INTRODUCTION
I did a trial run yesterday of photographing a text and discussing it with the child who made it. This assignment was done in June of last year and the boy still vividly remembered the experience and could recite quite a lot of the poem from memory.
I discovered that you really need to have the original writer present in order to understand how the text was produced. It would also be good to have a separate session with the teacher to ask about how (and why) the text was produced.
THE TEXT
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| From research |
TRANSCRIPTION
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Date: 6 February 2012
Location: Our house
Present: me (D), Grade 5 boy (B) and his older sister (G) and brother
Image reference: IMG 1963 (6 Feb 2012)
Image title: “20 June 2011 – Katana (Poem)”[0:38]
D: OK let me ask you one more question while I’ve got you here. This one that I like so much. This one here, mmm. You made this nice picture of a dog and a cat
B: Yeah. (text)
D: What was the assignment here? Did they give you the Engl… you had to write down the English and then write uh Xhosa underneath it? Or the other way / around it?
B: / It’s a poem!
[0:56]
D: But which came first? Did you write the … the Xhosa poem and then you translated it into English?
B: No we just wrote it.
D: Was it on the board or something? Katana katana?
B: Yeah [starts reciting in sing-song voice] “Katana, katana. Molo Katana uyaphi na katana? Ndiya edolophini. Uyakuthen-ni ((mispronounces word)) ntoni? Ndiya… I can’t remember right now / (text)
D: / ((Laughter)) OK and then you had to write the what it meant in English up above?
B: ((Begins reciting again)) Ndiyakutherg’u mquez uminqwazyz
[1:35]
D: And then what about the picture? Was that on the board too or did you make that up yourself?
B: ((High squeaky voice)) I made that picture (text)
G: What’s the poem about?
B: It’s… about Kitten kitten hello kitten where are you going Kitten? I’m going to town. What are you buying? Um I’m going to buy a hat. I’ve never seen a cat with a hat.
D: What’s the dog saying here?
B: ((Sing-song voice)) Uyaphi na katana? Where are you going?
[transcription ends at 2:02]KEY TO TRANSCRIPTION (Adapted from Rampton, 2006:xviii)
[0:38] Time on recording
((text)) “Stage directions”
(text) indistinct voice or best guess by transcriptionist
… short pause
DESCRIBING THE TEXT
There are several typical features of this text: the border is universal in schoolwork that I’ve seen by kids at all ages. Usually done with a colored pen or pencil, you could look at the way borders sub-divide work in the notebooks by assignment or topic. Different colored pens were used for the text: black for Xhosa and red for English. In this assignment, the Xhosa came first, the English was added and the drawing was added last. You can see evidence of rewriting and correction. From the recording it sounds like there was quite a lot of reciting in class in order to memorize the poem.
Jewitt and others, following Kress, would call this page a multimodal ensemble, that is, a combination of text and image using different media. It’s quite common to see handouts glued on to the notebook page for an added layer of complexity. See for example this image:
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| From research |
In this image you can also see the collaboration between the student and the teacher, as errors were pointed out and corrected and then the grade for the test was updated (“9+2″).
ANALYSIS
Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and Multimodal Discourse could be used to analyze these kinds of pictures although that might be overkill. Cox has two books that could be used for analyzing such texts: The Pictorial World of the Child and Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure. Blommaert’s Grassroots Literacy would also come into play. I’m still searching for a similar study of children’s school texts. English Studies in Africa vol 49-1 has a number of articles that are helpful but nothing exactly like this.
While the analysis of the texts themselves is interesting, I think it’s even more interesting to step back and look at what is happening in the process of text-making. In this class, the teacher is engaging the students in a book-making activity. For this particular class the student’s didn’t receive a textbook at the beginning of the year which they would then proceed to work through. Instead they began with a tabula rasa, a blank notebook, that over the course of the year was filled with didactic materials about Xhosa.
So in the absence of an “official” text, a rather dynamic classroom text is created which is stamped with the individual style of each child. The lack of a textbook can be seen as a deficit but it can also be seen as a strength. The teacher is not tied to a textbook that may or may not be appropriate for her students. She can customize lesson plans and activities to the level and interests of her students. But what I hadn’t appreciated until looking at these texts is how the text-making activity reinforces the information being transferred to the students. In other words, by forcing a child to write down the information, it is hammered into their heads through reading, copying, and verification in a way that wouldn’t happen if for example the kids simply had access to the Katana poem in their Xhosa book. Prior to this I had really been focused on how errors of transmission might creep into texts in the process of being transferred from book to chalkboard to notebook. But I can now better appreciate how this “grassroots” literacy is actually more effective in helping kids to absorb information.
While the lack of textbooks in South Africa is universally bewailed, I’ve never read anything talking about these amazing notebooks that are created by children. They are evidence of a great deal of creativity on the part of the teacher and the students. And I think their rather rigid format (colored borders, etc.) and tangibility results in a permanent record of what was learned by the children in a way that glossy textbooks might conceal.
When I go to Mozambique next month I expect to find that teachers and kids have less resources: cheap notebooks rather than the hardcover kind found in South Africa and a single ballpoint pen rather than a fistful of colored pencils and pens. But even so, it’s likely that they are engaged in similar text-making activities in the absence of official textbooks.
