All the material that Associate Professor Mary Alice Barksdale needed to win a Fulbright Scholar grant for educational research was a couple boxes of crayons, sheets of paper and some staples.
These meager tools were part of the reason why she received an e-mail in late March 2008 from the people at the program congratulating her on her accomplishment. It was the same reason why she departed for South Africa to a township in Port Elizabeth in January of that year to work with a number of educators at a local primary school in association with the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
As the Elementary Education Program Area Leader in the Liberal Arts and Human Sciences' Department of Teaching and Learning, Barksdale is part of a graduate program that accepts no more than 25 students each year. These students will spend their time studying how children learn to read and develop. It's also no wonder that the focus of her winning proposal - her second Fulbright award, by the way - was about first through third graders who use their imaginations as well as the tools provided by Barksdale to preserve their mother language, Xhosa (the "x" prompts a clicking noise), while learning English. To achieve this, Barksdale had the children create storybooks with simple sentences written in both English and Xhosa. Barksdale hoped this would nurture the young minds toward a proactive approach to reading and writing.
Her enthusiasm for her work has brought her to many different countries in the past. She did extensive research in the neighboring country of Malawi from 2001 to 2006 and lectured in Russia. While sitting in her office in 307 War Memorial Hall, she spoke about her time spent in South Africa.
COLLEGIATE TIMES: What were some cultural differences that you encountered from past experiences?
MARY ALICE BARKSDALE: I got the whole idea for this project; it all grew out of my work in Malawi. I know a lot about Africa, I know a lot about poverty. Malawi is a country where most of the people don't have electricity, at least not the people in the rural areas; the people in the towns do. But none of the classrooms or schools had any electricity. Part of my reason for going to South Africa - I was a little misguided. I knew that class sizes would be smaller in South Africa, but what that turns out meaning is that instead of 100 kids, there's 45. But, there's still more than you can handle.
And in Malawi, lots of classrooms didn't have desks. Well, these classrooms did all have desks, the kids didn't necessarily have chairs, but if they didn't have a chair they sat on an upturned pail or something. But the same situation, some kids didn't have pencils, they didn't have paper, the schools didn't have basic materials for teaching. It was more like Malawi than I really expected it to be. Which is a good thing and a bad thing because it means that the work that I did really is representative of Sub-Saharan Africa, but it was very challenging - more challenging than I thought it would be.
CT: Why did you focus on the mother tongue languages in your research?
MB: Most black African kids in South Africa, and in Sub-Saharan Africa in general, grow up in homes where mother tongue languages are spoken. In the part of South Africa where I was, the primary language is Xhosa. ... I think that the mother tongue languages are very, very important and valuable because in many ways language carries culture and having your mother tongue language and being able to speak it and read it and write it, I think, is a part of having an identity and owning your own culture - being who you are. And in most countries, children are expected to be taught in mother tongue languages in the early grades. But then they have to switch over to English, and in South Africa, kids in first grade were only supposed to be given instruction in Xhosa. There was supposed to be no English at all. But beginning in second grade, there was to be a little English and a little bit more in third grade. But then all of a sudden in fourth grade, instruction is supposed to change over to being in English. ... One of the most basic rules that I believe (above) of all is that reading is a skill, and you have to practice to get good. Well, for all of these kids who speak all these other languages, there aren't materials in their mother tongue languages for them to practice reading. I found a handful of children's books written in Xhosa while I was in South Africa, but just a handful. Some of these books that I found cost like $8. People in the townships, they can eat on $8 for a week. They're not ever going to spend $8 going to one of these fancy bookstores and buying a children's book in Xhosa. The same situation is in Malawi. There aren't hardly any books written in Chichewa or any of the mother tongue languages, and this business of, if you're going to become a stronger reader, you need to practice. Well there's nothing for them to practice, and there's never going to be anything for them to practice on. And if we really want to promote literacy in these countries, we need to come up with a way of having texts for children to be able to practice reading. And I think, "Well, there's only one way to get them: We have to produce them ourselves, and we've got to get the kids involved in writing, and they've got to write their own stories, and we need to get them to publish their stories, and we need to have books that can be shared across the whole school - maybe that can go into libraries."
CT: Looking back, how do you feel about your experiences there?
MB: One part of me says, "My gosh, I pulled this off." These teachers did not believe that the kids could write. They didn't believe we could get them to write. They weren't sure that it would be of value. I had trouble getting into a school and getting the project started because everybody thought, "Well, this is going to take a lot of time." I think they thought, "Well, this is a crazy woman from America, and she wants to come in and do her project, and it doesn't fit with the kinds of things that we do, and I'm not sure we want to do it." I really had one teacher, she was my champion. She said, "We need you at the school. We need this project at the school. We need to do this kind of work. Stick with us. Come to this school." She was my champion. I mean, I ended up having real good relationships with the other teachers and getting things done in all the classrooms, but she was the one who really had me there. I pulled it off, and I think I've shown that it can be done, and I have plenty to write about. I mean, it's research papers (I'm going to write) about how I did it. Maybe I better say "how they did it." How we did it.