A Grassroots Effort to Learn New Literacies and Inquiry in Rural Kenya

• In Event: Digital Literacies for Global Meaning-Making: Learning From Four Cases From the Global South

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives
In light of globalization, students in Kenya need to learn similar new literacy practices as students in other countries. Accordingly, the Kenyan government mandated that all students graduate digitally literate. In 2013, Kenya implemented the Digital Literacy Programme, hoping to provide a tablet for each Grade 1 student. The goal was to innovate teaching and learning through technology integration. However, not all schools had received tablets at the time of this study, and not all schools that received tablets continued to use them due to wifi and technical difficulties (Wanzala & Nyamai, 2018). To overcome these challenges, educators formed a grassroots effort to bring the New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute (NLI: Author, 2009) to Kenya in 2018. The NLI views new literacies as a broad construct encompassing online reading comprehension (Leu et al., 2019), internet inquiry (Dwyer, 2016), and use of digital tools (Authors).

Methods and Data Sources
This case study describes 49 teachers’ perceptions of new literacies in Kenya after participating in the NLI. Data sources included pre and post open-response surveys, transcripts from focus groups, transcripts from one-on-one interviews with ten participants, and participant-generated artifacts. We analyzed the corpus of data using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-step thematic analysis protocol.

Findings
Many of the issues around new literacies cited in research on Kenya from before the Digital Literacy Programme (see Ogembo, Ngugi, & Pelowski, 2012) still hold true today. One participant summarized these issues by stating, “One, we have no Internet in our schools. Two, the Ministry of Education has provided the tablets to the learners, but you find we don’t have the technicians, and the teachers have not been trained in that field.” However, participants believed that internet inquiry could be applied in their classrooms, dependent on technology, as a way to implement learner-centered literacy instruction. Participants believed that learner-centered teaching would improve student engagement and promote critical and creative thinking. In the focus groups, a participant shared that her goal was to “be relevant with emerging challenges in a fast changing world” in order to “benefit the learners.” The teachers believed in the possibilities that new literacies could “awaken” for their learners and for their country.

Significance
A vital issue for U.S. researchers collaborating in Kenya is to understand that PD must be adapted to Kenyan culture and contexts in order for educational changes to be internalized and then scaled. This understanding is vital for anyone promoting change with teachers cross-culturally. Ample time must be spent creating a sense of community among participants and the facilitators. This can be done before traveling (e.g, we held Skype planning sessions), during the PD session (e.g., we asked for participant feedback at least once a day) and following the PD (e.g., through continuing partnerships). We believe these insights have implications not only for the Kenyan context but for other cross-cultural research contexts as well.

Authors

• Shea Kerkhoff, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Hiller A. Spires, North Carolina State University

• Peter Wanyonyi