The first workshops

The time flies and although I can’t believe it, already almost two months full of new experiences and encounters have passed since we arrived in Ghana. Slowly I start feeling at home in this place. Everyday life has begun and luckily also the workshops are getting good and successful. Unfortunately this has not always been the case – the first lessons didn’t really work the way we would have liked them to.

Although we were excited and motivated when doing the preparations for our first workshop, many things didn’t happen the way we planned them. We had the impression that the students were either not very motivated or extremely shy as they did merely answer our questions and only told us they wanted to do “excursions” and “fun games” when we asked them to express their wishes for the workshop.

Moreover we often had some difficulties with the language. The students didn’t understand our “German English” and we had problems with their Ghanaian accent. Sometimes they even completely misunderstood what we were actually trying to explain to them. For example, when we told them to collect several ideas for topics for this year’s youth magazine, they surprisingly came up with a whole text about one single topic.

Also our “methods of teaching” often weren’t really understood. When we tried to work on topics with the help of “mind maps” and “brain storming”, the students seemed clueless and obviously didn’t understand. At first we thought that they simply didn’t talk because they had no ideas concerning the topic. It was only after the lesson that we realized that the “methods of teaching” were completely different in Ghana and that they had never heard of things like “mind maps” before.

Because all these little difficulties, we talked and discussed a lot with our mentor Scheck. Now, finally, everything seems to work better. We try to use simple language, avoid confusing methods and examples and let the students repeat the task in their own words. Moreover we try to minimize the theoretical parts in our lessons and write texts instead. This is what we also tried in our last lesson about “short stories”. After short explanations about the structure of a short story they were supposed to write their own texts. We were surprised how everyone became quiet and eagerly they started writing.

After this small success we are now sure that also the next workshops will be good and that the students and we will get used to each other.