administration office dropped off the applications and we had to start going through them. They literally just dropped them off as they had come in. There were almost 700 applications that hadn’t been processed at all. No list had been generated or anything, so we decided that the first thing to be done was create an excel sheet with everyone listed. We literally spent 10 hours straight plugging all their information into a list.

There were 6 computers being used and some people were reading information off to others who were typing. As the youngest and most computer literate person in the room, I ended up being the fastest at entering the information, entering 245 of the 680 applications. Then we realized that the announcement sent out to students had an unfortunate mistake that told students that they needed their diploma or their transcript (instead of and). This meant that we had to put an announcement out to everyone that they needed to bring their transcripts by a certain date in order for their applications to be complete. Once they did, they had to be placed with the corresponding applications. It was an insane amount of work, but we got it all worked out and then the professors chose 80 students to interview, finally selecting 40 students for the program.

A few weeks later we had another meeting to decide what classes were going to be offered and who would teach them. We had a few things on the agenda, one of them being deciding on when the program was going to start. I was thinking it would be in the fall of this year, but they said “how about next week?” Everyone agreed. It’s still surprising to me that things can come together so last minute. I asked some of the professors how they could develop a master level course in less than a week and their response was that they’ll be teaching the same modules they’ve been teaching the B1 and B2 classes for the last 20 years or so. I guess that makes sense.

I later had a discussion with Dr. Mbaye about this, just out of curiosity, because I thought that the Master program that we’re doing was to prepare the students for the exam that will get them into the B1/B2 program. My question was this:  if the teachers are going to teach the Master students the same modules they teach the B1 and B2 students, what are they going to teach them when they get into the B1/B2 program? He didn’t have an answer except to say that he had made that same observation, but no one seems to want to listen to him, so they’ll figure it out later. We were both glad to know that our assessment of the current situation is accurate, even if no one else seems to see the endgame.

They asked me to do something with the Master students as well, so I took the advice of the B1/B2 students and we’re doing practice teaching. I split the class up into groups of 6 and each group will design and teach a full one-hour lesson. Most of them have never been in front of a class, so it’s a great way for them to start because their classmates act as the students. On Mondays I meet with the group that is teaching so we can plan the lesson with each member of the group being chosen to teach one activity. This gives them the theory behind communicative lesson planning in much smaller groups and very organically because it is while actually planning and creating activities. On Thursdays, the group teaches their lesson to the other students in the class and I record it. Just after they finish, we watch each student’s activity and comment/critique. I don’t grade their actual teaching practice, because that would just be mean. They’ve never been in front of students before, so they’re stressed enough without being graded on it! I give them reflection questions to answer after each lesson, and I grade them on their participation. It’s not necessarily a content course, but just a chance for them to practice teaching a bit. One of the questions I usually ask them is: “What did you learn about teaching that you didn’t know before?” One of the answers I’ve gotten consistently is that they learned there is much more to teaching than just being able to speak English well; that teaching itself is a skill that has to be learned which is much harder and more complicated than they thought.

My work here is done, ha ha!