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This page introduces the main participants of the project. These include the City Academy Norwich, from which Year 7 students were selected for the project, and the Lycée Ahmadou Kourandaga de Zinder, their counterparts from Niger. It also contains an introduction to the Religion and Society Programme, the project's funding body.
City Academy
City Academy Norwich is a remarkable success story in British education. Barely three years ago, this establishment, formerly known as Earlham High School, was the fourth-worst performing school in England, 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 School has seen a spectacular turnaround. A range of measures were put into place, including the extension of the school day from 3pm to 3.40 pm, causing the percentage of pupils getting five top grade passes to rise from 15 to 40 per cent (5 per cent higher than the Government's base target). The latest Ofsted report was highly complimentary of the Academy's staff, vision and implementation:
"The governing body and the academy's leaders have a clear mission, to create an institution in which students make rapid progress in both their work and their personal development. This mission, a very highly motivated leadership team and staff body and imaginative strategic planning with highly challenging targets, together have enabled the academy to make considerable progress as an institution and students to make good progress as learners."
Top set pupils from Year 7 (about 11 years old) were selected from this outstanding Academy to participate in the Depicting Africa project. The aims of the project are very much in line with several targets set by both Ofsted and the City Academy Norwich: teaching pupils about other cultures, fighting discrimination and intolerance. The pupils were furthermore invited to function within a university atmosphere, greatly enhancing their knowledge and understanding of university life and teaching. This will undoubtedly impact on their further academic studies.
In this website we share the various lessons and activities carried out as part of the Depicting Africa project, with the hope that they can also be implemented in other secondary schools in the UK.
Lycée Ahmadou Kourandaga de Zinder
The Lycée Ahmadou Kourandaga de Zinder - named after one of the former sultans of the town, who battled against French colonial occupation - is a public secondary school founded in 1973. It lies in the western side of the town of Zinder and had 1387 students and 46 teachers at the last census. Admission is competitive, with an entry exam at around age 12, and the curriculum culminates with the award of the Baccalauréat after about 7 years. Success rate at the Baccalauréat is 50% on average, with high success (80%) in the mathematics/physics/chemistry route. This, like other further and higher institutions in Niger, depends of the Ministère des Enseignements Secondaire, Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique in Niger.
Religion and Society
This project was funded by the Religion and Society Research Programme (henceforth RSP), a collaborative venture between the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. Together these UK government-funded councils have contributed £12m to fund research of the highest quality on the interrelationships between religion and society. The Programme, which since it started in January 2007 has funded 75 projects across the arts, humanities and social sciences, was divided into three phases, with Phase 2 focused on Youth and Religion. It is under this umbrella that the City Academy/Lycée Ahmadou Kourandaga project was launched.
Projects funded by the RSP were intended to explore the importance of religion in British society and beyond. Projects ranged from academic research undertaken in England (e.g. An Analysis of the Aims, Practices and Models of Effectiveness in Religious Education across the UK, Professor James Conroy, University of Glasgow) to non-Western communities (Icons and Innovation in Southwest China's Religious Texts, Dr. E. Hsu, University of Oxford; Identity and Religion in Northern Kenya, Prof. John Mack, University of East Anglia). The award in 2008 of a grant to Dr. Anne Haour of the University of East Anglia and Dr. Benedetta Rossi of the University of Liverpool focused on the question of Hausa identity.
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The Hausa' comprise 24 million people living in West Africa, who share significant cultural, religious and linguistic ties, while maintaining a high degree of heterogeneity. Fascinated by this widespread identity, Dr. Anne Haour and Dr. Benedetta Rossi brought together workshop participants from Niger, Nigeria, the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, France and the UK to establish an international network of expertise on Hausa identity. This network has led to a landmark publication in Hausa studies featuring papers by participants entitled 'Being and Becoming Hausa' published by Brill in 2010, which has become the fourth bestselling volume in their African Social Studies series.
Leading on from this academic dialogue, it became clear that even though religion is often thought to be a significant factor in dividing and distinguishing between different communities, this is not a historical inevitability, as is clearly shown in the case of the Hausa communities. Dr. Anne Haour saw the potential of this project to break down stereotypes of religious extremism and ethnic determinism, notions that people are continually confronted with in Western media. In line with the research aims of the RSP, the Depicting Africa Project was accordingly established with funding from the RSP, to question the links between religion and society, both in West Africa and the United Kingdom.
Through a direct link with secondary school pupils in Zinder, Niger, pupils from the City Academy in Norwich were encouraged to directly address these questions themselves.
