All of us at FunDza were excited to have received a grant from the National Arts Council to run our ‘Me With You’ writing workshop and mentorship project this year.
The project was envisaged as two sets of face-to-face special writing workshops in Cape Town and Durban that would culminate in a writing mentorship programme. For this three writers from the workshops would be mentored to develop a story to be published as our high quality professional weekly stories.
We were all set to go: partner sites had been confirmed, invites for participants were about to go out… and then Covid-19 hit and we found ourselves in lockdown.
Given that it seemed like we would need to quickly adapt to physical distancing as the new reality, we knew that merely shifting dates for the workshops wouldn’t necessarily work.
So, we decided to see how we could take our writing workshops online.
We’ve spent the last six weeks planning for this and working out how the process will change for delivery in a virtual way, starting in the first week of June.
Rather than the 30 participants in two locations, we’ll now be reaching 25 participants virtually. Instead of running the workshops as an intensive two-day process, we’re now planning for an extended programme that runs over two weeks.
While the original worries were around a suitable site, transport, and refreshments… now we need to think about data and devices, and how to create a supportive environment despite the physical distance. And, how to adapt a face-to-face programme into something that is engaging using a range of technologies.
This is how we’ve approached the changes.
In the original plan we were going to work with partners to bring together the participants. Now, we’ve used our strong FunDza Fanz base of writers to select 25 young people who have already submitted writing through our platform. It has been very exciting getting hold of them and hearing their enthusiasm for the opportunity, for as a virtual library we don’t often have close contact with our audience.
We want the participants to feel part of a group, and to interact with each other in some – albeit limited – way. So one of the components of the workshop is using a video conferencing platform where participants can see one another and read their work. The platform we are using is the new ‘Veedo’ – for this the data is reverse-billed, so the host pays for any of the data costs for the service.
But of course we need to get them to do the writing, and we cannot rely on virtual workshops where connectivity can be a problem, and participants have to refer to course material – not easy to arrange during a virtual meeting – so the actual assignments and course content have been collated into one of our online courses. We have made some technical changes to our online course platform so that long form answers can be submitted. We are testing the course with staff members to check that the instructions are clear, and that it is easy to submit work.
And then of course we need to send reminders of meetings, and work, and general info – and so we are also using WhatsApp. This is also where we can send enrichment videos and texts for participants to enjoy. We are testing this too with our (longsuffering) staff members, checking that we are not bombarding them with too much information.
We have also decided to include one-on-one interactions between a staff member and a participant to ensure that we do have some level of personal contact, as so much of the richness from workshops comes from the informal interactions over tea, or in chats about the participants’ work. We cannot replicate that, but we want each participant to feel ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ by us, even if we just have one or two individual ‘check-ins’ per course.
So we are ready to begin on our new pilot programme. Watch this space to see how it works!
PS: To get a sneak preview of what some of content is like for participants, check out Zilungile Zimela performing her poem ‘I am a house on fire’ here. This will be sent via WhatsApp as part of the course programme.