We’re celebrating! FunDza has been selected as a finalist for The Tech Awards (Microsoft Education prize) for the second year in a row.
Microsoft Education Award celebrates organisations that seek to address barriers to educational opportunities that arise from social and economic injustices, learning disabilities, geographic isolation, and lack of resources of all types. Used creatively, technology can enhance the education of people of all ages, by enabling learning and improving the effectiveness of teaching. Technology has the promise of making lifelong learning a reality for more and more people around the world. Click here to find out more about the awards.
FunDza needed to submit two recommendations from people that work with the organisation as part of the application for the award. We are deeply grateful to Associate Professor Catherine Kell, Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town for her motivating letter of recommendation. Here follows what she wrote.
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I write in support of the FunDza Literacy Trust’s work in promoting reading and writing amongst South African teenagers through the creative uses of digital technologies, in particular, mobile phones. I have followed FunDza’s work since the early years of its inception and have been incorporating aspects of its work into my teaching and research for the past three years.
In their book called Digital Literacies, Jones and Hafner (2012) explain the massive changes to living, learning and interacting brought about by the new literacy practices associated with digital technologies and the importance of the read-write web. They suggest that these new digital literacy practices offer opportunities for people to do new things, to think in new ways, to express new kinds of meanings, to establish new kinds of relationships and be new kinds of people in the online spaces created through the innovative use of such technologies.
In my teaching at the University of the Western Cape I explore with my students what all these new possibilities mean for young people growing up in South Africa, and we use the FunDza platform as the means for discussing each of these possibilities in detail. I interact with around 150 students a year in these discussions and they in turn interact and report on the experiences of their siblings, friends and classmates.
They feel that they can do new things with the FunDza platform on their phones. Growing up in poor communities there have been few resources for reading. With FunDza, students say they love the intimacy of reading a cliff-hanger type story on their phone and they don’t have to turn the light on at night. (In South Africa most families sleep many to one room.) The stories keep them gripped as they read literally phone in hand, head under the pillow, while walking between rooms, while catching the train. They say they would never carry a book around with them like that! The clever idea of delivering an installment of the story each day for a week keeps them hooked – the students say they are literally waiting on tenterhooks for the new chapter to arrive. Suddenly, they are readers.
In the townships and shanty-towns of South Africa’s cities and against the backdrop of the trauma of the history of apartheid, the pain of poverty and inequality, and an education system that continues to treat children as blank slates needing to be filled with rote learning, the FunDza stories come right into young people’s lives in intimate and compelling ways and sparkle with possibilities. Young people say that the FunDza platform enables them to think in new ways. Suddenly, there is the possibility that they could become writers too! Authors are no longer just upper-class, educated people from the US or Europe. Authors can look and sound just like they do, and can write stories about their own daily lives and challenges. I have had a number of students ask if they can get in touch with the FunDza Trust so that they can offer their stories for consideration. FunDza is growing communities of writers.
The students laugh as they start to interact through commenting on the stories. They are able to express new meanings! At last, they can write in their own language, the hybrid, playful remixes of the local dialect of Kaaps Afrikaans, the mixing with other national languages like isiXhosa, the ‘textese’ that rolls off their fingers as they respond quickly to the events in the story, writing with a fluency they have seldom experienced in their school classrooms. Who would have thought, they ask, that there could be a space for such playful and passionate engagement with stories, a space for their own voices to be heard and opinions to count? They establish new kinds of relationships as they start to interact, becoming ‘FunDza Fanz’, contributing their own ideas and meeting online with other youth from all over the country. They love to scroll up and down the screen, to see if their friends have responded, and, unlike with traditional books, they can search for the names of their friends who have commented and for points they may have overlooked or forgotten. FunDza is reaching tens of thousands of young people in South Africa and more widely across southern Africa, and it is creating a sense of a public sphere, one that is a little transgressive and highly in tune with the life experiences of young people. FunDza knows how to keep its Fanz.
Finally, students agree that the new literacy practices of a platform like FunDza’s do enable them to be new kinds of people, young people who feel that they have possibilities and choices, that they have voices and that there is a space that’s for them, of them, with them, and it moves with them! This is not an easy thing to achieve, but FunDza achieves it with absolute dedication and with great panache. I could not recommend it more highly.