Project(s):
Under the guidance of a mentor from CAVUC, the intern worked with all active members of CAVUC in visiting and identifying vulnerable children in Dalun and neighboring communities. Since CAVUC is a relatively new and promising initiative, the intern and CAVUC primarily focused their attention on collecting and organizing data, creating an immediate and long-term action plan for fundraising and laying the foundation for a website that will bring more awareness to the important cause.
Working with CAVUC, I was really grateful to experience firsthand the challenges of starting an NGO. I was given the opportunity to brainstorm funding options, reconfigure a model, and interact with incredibly passionate actors for change. This internship certainly helped foster my passion for educational issues and my engagement with educational bureaucracy. I have a new admiration for supporters of education and especially teachers of northern Ghana, who are devoted to their jobs.
~Rebecca, CAVUC Summer 2013 Intern
Dalun Community Youth House
Background:
The Dalun Community Youth House is the “hub of youth activity” in Dalun. It houses initiatives that include an all-girls soccer team, collaborative workshops on sports development, youth community organizing and many more!
For more information, please go to: http://blogs.haverford.edu/titagya/2012/07/10/youth-center/
Project(s):
Given the nature of its name, the Dalun Community Youth House naturally involved all interns. All interns collaborated with Youth and Life Improvement Programme (YLIP), a young people/youth-led organization that addresses the disparities young people face when it comes to college readiness and access, young people’s oppression from older generations, issues of environmental sustainability and women’s leadership. YLIP above all saw young people as agents of change in the Dalun community. The partnership with YLIP focused specifically on preparing young people for college by networking with stakeholders in higher education and the community, building the professional images of the young people and working to craft the image of the entire organization on social media.
Through [YLIP], I found an amazing group of individuals… Together – we identified the need for a mentorship component to YLIP that would provide participating members with mentors from the community. We built a working list of possible individuals who could be potential mentors and spent the summer reorganizing the structure of YLIP, creating concrete immediate goals, and estabslishing connections to other individuals/organizations in the community that could further this vision.
~Emilyn, Summer 2013 Research Assistant
Dalun ICT Centre
Background:
Dalun ICT Centre is the entrepreneurial endeavor of Safianu Mahama, an ambitious Dalun community leader and member of the Titagya Schools’ administrative team. It was an idea that started in 2010 and came into fruition in August 2013. With the help from contacts in Denmark and local partners, Safianu successfully debuted the ICT Centre in Dalun. It is an important addition to the community because it is the first of its kind in the area (the nearest ICT is an hour away by bus) and it will serve to increase computer literacy and services in Dalun. The ICT Centre is equipped with about 20 computers, a scanner, copier machine, printer and Wi-Fi.
For more information, please go to: http://btghana.wordpress.com/tag/safianu/
Project(s):
This past summer, no intern worked on a specific project related to the ICT Centre because it was undergoing preparations for its grand opening to the entire community, which took place in August. However, it is worth mentioning that the Director of the ICT Centre, Safianu Mahama, played a crucial role in overseeing the well-being of all Dalun Community Internships and participants involved. Also, the ICT Centre was a focal point for all projects as it was used to print lesson plans, hold meetings and to complete social media and networking tasks for CAVUC and YLIP. A high point over the summer was being able to celebrate with the entire community the grand opening of the ICT Centre at the very end of the internship experience.
The opening of the ICT Centre was a highlight from this summer. From previous experiences in Dalun, I have had the pleasure of seeing this project unfold before my eyes. Already, it has proven to be useful in ways that I never imagined! There were many days where I used its services to print lesson plans and would find fellow interns there working with YLIP, children self-learning on a computer or friends of the community using the scanner for official documents. The ICT centre is definitely an attraction in Dalun that brings all walks of life together!
~Esteniolla, Summer 2013 Student Coordinator
2012 360 Retrospective Group Reflection
“What did you learn about ‘Learning and Narrating Childhoods’ in this 360? What conceptual framework have you constructed with which to answer this question?” The professors asked the students to answer this question in final course projects. We scaffolded the process by holding class and individual sessions to brainstorm and refine topics, which students could do singly or jointly. We also asked them to write informally about their conceptual frameworks and to submit annotated bibliographies of linked research and theoretical material. Some students wrote about the dynamics of photography — its production and reception — in this context. Some explored challenges of curriculum design informed by course studies. Some investigated the life trajectories of subgroups, women or men. The projects were varied, engaged, and thoughtful. As a group, though, they seemed halting, reticent. It was almost as if our students feared digging in and seeing things as deeply through as they could, for then they would have to show and tell; to find the words to make and defend an argument; to tell a story rich enough to form a platform for refutation.
This Prezi presentation seeks to figure out what the projects do say about what students learned from this experience. At the same time, it is a venue for students to take a look at a composite of their learning and say, now, what they can about it. To say: I learned this or I realized that. Two of us, Alice (a professor) and Ashley (a student), selected quotations from the final projects to represent the key issues they addressed. We then shared the Prezi with the class, and asked students to write brief statements now, from the distance of a couple of months, saying something concrete about what they have learned about these issues. The pictures show objects of art and craft that we bought when in Ghana. We decided that given the power dynamics involved in photography (which several in the class focused on in their final projects), it was better to use photographs of works that Ghanaians had entered into public markets, and that we had come by through trade, rather than solely through the “taking” of a picture.
We hope you will learn and help us keep learning from this retrospective of our 360 final projects.