In July 2009 I had the privilege of catching up with old friends and meeting some new faces when Jonathan Thurston, his wife Kristi, and past and present students arrived in Ghana to carry out a book making project with students at a primary school in Elmina, in the Central Region of Ghana. What’s so special? They use simple, portable technology to inspire creativity and facilitate learning among Ghana’s poorest students. And they use ‘social media’ to establish networks with like-minded individuals and organizations internationally, enhancing development opportunities and increasing the possibility of involving other communities and countries as the organization grows. I interviewed Jonathan, the founder, about 2009 summer’s project and the organization behind the project: The Intl School of Art, Business and Technology (ISABT). Founded in 2006 by Jonathan Thurston, Trudy Obazee, former Chair of the Accounting Department at Albright College, and Sarah Philbrick, ISABT's mission is to operate educational programs in Ghana and give children an opportunity to become authors. You can view some of the books that students wrote in July 2009 at the Ghana Reale Library. For those interested, download Reale Writer from the Reale site. Kojo's story We’re working with schools and we’re trying to work with the PTA to sustain our program. We have some help from other NGOs like Global Mamas with housing or advice. We have people that we work with in Ghana here that can go around and make appointments before we arrive to save us a lot of time. You know, sometimes things take a while so if we can get the ball rolling a month before we come and jump right in when we arrive. Yes, former teachers. We have one who was actually hired to run the book making program. And what I’m trying to do is put our research from this summer and from the past together to educational units and share it with teachers across developing countries and solve their problems before they have them, like an issue with ink or different technology issues or equipment. Ideally you would have the educational units ready and all you need is a working printer and a working laptop that can run the software, and some paper and some crayons. If you have that, you can run it. A video of 2008's visit with the teachers. Last summer I came for a week and saw the possibility and impact that it had. One school I went to, Kakum Oda, had no power and very few books and resources. I only had a week and I had asked for just two students to work with to see. On the first day I sat down with the head teacher and greeted her and said, ‘Thank you for working with me, so, it would be great to meet the two students.’ And she started laughing. She said, ‘There’s more than two.’ I said, ‘Really, more than two?’ I thought, maybe, there’d be four or six. No. Every kid in the school wrote a story already! There were over a hundred stories. They all came up all of a sudden and put them on the desk. Just from hearing about the project they’d all written a story. I couldn’t do all the stories last summer but I what I saw was that people want to do them. So we’re working through those stories and I have my college kids illustrating them, putting them into software—we’re working our way through that pile. Click You Tube to watch the Elmina Authors at work and interviewed. Elmina authors So what’s happening this summer? This summer we have a new program where we have writing instruction. It’s about how to write a story, descriptive language, setting, character, and plot. One thing I noticed with the pile of stories was that there was little structure so one thing we did this summer was introduce story-writing instruction—and they totally get it. From a few paragraphs to pages—we’re seeing very descriptive and rich stories. I want to read that story. And maybe some will be copying from one at the beginning, we’re all going to sit and read them together and if we get a story twice, we’ll know. We’re still learning, but when I came last summer one thing I noticed is that a lot of the stories didn’t have a beginning, middle or an end. For a well-rounded story you have to introduce the story, tell the story, and then tie it up at the end. We talk about that during the teaching sessions. I’ve been doing a lot of research into folk stories as well for a couple of years now, especially from West Africa. You know Ananse? When I see an Ananse story, I know, often, whether it’s an original. If they do want to tell an Ananse story that’s fine, but we encourage them to make it their own a little bit and enrich it to make it different. Click on the link to watch the children in the Book Making Project.