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| Writing practice |
Uniskript is an innovative approach to literacy which makes
the connections between sound, mouth and symbol more explicit and therefore
easier to learn to read. It has been developed through the University of the Nations
in Hawai’i and although apocryphal reports have been favourable, it has not
been thoroughly tested. During December and January I was able to be part of
one of the first significant trials of Uniskript, as we established its use in
the Koriki language, a dialect of Purari, in the Gulf Province.
In July last year, two Koriki women accompanied the local
translation and literacy workers, Robbie and Debbie Petterson, to Hawai’i to
work on Uniskript in their language. I call the Pettersons local, for although
they are from NZ, they have also been working in the languages of the Gulf
region since 1984 and are the sort of people that locals know as Auntie Debbie
and Uncle Robbie. Two men from another local language also went, to get Uniskript
started in Urama. Together they worked on alphabets unique to their language,
using iconographs relevant to their culture. This means that each alphabet is
unique to the group it belongs to.
Arriving in Gulf to help with Uniskript, I was jumping in
the deep end…as usual. We spent half a day training eight volunteer teachers
before classes started. Over 100 kids turned up, to a summer school literacy
programme during the official school holidays. I challenge you to find that
enthusiasm for school in Australia! We started with four classes, based on
their current literacy skills in English and Koriki using the ‘normal’ (Roman)
alphabet. I ended up with the class that had never been to school before.
My job was to mentor the two trainee teachers assigned to my
class. I have not officially studied education principles, but having collected
several university degrees and been in various educational settings before,
have a surprisingly strong skill set when it comes to teacher training. At the
same time, I was helping the children to learn. We were not only teaching them
literacy through Uniskript, but as the absolute beginners class, we were also
teaching class room behaviour and all those skills which Aussie kids learn
through kindy or pre-school, such as how to hold a pencil and which direction a
book goes (left to right, top to bottom, which end is the front).
The students in my class ranged from 20 (the day there was a
funeral in the village) to over 40. Most days attendance was in the mid 30s.
Calling the roll was one of my many challenges, as kids had multiple names. It
took me a few weeks to be smart enough to dismiss students one by one as I
called their names. In doing so, I found one student listed three times under
different names. Another girl had two different first names and three surnames,
presented in varying combinations. Ages in the class varied from four and a
half to ten. None of them had been to school before.
Our class faced most of the common educational challenges
for village schools in PNG. The class size was too big. The teacher was
undertrained. The teacher who was well trained (myself) did not know the
language. The students did not know English or Tok Pisin. The classrooms were
suffering from tropical fatigue (The stairs to my classroom had rotted away, so
we had to come up the other stairs and through another classroom and an office
to reach our room. I had planned on including outdoor games, but these were
cancelled when getting outdoors meant disrupting another class). We had minimal
resources (It surprising how many flash cards you can create from one 2min
noodle carton and a black marker, and we nearly ran out of chalk). The teachers
were volunteers, so sometimes did not turn up, as they had to go fishing to
feed their family. A village incidents, such as
funeral or a fight, interrupted
schooling. Class started late after a rainy night that meant that everyone
slept in and the path to class was muddy… and so on. In this context, the work
we did was a reasonable test of the effectiveness of Uniskript for teaching
literacy. Any good results had few other sources to be credited to.
Now that I have set the scene for our Uniskript teaching,
I’ll point you in the direction of some photos and get to writing about how Uniskript
works and how the students and community responded.
For photos, please visit my photojournalist friend Erin’s
blog:
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