Reading to Learn Africa Inaugural Conference 2015

After several years of talking about a conference in Africa to showcase the work done by Reading to Learn in South and East Africa, the Inaugural conference took place on 28 and 29 August 2015 in Pietermaritzburg - the "sleepy hollow" where RtL started more than 10 years ago.
The conference was held at St Nicholas Diocesan School, with 164 delegates attending.  Most of these were teachers - those who work at the coal-face and try to put into practice the policies.  The conference was a great learning time for all and was enjoyed by all.

Keynote Speakers

Claire Acevedo is an Australian educator now based in the United Kingdom where she is in receipt of a full-time funded PhD scholarship from the The Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET) at the Open University. Her research focuses on developing teachers’ knowledge about language as a tool for professional development. She concurrently
provides educational services to schools and education sectors across Europe (in three languages); teacher professional development, project management and curriculum resource development using multimedia. She is an experienced in-service teacher educator with a strong background in secondary school teaching and leadership which has been enhanced by experience in primary schools, adult education and the tertiary sector. Her area of interest is literacy education and she has become an expert in using Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday) via “Sydney School” Genre pedagogy (Martin & Rothery) to improve reading and writing outcomes for under achieving students in all areas of the school curriculum. She has collaborated with Dr David Rose, University of Sydney, over more than a decade on the latest research into Genre based reading and she specialises in delivering the Reading to Learn literacy acceleration program to teachers and teacher educators. She is the co-founder and deputy chair of Reading for Life (http://reading4life.org) a non-profit association that promotes social justice in society and equity in education all over the world.


Find Clare's Keynote address here: Keynote Address

The East Africa Contingent

We are privileged to have representatives from the Aga Khan Foundation SESEA joining us at the conference.
They are:
Rupert Corbishley - Regional Senior Programme Officer, Education
Francis Kalu  - SESEA Kenya
Rosemary Oyollo - SESEA Uganda
Patrick Ngowi - SESEA Tanzania
Isaac Musoke - SESEA Kenya

Venue

The Conference will be held at St Nicholas Diocesan School, 34 Jabu Ndlovu Street, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.  The Reading to Learn community is grateful to the school for their support and generosity.

Programme

Papers included:

RtL and CAPS – how using the RtL methodology not only fulfils the requirements of CAPS but exceeds it

Reading for Children – an approach used by the Aga Khan Foundation in East Africa and Central Asia to help parents read to and with their children

Scaffolding Academic Literacy using the Reading to Learn methodology

RtL and Maths – a methodology which helps learners understand and memorise the proceedures for algorithms

Family Literacy as a tool for reading development

The impact on using the RtL methodology on Grade 6 and 7 writing in a township school

Reading to Learn in isiZulu and Afrikaans

Digital Storytelling 


Plus workshops and movies of teachers working at different levels

Other presentations (Click to access)
Mark and Tracy Millin
Fiona Beal - Digital Storytelling

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