A thoughtful prescription for a pedagogical strategy for sub-Saharan Africa.
A debut treatise offers a new approach to sub-Saharan African education.
The educational systems of sub-Saharan Africa are not suited for the continent’s economic needs. Modeled on 19th-century European ideas about schooling, they offer an extremely one-size-fits-all approach that ignores the individualized needs and strengths of students. As the nations of Africa move toward postindustrial service- and skills-based “creative” economies, an alternative paradigm in education is required. With this book, the author presents a new method: authentic learning. Steve Revington, whose thoughts on pedagogy underlie Muganga’s work, defines authentic learning as “real life learning…that encourages students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world.” After describing his own traditional education in Uganda, Muganga delivers a portrait of sub-Saharan education as a whole, contrasting it with the more personalized and economically pragmatic practices of authentic learning. The author explains the benefits that this new system would have for the continent and then explores the realities of how it could be implemented. The creative economy represents a way for Africa to make up a lot of ground, exploiting the near-limitless innovative potential of its citizens. But, the author argues, unless an educational overhaul occurs, that resource will remain untapped. Muganga writes in a crisp prose that is technocratic without suffering from opacity: “Globalization connects strongly to the creative economy through the movement towards specialization, where modern information and communication technologies facilitate the sharing of cultural knowledge.” This short book, aimed more at influencers than a general audience, is well-argued and thoroughly sourced, synthesizing a large body of recent research and educational theory. While there are many ideas out there about how to teach children, it’s difficult to argue that a personalized education that prepares students for the economy isn’t an attractive system. On paper at least, Muganga’s proposal is a persuasive one, ambitious but not impractical. While the implementation may be complex, he has succeeded in his stated goal of starting a dialogue on the subject.
A thoughtful prescription for a pedagogical strategy for sub-Saharan Africa.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2534-6
Page Count: 173
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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