So, apparently, Mennonites aren't night owls. We came into Nairobi from the University Campus where the conference was being held, and it's 10:30pm here, and this house is absolutely silent. The only sounds are the mosquitoes buzzing around and my typing. And even my typing sounds really loud when everything else is silent! I got back from having supper at about 9:30, and it was already completely silent around here. It's a little disconcerting, actually!
Anyway, the conference was actually really good. I met up with a few interesting people, and heard some really interesting papers and symposiums. One thing that always strikes me when I go to these sorts of conferences is the fact that it's supposed to be a conference full of educators. So, people who make it their business to research educational theory, education, best practices in teaching etc. And then they get up and give a talk that really, really sucks. It blows my mind how someone could be invited to be a plenary speaker at a "multilingualism and education" conference and not know how to give a decent presentation. Very odd. But thankfully, at this conference, that was not the norm - there were only a few really poor presentations that I attended.
And I have to admit, if I do say so myself, that I totally rocked my presentation! After a lot of hard work, I finally got a finished product that I'm quite pleased with. And my confidence was given a bit of a boost by listening to some of the other papers and presentations made, because it did encourage me that I'm on the right track. My thinking about multlilingualism and language choice and multilingual education is pretty much on track with what all the high-falutin' PhD holders are saying and advocating for. So that did give me a bit of a confidence boost to be able to stand up and tell people what we're doing in my little corner of Africa. Once my paper was over, I got some really good feedback and encouragement from those who were listening, too.
In some ways, I get a bit discouraged when I go to conferences like this, though. I mean, we have some of the same challenges in my place that they face all over Africa in terms of the education system and the issues of language in education. But in other respects, we're SO far behind actually dealing with those challenges, just because we're starting from basically nothing. We just don't have the support of universities and huge government departments and loads of materials to use. We have me, Jackie, and two chaps from the government to tackle this situation. It's really so very daunting!
But then, I need to encourage myself with the fact that we have come a long way in the past few years. Considering that we have started from scratch, and I mean completely from scratch, we've made a ton of progress! However, I still feel like we're the voices crying out in the wilderness on behalf of those folks in our country who don't speak English... which is pretty much most of the population! Anyway, I am encouraged because I do think we're on the right track. And we're starting slowly. The important thing is that we've started!
I also got the gumption up to speak during one of the parallel sessions this afternoon. A professor from a local university was making a presentation about my country and the language policy there. He was so off-base on so many things that he said. In fact, he was downright wrong on the entire premise of his presentation. Turns out he's never actually been to the country and he wrote his paper two years ago while he was hanging out in the US! I was able to set the record straight for the folks who had come to listen and learn about the situation where I live. But I felt a bit bad about contradicting what this professor was saying! A white girl contradicting an old male professor - a little risque! But it had to be done, I just couldn't hold my tongue!
Anyway, it's pretty quiet in this guesthouse and my toes are getting cold. So methinks it's time to go curl up under my blankets. And yes, I did say blanketS. It's so deliciously cold here!
No comments:
Post a Comment