Media
This page contains all the articles, links and original files that mention the 'Depicting Africa' project. Should you reference this website, please contact us so we can add your link to the site.
Times Educational Supplement
The Times Educational Supplement, with more than 2 million registered online users in 197 countries, is the world's largest online network of teachers. The project webpage can be accessed through the TES website, to ensure maximal dissemination of the teaching resources.
Dr. Anne Haour and Ms Hannah Swain from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and City Academy Norwich (CAN), respectively, have recently completed a project entitled 'Depicting Africa,' which was designed to challenge pupils' preconceived notions of identity, culture and religion in Africa. Funded by the UK government research councils through the ‘Religion and Society Research Programme’, the ‘Depicting Africa’ initiative built on the findings of a previous university research project led by Dr. Anne Haour, concerning identity and religion in the Hausa areas of West Africa.
Through ‘Depicting Africa’, Year 7 pupils from the secondary school City Academy Norwich were asked to confront clichés concerning radical Islamism and ethnic determinism in West Africa through a series of seminars, activities and experiential learning methods. The aim of this project was twofold: to question the often negative ideas that pupils tend to have about African societies, and to indicate how stereotypes can hinder people’s opportunities in life. The latter was related to university attendance, showing that stereotypes may create obstacles for those willing and able to attend higher education. The subtext of this project was to introduce pupils from this school with historically extremely low HE participation rates to university life and to an academic environment; this was done by allowing them to directly experience seminars, lecture theatres and talks at UEA’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. This experience was intended to raise aspirations and to help lower the threshold that some of these students may experience in their transfer from high school to university studies.
The participants were Year 7 pupils from the City Academy Norwich, a local school that has seen a spectacular turnaround in the last couple of years. Barely three years ago, this establishment formerly known as Earlham High School was the fourth-worst performing school in the country, with only six out of every hundred pupils obtaining five A* to C grade passes at GCSE, including maths and English. Since 2009, however, the percentage of pupils getting five top grade passes has risen from 15 to 40 per cent (5 per cent higher than the Government's base target).
Throughout the project, the Norwich pupils were paired with peers from the Lycée Amadou Kouran Daga Zinder, a secondary school in Niger. They directly communicated through Skype, email and letters. During the three months of the project, the students presented bulletins on the Egyptian cabinet, reflected on Hajj and Christian pilgrimage, researched Madagascar and Ethiopia, thought about what makes a person or an artefact English, helped cook a Nigerian meal, reflected on angels and light in Christianity and Islam, wrote descriptions of British Museum artefacts from the Hausa area, discussed how one defines ethnic identity and visited the UEA mosque. They designed questionnaires for their Nigérien peers, conducted secondary and primary research, and began to look critically at news reports which present only the glum from Africa.
The ultimate aim of this project is to disseminate a teaching resource to other schools in the United Kingdom, making it possible for them to confront their pupils with similar questions. A DVD will be created that contains Powerpoints presentations, questionnaires, lesson plans and materials, and suggested activities to ensure maximum usability.
Laura de Becker, UEA, with Anne Haour and Hannah Swain
The City Academy newsletter
This account was written by Hannah Swain to let the wider City Academy Norwich student and teaching body know about the project.
Click here
Ziggurat, Autumn 2012 - "Depicting Africa: Rethinking Images of the Continent"
Ziggurat is a magazine, published twice a year by the University of East Anglia. It contains a mix of news and features about the University of East Anglia and its alumni.
This June saw the conclusion of the Depicting Africa project I had been working on for the past three months with my colleague Hannah Swain from City Academy, a Norwich secondary school. It was a collaborative project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Religion and Society project, working with one Year 7 class (11-12 year olds) to try to challenge negative ideas they have about Africa and to think, more generally, about how stereotypes hinder opportunities.The City Academy schoolchildren were paired with peers from the Lycée Ahmadou Kourandaga in Zinder, Niger. They exchanged emails, letters, and spoke on Skype. The Norwich school children presented news bulletins on the Egyptian cabinet, helped cook a Nigerien meal, reflected on angels
and light in Christianity and Islam, thought about what makes a person or an artefact English, and discussed how one defines ethnic identity. They designed questionnaires for their Nigerien peers, conducted secondary and primary research, and began to look more critically at news reports which present only the glum from Africa.
At the beginning of the project, we had asked the children to give five words they associated with Africa. ‘Dirty water’, ‘poor’ and ‘hot’ came up a lot. At the end of the project we asked them the same question again and, unsurprisingly, the answers had changed, with ‘polite’ and ‘middle class’ brought up. “I thought they were going to be completely different to us… Now I know they are not so different after all”, commented one student.
It is of course never a one-way street. Perhaps it is not just the children who have changed outlook – all of us Africanists who took part have learnt a lot. In terms of skills, responding to deep metaphysical questions in a single sentence for fear of losing your audience was certainly something for me to work on. The impact of the aid sector in shaping children’s images of Africa was also something to reflect upon.
Over the coming months we will be designing a teaching resource based on the project, consisting of a DVD with lesson plans and Powerpoint presentations, which will be available to other secondary schools in the UK.
As an Africanist archaeologist, my current project is a five-year programme of excavation and survey entitled Crossroads of Empires, researching an area of the Niger Valley and the people who populated it between 1200 and 1850 AD.
Dr. Anne Haour
Access the original text here.
Broadview, October 2012 - "Rethinking images of Africa"
Broadview is the university's internal newsletter, which is published throughout the year and covers a wide range of subjects concerning UEA.
An ART project connecting school children in Norwich and Niger concluded over the summer.
The ‘Depicting Africa’ project was developed with City Academy and funded by AHRC.
The aim was to challenge negative ideas about Africa and to think about how stereotypes might hinder opportunities for African people.
The children exchanged emails, letters, and spoke on Skype. The Norwich schoolchildren presented news bulletins on the Egyptian cabinet, helped cook a Nigerian meal, reflected on angels and light in Christianity and Islam, thought about what makes a person or an artefact English, and discussed how one defines ethnic identity.
They designed questionnaires for their Nigérien peers, conducted secondary and primary research, and began to look more critically at news reports which present only negative events from Africa.
Dr Anne Haour (ART) said: “Over the coming months we will be designing a teaching resource based on the project, consisting of a DVD with lesson plans and Powerpoint presentations, which will be available to other secondary schools in the UK.”
Access the original text here.
London School of Economics - 26th of October 2012
The Impact of Social Sciences blog is run by the London School of Economics Public Policy Group, and is a hub for researchers, administrative staff, students, think-tanks, government, and anyone else interested in maximising the impact of academic work in the social sciences and other disciplines.
"Bringing research to a wider audience, and having an impact on the young, is easier when there is a meeting of the minds."
Sparking the imagination of teenagers is never easy, so Anne Haour was initially stumped when she was faced with writing plans for ‘youth impact’ into her research bid. Here she writes how seemingly arcane research made an exciting impact on young people in the UK.
Access the full article here.
Social Science for Schools
For those interested in accessing additional teaching resources to discuss social and economic issues in the classroom, click here. This link will take you to the website of the Economic and Social Research Council, which provides funding for research and training in the social sciences.
