Michael Wessells, in Child Soldiers, Peace Education, and Postconflict Reconstruction for Peace, suggests that literacy is essential in helping former child soldiers reintegrate into civilian life and build positive futures.  In an attempt to assist with former child-soldiers’ reintegration into society, I traveled to Palisa District, Uganda, where I taught 350 children in a one-room-school house. There, I taught literacy skills, which in Uganda consist of English language proficiency in reading, writing and speaking.  However, the consequences of their literate development were rather steep, and the costs were many.  In this presentation, I explore the costs of literacy for Ugandan children, including:

Cold hard cash: While primary education in Uganda is, in theory, free, many children are unable to attend classes due to lack of finances for such items as books, pens and pencils, and mandatory uniforms (without which, students are not allowed into the classroom).   Secondary education is a luxury that few can afford, but, as one student stated, “Without education, I have no chance of a good future; I will become only a digger.”
 
Recolonization:  All formal education in Uganda is conducted in English, therefore, Ugandans must adopt the language of their colonizers. To be successful in this setting, they also adopt pseudo-British sensibilities at the expense of their tribal heritage.

Abduction: In Uganda, seventy-five percent of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is comprised of abducted children. Many of these children were/are abducted from the classroom or on the way to school because LRA leaders intentionally prey on school children, assuming that they are intelligent and will make better soldiers.

In choosing to live in the village with my students, I was able to develop relationships that are ongoing.  In this presentation, I will share my personal experiences teaching students who, regardless of the cost, are desperate to obtain “those skills, knowledge, and practices that are needed to function successfully” (Freire).  I will also supplement my presentation with photographs of and writings by my students.

In Northern Uganda, seventy-five percent of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is comprised of abducted children and youth. In many cases, children’s involvement in combat “has obstructed their education—while such atrocities as rape, watching families being murdered, or being forced to be child soldiers has left lasting trauma” (Reynolds). However, Michael Wessells, in his article Child Soldiers, Peace Education, and Postconflict Reconstruction for Peace, suggests that education or literacy is essential in helping these children reintegrate into civilian life and build positive futures.

This paper explores the practical realities of literacy education within a postconflict environment.  I share my experiences teaching writing to former LRA child-soldiers at Living Hope College, located in a village outside Mbale, Uganda. In an attempt to teach literacy skills and assist with their reintegration, I chose to live in the village with the students. Both living and teaching conditions in this context are extreme: There is no running water or electricity; there is a severe lack of basic school supplies such as textbooks, paper, and pencils; there is excessive classroom overcrowding—sometimes with a 75:1 student to teacher ratio. In addition, the literacy classrooms at Living Hope College are populated with students who are victims of prolonged and pervasive trauma.

The paper analyzes my own attempts to develop a practical, context-sensitive teaching approach. I argue that when teaching in extreme environments, the following pedagogical principles are crucial to reintegration; building positive futures; and overall learning and literacy of traumatized populations:

1. Because war-affected children can exhibit aggressive or withdrawn behavior, teachers in extreme teaching environments must educate themselves on symptoms of trauma and how it can impact learning.

2. Teachers must not categorize students, but should rather perceive each student’s individual strengths. Each traumatized or war-affected student has had different life experiences. To simply view individuals as “poor child-soldier orphans” would not only reduce the students to one-dimensional stereotypes, but would effectively render the teacher an ideologue.

3. While trust is extremely hard to restore in former child soldiers, teachers needs to create a safe place in which students can learn. In Overcoming the Trauma of War: Literacy Challenges of Adults Learners, an interviewed teacher states “Sometimes being a good teacher means being a friend, co-learner, and counselor […] we have to give these students an opportunity to express their perceptions and feelings of isolation and uprootedness.”

4. To establish effective classroom practices, a teacher cannot be tied to a set curriculum, but instead, remain flexible and innovative.  In his book English for Life?—Teaching English as a second language in Sub-Saharan Africa with special reference to Uganda, G. P. McGregor states, “If we teach our English with energy, imagination, and organization, we will not only bring our students pleasure and examination success. We will enrich their lives” (p. 25).

Finally, sharing photographs and samples of student writing, the paper will analyze successful—and unsuccessful—methodologies for extreme teaching environments and discuss how similar methodologies might be applicable to teaching traumatized populations in the United States.  To display these photographs I will need a projector and screen.

For this panel, we will examine what theologian Brian McLaren coins “the Christian rhetoric of exclusion” and its prominence in Christian media. We contend that typical heaven-and-hell dichotomies within evangelical pop culture obscure Christianity’s message of love. We also posit that Christian media’s embrace of extreme Arminianism—of personal agency and free will—portrays all physical ailments as the consequence of individual sinfulness. We further propose that such rhetorical Arminianisms equate religious experience to personal buying power. Healing and salvation are the commodities, and faith—by means of monetary donation—is the new currency within sermonic rhetoric.

We will showcase video clips from sermons and films, thus giving our audience a fuller sense of faith-healing rhetoric within Christian pop culture.

Speaker 1—Melanie Yergeau: “The New Thomases? Aimee Semple McPherson and the Rhetoric of Exclusion in the Sermons of Benny Hinn”

Rhetoricians and religious scholars often blame Foursquare church-founder Aimee Semple McPherson, with her fervent 1920’s radio evangelism and glamorous mega-churches, for Benny Hinn’s modern-day “miracle” antics. Excluded from feminist ministerial circles and demonized as the faith-healing Satan of the Great Depression, McPherson’s media legacy has been one of scandal—her faked kidnapping and her three marriages. Speaker 1 will compare McPherson’s book of sermons, This Is That, to the faith-healing rhetoric of Benny Hinn. While both evangelists commodify faith and healing with their pseudo-cultish, ableist rhetoric, McPherson’s depiction of “faith as currency” is often decontextualized when conflated with Hinn’s ministries.

Speaker 2—Lorelei Blackburn: “Cinematic Sublimity: The Exclusion of Love in Contemporary Faith-Healing Media”

Tom Sine, in “Who is Tim LaHaye,” declares that the Left Behind series “tend[s] to foster both an eschatology of disengagement and the politics of fear,” neither of which are core tenets of evangelical Christianity. Using Edmund Burke’s “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” Speaker 2 will examine how some modern-day media evangelists use faith-healing propaganda to instill fear and false agency in their audiences. Speaker 2 will further posit that the use of the sublime, when manipulated by said evangelists, irresponsibly subjugates love as a minority discourse, reversing the primary foundation of Christianity, which places love at a premium.

In this session, the presenter will begin by discussing successful—and unsuccessful—methodologies for building relationships with traumatized students to create effective learning environments. She will share personal narratives based on her experiences teaching former child-soldiers and street kids in Eastern Uganda.  Participants will then be given the opportunity to read and respond to Ugandan students’ work, which often reflects the trauma and horrors of war, poverty, and abandonment.  Because the subject matter is often horrific and repulsive, the presenter will offer suggestions on how to ethically respond to both form and content. 

 Finally, to foster first-hand understanding of the cultural, social, and language needs of refugee populations, and to “come together as community,” attendees will participate in a real-time webcam session with EFL students in Uganda. This diverse group, former child-soldiers and former street-kids, has agreed to tell their stories and field questions, allowing participants to virtually travel to and inhabit “those less traveled places.”  In case of unsolvable technical difficulties, the presenter will share both digitally recorded and written personal narratives by Ugandan students. 

This paper examines how modern-day Christian evangelists draw on the Book of Revelation to use apocalyptic media, including sermons, films, books, podcasts and websites, to instill fear in their audiences, thus eliciting a contrived need for salvation.  This paper further posits that the use of the sublime, while manipulated by Christian evangelists, and used as both a viable means of proselytizing and as a conversionary tool, irresponsibly subjugates love as a minority discourse, effectively reversing the primary foundation of Christianity, which places love at a premium.

I contend that further exclusion of scripture from the rhetorical canon will lead to additional biased and constrained theories that do not authentically reflect reality.  This paper briefly examines new discoveries in quantum physics and neuroscience, to illustrate that, as during the Renaissance, rhetoric is again positioned on the cusp of another paradigm shift—this time away from empiricism and toward holism. In this paper, I maintain that faith in a higher power and in the veracity of scripture cannot be considered less scholarly than the acceptance of an unsubstantiated empirical rhetoric.  This paper also challenges the common mindset that would subordinate pre-classical Hebraic scripture and categorically dismiss it as unreasonable. Instead, I argue that rhetoric and faith are not mutually exclusive; scripture is a reasonable scholarly rhetoric and as such, should be canonized and recognized as a viable—and even requisite—rhetorical discourse.

In the past year I have traveled to:

• Michigan
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Missouri
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• Sonoma County, California
• New Hampshire
• Maine
• Mississippi
• New Orleans
• Alabama
• Kentucky
• Uganda
• Rome
• Ethiopia

Hey, no wonder I’m tired!  Wonder where I’ll be off to next… Until then, though, it’s nice to rest my head on my old, familiar pillow… 

If you’d like to see photos from my recent trip to San Francisco and Sonoma Valley, visit my photo album (link to your right or below).  http://lorelei.kuiama.net/photos/main.php/v/California/