Radio Stories Nigeria
Promoting Literacy at Home - Lockdown and Beyond
Radio Stories Nigeria is a low-tech, high-accesibility scheme designed to bring high quality storytelling and literacy activities to pupils aged 9 -14 in Nigeria during the Corona Virus lockdown. The activities will be engaging, focused and playful and designed by leaders in the field of Creative Education.
The project will include the participation of Michael Harvey, who is a UK based international storyteller, specialising in literacy and education. Over the last three years he has been part of the Welsh Govenment’s efforts to put creativity at the heart of the new Welsh Creativity based curriculum, Curriculum for Wales, working with pupils and teachers to promote and disseminate sustainable creative practice in schools.
The Challenge
To provide educational continuity and creative stimulation for Nigerian students aged 9-14 during the Covid-19 lockdown. To promote literacy and other creative skills and mindsets. Most of these students will not have access to digital media or have much practical family support for educational activities. The activities will need to run until September, when schoosl re-start, and be accessible to different language communities.
The Response
The heart of the project is a regular radio broadcast featuring stories from Nigeria and further afield. The storytelling will be direct, accessible and plot led. Each story will last around 10 minutes and each programme would include two contrasting stories. The programme presenters will model enthusiasm for stories and storytelling and, as the series develops, will also propose storytelling activities that the young listeners can complete indvidually, or with their siblings.
A rapt Yr 6 audience.
The radio broadcasts will be supported by handouts distributed to the children’s homes with summaries of the stories and other literacy based activities as well as visual art and other activities, such as asking older family members for stories of their childhood.
As the series develops the presenters will talk about the stories, beginning with a listener’s perspective and gradually moving to a storyteller’s perspective as storymaking techniques are revealed and discussed. By the beginning of term in September participating students will have a bank of stories and story making techniques to use in class.
In order for the project to transition into school life post-Covid19 it is recommended that a radio based celebration be organised. This could be a story celebration which showcases the successes of the project and the talent and creativity of young Nigerians. This will also raise the profile of the project and creativity in general as a strategically important element in the life of any country as well as allow a more joined-up resumption of regular teaching in September. The final celebration episodes of the radio programme could include child led interviews of contemporary Nigerian authors well as an online presence to showcase and celebrate the project, aimed at educationalists, policy makers and others.
Although outside the specific brief of this project, it opens the door to a broader ambition to disseminate creative teaching and learning more widely. This would require some level of project evaluation in order to have a clearer idea of how to deliver similar projects post Covid-19 as well as identify areas of the education sector keen to develop creative teaching and learning. It would also be valuable to assess the project as a model for providing educational opportunites for children in the event of future epidemics.
Because of Nigeria’s linguistic diversity the broadcasts and resources will have to be translated as appropriate.
Stories
The stories will often be based on traditional or folkloric material from around the world, or stories created by children based on traditional material. I have a large number of stories created by groups of children which could be adapted for broadcast and two examples are given below.
Although group story creation is not in the remit of the project (unless undertaken by siblings listening and working together) these examples show the level of clarity and narrative competence possessed by children of the target age. Although we will not be able to provide live interaction the participation in these recordings show that the style of presentation in the broadcast should be child-friendly and have an interactive style. Similarly, while discussing the stories and narrative skills during the broadcast the best tone is one that is positive, affirming and discussion based rather than purely didactic and based on the children ‘getting it right’ at the expense of spontaneity and creativity.
Storytelling in a Cardiff school
It all starts with the telling and listening to stories. Stories themselves invite discussion of the issues and themes that they contain as well as character motivation and our own emotional response to the stories. From there we can begin to unpick the way stories work. A simple and very effective way of starting young learners on a story creation is to tell half a story and ask them to finish the story in a way that is satisfying to them using only characters, locations and objects already in the story. From there we can go on to use these basic character/location/object ingredients to create stories and begin to delve deeper into the mechanics of creating a satisfying and meaningful plot.
Narrative and Creative Skills and Attitudes
Creative freedom and creative rigour work together to make engaging and original art. By limiting our choices we are obliged to give more attention to our material, make more interesting choices and soon the story we are working on becomes ‘real’. The first two broadcasts will seed a number of different stories for the listeners and open informal discussions on story structure between the presenters from the point of view of story listeners.
The new Curriculum for Wales has identified five core Creative Habits of Mind set out below. They are a useful way to talk about the attitudes behind the practical work of being creative and will be used in the conversations about stories and storymaking in the radio programmes.
Inquisitive - wanting to know how things work and how things come to be the way they are
Imaginative - combining different ideas and elements in new and original ways
Collaborative - working together
Disciplined - possesing a practical understanding of the craft of a particular art form
Persistent - having the resilience to carry on in the face of difficulty and the resources to deal with that difficulty
Teaching Materials
A gift to Michael from pupils of Tredegarville Primary School in Cardiff - a jar of storytelling inspiration of characters, locations and objects.
The radio broadcasts themselves are the core of the project and will be reinforced by activities on paper. The same informal tone will be maintained in the paper-based exercises and will be presented to the young learners as coming from the presenters of the programme. The mailouts will include spare blank sheets for the children’s own writing and the first instalment will include a pen.
Outputs
The participating students will be incouraged to keep their work together so that they can see how much they have achieved and how much they have written. Those who wish can share examples of their work in the final celebration event. Schools may wish to celebrate and display participating students’ work in school at the beginning of the September term.
Examples of student work from previous projects are available on the links below. The students aged from 4 to 11 and included a high proportion of pupils with English as an additional language. In these projects it is an important principle for me that I do not edit or ‘improve’ the children’s writing. I give them the tools to do the job and the effort, skill and talent are all theirs.