Abstract
In this article, we provide a reflection on a community storytelling project that took place at Kūtha Primary School, located in Kitui, Kenya in August of 2023. The project brought together faculty members at two Florida institutions in the U.S. with students and teachers at Kūtha Primary to develop and publish stories written by youth in grades sixth through eighth. By working together to develop the project objectives, mentor youth to write, edit, and illustrate their stories, and collaborate with a visual designer to publish the stories into a book that was shared with the community, our team learned about the value of collaboration and sustainability in developing transnational community-engaged projects. The article also emphasizes the need to embrace a multi-epistemological framework when developing and implementing community-engagement literacy projects.
Introduction: A Multi-Epistemological Approach to Community Engaged Research
In “Community Engagement with a Postcolonial, African-Based Relational Paradigm,” Bagele Chilisa, Thenjiwe Emily Major, and Kelne Khudu-Petersen (2017) describe a “multi-epistemological” approach to research, an approach that acknowledges multiple ways of being, doing, and seeing. Engaging multiple epistemologies allows space for project collaborators to effectively work together in the co-creation of knowledge. Multi- epistemological approaches are critical to all community engaged work, particularly when bringing together communities from different backgrounds to participate in work related to storytelling, identity, and writing. Similarly, in “African Rhetoric as an Emergent Subfield,” Nancy Henaku and Ruby Pappoe (2022) invite scholars to take a multilayered approach to reimagine African rhetoric, stating, “This requires a rethinking of the meaning of ‘African’ in ‘African rhetoric’ and a consideration of ‘African rhetoric’ in less monolithic perspectives, but rather as a tapestry of multilayered cultures, histories, and traditions” (p. 173). While Henaku and Pappoe’s (2022) essay focuses on rhetoric, their proposed methodology can be applied to researching and teaching literacy and writing in African contexts. Further, in “Towards an Indigenous African epistemology of Community in Education Research,” Philip Higgs (2010) calls for “African community based research” which he argues should be conducted from a trans-traditional vantage (emphasis in original), an approach to research that integrates non- African knowledge systems with Indigenous African knowledge systems (p. 2419).
In writing studies and related fields, multiple streams of research have focused on the importance and value of multi-epistemological approaches to community-engaged storytelling projects. For example, Steven and Sara P. Alvarez’s (2016) “La biblioteca es importante”: A Case Study of an Emergent Bilingual Public Library in the Nuevo U.S. South” documents how community-based writing projects in public spaces can help maintain students’ linguistic fluidity by reinforcing their ability to practice their heritage language. In “#Say[ing] HerName as Critical Demand: English Education in the Age of Erasure,” Tamara Butler (2017) advocates for the importance of building a “plurilogue” among Black and decolonial feminist scholars to “recognize the intricate links between Black women’s lived experiences and political activism” (p. 153). These scholars recognize that community- engagement practices must embrace multi-epistemological frameworks that centralize positionality and power in collaborative research.
In this article, we provide an example of a community-engaged writing project that leverages a “multi-epistemological” approach to research while also intentionally centering African epistemologies. Through this collaboration, we highlight how transnational literacy projects can expand our field’s understanding of writing, rhetoric, and literacy beyond white/Western/monolingual ideologies.
Project Positionality: Culturally-Sustaining Pedagogies in Kitui, Kenya
Weeka nesa (call)
Niwewayika (response)
Weeka nai (call)
Niwewayika (response)
In Esther’s community, Kūtha, the above call and response exchange is typically used in public discourse or deliberations to remind and encourage people to do good to others because the good will return to them. Loosely translated to English, it goes something like this:
If you do good (call)
You do it to yourself (response)
If you do bad (call)
You do it to yourself (response)
The Writing Our Dreams project was about doing good for Esther’s community, Kūtha. This project is not an isolated case; it is part of Esther’s ongoing community service work, an act of reciprocity to give back to a community that has given her so much. Every summer, when Esther travels to Kenya, she always asks herself, what can I do for my community? Will it bring good?
As we begin, it’s important for us to explain why we worked on this project together. First, we have a relationship that stems back to when we began our graduate program in 2013. Esther was already in the program, and she served as a mentor to Victor and Laura. Esther and Laura have been engaging in discussions about language and community since then, and we continue learning more about language every time we have a conversation. This project is not something that started with a research agenda. As we will share throughout this article, this project is rooted in relationships–both with the youth and teachers that we collaborated with, and with each other.
Writing our Dreams is a transnational community literacy project that emerged after Laura and Esther visited the Kūtha Primary School, Kenya, in the summer of 2021. As previously mentioned, we all went to grad school together and have maintained a close bond as friends and familia-from-scratch. During graduate school, Victor and Laura participated in an ongoing community literacy project with Latinx and Indigenous youth in the Lansing, Michigan, U.S. area, where we attended grad school. Our mentor, Dr. Estrella Torrez, oversaw the project and mentored us to engage youth in literacy work. As rhetoric and writing scholars, in some form or fashion we have a vested interest in literacy and writing education, particularly in how this work can be approached from a justice and community-centered perspective. Esther was familiar with the work Victor and Laura did in Lansing with local youth and wondered what such a project would look like in her home community.
Thus, in the summer of 2021, Esther saw an opportunity to begin a project by inviting Laura to visit her former primary school and talk to the students about writing. Esther has been contributing to her community and previous school for many years, always seeking to give back to the community that supports her. During the visit, Esther and Laura asked the teachers how they could support them given their expertise in writing and rhetoric. The teachers were interested in improving the students’ reading and writing literacies. The teachers made two requests: 1) help purchase a required textbook for teaching composition; and 2) conduct writing workshops for teachers to enhance their approach to teaching English composition. After returning to the United States, Esther and Laura shared with Victor the requests the teachers had made and we began to plan out the larger project. The first request to purchase textbooks was easy and straightforward, but the second request about conducting a workshop for teachers to teach writing was a more complex problem to solve. We had to think carefully about what to teach in the workshop, particularly how to ethically export U.S. composition to Kenya, more specifically to a rural context where students speak multiple languages, including but not limited to Indigenous languages like Kikamba, Swahili, and English.
The three of us have been trained in U.S. composition theories and pedagogies and have experience working with youth and community-engaged literacy projects. Yet, we wanted to remain conscious that the context of Kitui, Kenya is distinct from our previous training and experience. In Kitui, we would be working with a rural school and education system that Esther knew as a student but none of us had studied as adults. Furthermore, for Laura and Victor, the British colonial legacy and influence over schooling in Kenya was not something we knew personally nor studied at any point. As Mary N. Muchiri, Nshindi G. Mulamba, Greg Myers, and Deoscorous B. Ndoloi (1995), note, when North American understanding of writing is exported to international contexts, “it changes meaning and serves different needs in the new context” (p. 176). Thus, as we conceptualized our approach to this project, we kept this question in mind: How do we adapt and localize our training, experiences, and knowledge to the new setting of Kūtha Primary School in Kitui, Kenya in a way that is culturally relevant and sustainable?
There are two theories of literacy that initially influenced our thinking. One builds on the other and both try to consider the ways that literacy could bring community, context, and culture into literacy education. The first is culturally relevant pedagogy, coined by education scholar Gloria Ladson Billings in 1995. Billings (1995) sought to build on asset-based pedagogies by positioning the cultures that students bring with them into the classroom as a site of strength. Building on Billings’ work, education scholar Django Paris (2012) lovingly critiqued and pushed forward culturally relevant pedagogy to theorize culturally sustainable pedagogy, also known as CSP. According to Paris, CSP was established as a response to the question, “what is the purpose of schooling in pluralistic societies?” Paris (2012) identified a need to offer a change in stance and terminology in pedagogical theory and practice. Thus, culturally sustaining pedagogy “seeks to perpetuate and foster–to sustain–linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation. CSP positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits. Culturally sustaining pedagogy exists wherever education sustains the lifeways of communities who have been continuing to be damaged and erased through schooling” (Paris and Alim, 2014, p. 1).
Paris’ (2012) vision for culturally sustaining pedagogy has been influential to every part of our approach to writing pedagogy, especially for this project. We understand that teaching writing goes well with the idea of sustaining culture, especially in relation to the purpose of schooling in a pluralistic society. In our approach to teaching writing, we want to combine what we know from our discipline of writing and rhetoric with a way to frame writing as an opportunity to be additive for our students’ lives and learning.
At the same time, as we began planning this project, we knew that the teachers we would work with in Kitui may need to be convinced that our approach would be beneficial in the long run. Like any writing teacher across the globe, our partners at Kūtha were focused on developing student writing mechanics. Perhaps this is the writing studies scholar’s biggest enemy: the question of how to teach grammar. But we understand where the question comes from and acknowledge that teachers are often assessed by their students’ ability to craft grammatically correct prose. We decided to frame our big writing project around the idea of creating a diagnostic that would allow the students to write about something meaningful but low stakes, which would give us and the teachers a starting point from which to frame the workshops we would design. The diagnostic would allow us to get a sense of the students as writers and understand their writing styles. We would then use this writing to teach the teachers the importance of writing as a process and to discuss how mechanics and grammar would become part of that process. This would give the teachers the professional development they sought, starting from the moment we gave students the prompt. This process gave us a common set of writing we could continue to discuss.
As we were brainstorming what the students could write about for the diagnostic, we remembered that when Laura and Esther visited Kūtha Primary in 2021, students shared stories about their dreams and aspirations. We then asked the coordinating teachers, Angela, Faith and Racheal, to ask the students to write and illustrate stories that showcase each students’ dreams and passions by responding to the following prompt:
Write a story about your hopes and dreams for the future. When you think about yourself in the future, what do you imagine? What do you want to do in the future? What do you hope for? How will you work to achieve your goals? Include a drawing with your story. You can draw anything that shows what your dreams and hopes are. Use your imagination and dream big!
The coordinating teachers shared the prompt with students in grades five, six, and eight. Along with the prompt, we invited students to write in any language and modality they wanted. Twenty-three students responded to the prompt by writing about their dreams to become doctors, pilots, teachers, musicians, lawyers, drivers, and much more. They also drew pictures to illustrate their dreams and hopes for the future. Leveraging the emphasis on multimodal composition that we see as writing instructors in the U.S., we asked students to provide illustrations for their stories as a way to create another entry-point for students to express their thoughts and ideas beyond the boundaries of any written language.
Although our initial goal was to use the stories as diagnostic writing, when we received the stories, we realized the students were not just good at writing, but were also very inspiring and had potential to do good in the community by inspiring current and future students of Kūtha. Thus, we decided that turning the stories into an edited collection to be printed and bound would be a way to preserve and honor the work that the youth had done while creating something the community could physically hold. With the help of a graphic designer that we had previously worked with, Valentina Sierra Niño, and Charles Mwongela, who was in Kitui and could help transcribe the stories and scan the students’ illustrations, we started to develop the book that could serve as inspiration for future generations of Kūtha Primary scholars and families.
After the book was finally published and shipped to Kitui, the entire Kūtha community–parents, government administrators, spiritual leaders, and Kūtha primary alumni–came together on August 4th, 2023 to celebrate with students during a book launch. This event was a celebration of students as authors, each with a copy of their own book to hold as proof of their authorship. Using the example of our mentor, Dr. Estrella Torrez, who has published multiple volumes of youth stories, titled Nuestros Cuentos (Our Stories), we followed a model that we knew would be effective in teaching students that they are writers. When youth are able to hold a book and find their name and words in it alongside their peers, they develop their ability as writers more than any grammar lesson. While we couldn’t be 100% sure this strategy would be effective in the new context of Kitui, we did trust the idea that valuing youth voices and creating an outlet to demonstrate to the youth that we valued their voices would be effective.
After completing the project, we asked the coordinating teachers to write reflections on their own findings, takeaways, and interpretations of the project. In this way, the teachers were both participants and co-creators of knowledge in this project, which is why we include their reflections in this paper. We also analyzed the student stories to see if there were any key takeaways that could inform how to design and implement future community literacy and writing projects in Kūtha. In the next section, we discuss themes and takeaways from this project, including the emphasis on writing processes that emerged from the workshop and the centering of African epistemologies in the development of community engagement projects.
Culturally Sustaining Writing Process Pedagogy
After several consultations with the teachers and studying the students’ stories, we decided to design three workshops that covered three topics: “writing as a process,” “peer reviewing and editing,” and “teacher feedback and assessment.” The teachers had shared with us that their typical approach to teaching writing is product-oriented, giving students a prompt to complete during one class period of 40 minutes. We designed a workshop that would raise their awareness that writing is a recursive process that goes through various stages of pre-writing, drafting, writing, rewriting/revising, and editing.
Before the scheduled workshop, we asked the teachers to read a two page article by Donald Murray (1972) on “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” Because Laura and Victor could not travel to Kenya in 2023, Esther facilitated the workshop. She began by facilitating a discussion of the reading. The teachers highlighted what they thought was of value from the approach and the challenges of adopting such a pedagogy in the Kenyan rural context. Next, the group discussed peer reviewing and peer editing and how students can help each other to develop their ideas and also peer review and edit each other’s essays. Further, teachers talked about how to assess students’ writing and offer constructive feedback. Most of the teachers expressed their frustration with their students’ writing in English. For example, Teacher Racheal’s reflection highlighted “poor second language acquisition skills” and “first language interference” as their biggest challenge in teaching English composition. More specifically, the teachers argued that the students’ English sounded like their mother tongue, Kikamba. In other words, the students literally translated Kikamba to English in their composition. To address this concern, the teachers shared that their feedback focuses on correcting grammar and sentence- level errors. Yet, even with this focus, the teachers confessed that the students kept repeating the same mistakes.
The writing prompt we used for this project, and giving students the opportunity to re-write and revise their stories, allowed us to learn more about students’ approaches to writing and the goals that Kūtha Primary students have for their education. While we told the students that they could write in any language they chose, including Kikamba, Swahili, and English, most students chose to write in English. As we learned through this project, while we can encourage or even welcome students to bring their languages, dreams, aspirations, and more into our classrooms, we cannot separate communicative practices and identities from the sociocultural context in which communication happens. Colonial, Western models of education impact writing instruction worldwide, positioning non-Western languages and cultural practices as inferior to standardized white Englishes. As Esther Milu (2017) notes, although Kenya “is a very linguistically diverse nation, feelings of shame, ambivalence, and negative attitudes toward ethnic languages and hybrid language practice still exist. Many Kenyans, as victims of colonial and Western imperialist agendas, suffer from linguistic inferiority and shame” (10). Students and teachers at Kūtha Primary are no exception; in addition to carrying the colonial baggage, they face many pressures, including the pressure of adhering to standardized communication practices and the pressure to succeed in their education. In fact, as we worked with teachers on this project, we realized that our own involvement and presence in this project, as U.S.-based academics, created additional layers of pressure for teachers and students as teacher Racheal reflects:
While English is the language of instruction, the main language spoken in the school and the community is Kikamba, everyone’s mother tongue. The students’ English always sounded like Kikamba. We call it “ Kikamba English” because students practice direct translation of Kikamba to English in their speaking and writing. While this is “acceptable” to us as teachers, we did not know how U.S. professors, like Drs. Esther, Laura and Victor would receive it. Since our students are constantly shamed by their peers and sometimes by us teachers for speaking and writing in Kikamba-English, asking them to contribute to this project, they had fears; they thought Drs. Esther, Laura and Victor will be disappointed by their bad English.
As evidenced in Racheal’s reflection, our researcher positionalities shifted how the project was received, even if one member of our research team is from the same community as our participants. Of course, our goal in this project was not to shift or change anything about our partners’ approaches. However, the emphasis on writing as recursive, and the opportunity to discuss and practice revision, provided a chance for all of us on the project team to discuss the role that writing plays in relation to students’ cultures and lives. As cultural rhetoricians who value and practice decolonial and Indigenous approaches to scholarship and teaching, we were very careful not to practice (Western) (epistemic) imperialism as we participated in this project. As we exported U.S. composition theories and pedagogies to a Kenyan context, we wanted to make sure we didn’t assume we are the experts on the subject. While the teachers valued the writing process pedagogy as evidenced in their reflections, many during the workshop acknowledged it was a challenge to implement in a local context because the Kenyan Language Arts curriculum does not create space and time for it. As one of the teachers, Angela, explained in her reflection on the project:
I had never taught writing by asking students to revise multiple drafts. I got frustrated by the process and my students got frustrated too because this was not our practice and experience. After attending Dr. Esther’s writing led seminar/workshop, which was such an engaging experience, I got to learn new writing techniques. Most importantly when I learned that writing is a process, I started to reflect on my experience mentoring students to write for the project; it began to make sense. I had unknowingly taught them to write their stories as a process!
Since the 1980s, scholars in writing studies have been theorizing students’ writing processes, developing curricula for fostering innovation, creativity, and engagement in writing courses through a growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity and community engagement. However, for much of this time, “the” writing process was envisioned as linear, assuming a white American and monolingual, mostly male and middle class learner who engaged in activities like brainstorming, drafting, editing, and revision. However, since the critical/cultural turn in writing studies, many scholars have been advocating for a re-imagining of “the” writing process to multiple writing processes that better account for the linguistic diversity of contemporary composition students. Likewise, multiple scholars continue advocating for writing pedagogies that allow for dynamic interpretations of what “the” writing process should look like and entail.
In our collaboration with Kūtha Primary, a context that is deeply influenced by British education systems, we learned that while the communicative practices of youth, teachers, and community members at the school are dynamic and have space for multiplicity, the writing curriculum implemented at many schools in Kenya does not follow a process-style approach. Instead, we learned from teachers that writing is often presented as a linear process that hinges on the assessment of a single final and polished draft. Teacher Angela continued to reflect on her key takeaways from the writing process pedagogy:
I learned that it takes time to teach writing so that the process and product become a success. It takes time for students to discover their ideas. No wonder my students took so long to decide what to write about. I learned that I should give my students time to explore their ideas first through different strategies before they can express them in written language. Further, students learn to organize their ideas through the process of writing and this can happen through the process of rewriting, a technique that I now believe defines a successful writing exercise. Looking back, the reason why 14 students backed out of the project is because their writing experience has always been focused on product; they knew writing in one sitting (40 minutes) will not allow them to produce a good product acceptable to Drs. Esther, Laura and Victor. Furthermore, looking back, I realize that I taught the 23 students writing as a process by giving them feedback on multiple drafts and having them help each through what we learned during the workshop is peer review and peer editing.
We are not at all suggesting that we “brought” writing processes to Kūtha Primary, or that we dramatically impacted writing pedagogy at the school. What we learned, however, is that a “multi- epistemological” approach to this collaboration made space for multiple writing pedagogies to be placed in conversation. The recursive and collaborative process that came out of this project was not only due to the Western ideals of writing instruction, such as the American writing process approach, but rather based on the trust that allowed teachers, researchers, and students to try new approaches and ideas as we collaboratively fostered a love of writing. Teacher Faith’s reflection in particular shows that while the writing process approach in completing the project initially presented a challenge, in the end, it turned out to be a worthwhile learning experience for both students and the teachers:
When we approached our first set of learners (eighth grade) and explained what was expected of them-what to write about and what to highlight in their stories, they were excited but we could tell they were nervous. After a week, we received the first hand-ins, some with grammar mistakes and errors, for example, wrong spelling and vocabulary. It was also evident that the learners were struggling to understand what their hopes and dreams were. Teachers Racheal, Angela and I took turns reading students’ drafts and worked together to identify writing weaknesses for each individual student. We worked together to help the learners develop their stories and express their hopes and dreams more clearly. We also requested the other learners who were strong writers to assist those who were struggling, which I learned later during Dr. Esther’s workshop is called peer reviewing and editing. In the end we were happy with the stories the learners wrote. I appreciate the person I became from the whole experience of working on Writing our Dreams project. I have learned to be a better teacher of writing and a patient one too!
Centering African epistemologies in Community Engagement Projects
After the Writing our Dreams book was published and launched, we started looking at the book as a literacy and rhetorical artifact with potential to teach us and the field of rhetoric and composition about African epistemologies. In closely reading the stories, we recognized that the young authors can educate the field about African worldviews and philosophies. For example, we noted the stories highlighted important themes that focus on African ways of being, doing and seeing. While there are many things we can focus on under this takeaway, we focus on the themes of community and spirituality, considering how they are connected to African epistemologies. We argue community engagement projects in Africa should take these ways of being and doing into consideration as they design community literacy projects.
Community
One of the themes that kept being repeated in the stories was how much the students loved their community; how once their individual dreams came true, they will do good for their community and to the world. For example, in her story, student Mūtīki Kīilū wrote, “my hopes and dreams are to be a nurse at a national hospital in Kenya. Of all the nurses, I will be the best and all the other nurses will be following instructions from me.” Another student, Annah Ngei, wrote about wanting to become an accountant. She also wrote, “I will build a big house for my parents. I will not let my parents down. I will buy a car then build a big house in addition. I will build a shop in town. I shall employ people from my community.”
In most of the stories, the students’ dreams were not about them; their dreams were for others as well–their families, their community, and all of humanity. This value or perspective of viewing self in relation to the larger community is rooted in an African worldview; more specifically, it is attributed to Ubuntu, an African philosophical concept that emphasizes communalism and humanity towards others. John Mbiti (1969), writing about the conception of self in African cultural contexts, notes that:
Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man. (p.106)
Ubuntu philosophy and worldview expressed as “I am because we are” emphasizes that an individual cannot be separated from the larger group because a person makes sense of who they are in relation to others. Similarly, Maulana Karenga (2014) reminds us that in African culture and worldview, the “self is called into being and constituted in community” (p. 17). Karenga (2014) notes that African conceptions of self sharply contrast the Western conception of “self as a thinking subject” (17). For Africans, Karenga (2014) writes, the “concept of self [is] a related and relating subject. Thus, it is not simply “I think, therefore I am,” but rather that I am related and relate to others, therefore I am. It is in my being with, being-of, and being-for others that I discover and constitute myself” (p. 17, emphasis in original). As the quotes in Table 1 show, the Ubuntu philosophy and way of thinking shape the student’s dreams and hopes for the future. Put another way, their dreams are not personal; they are dreams of their families, their community, and all of humanity. In other words, while their stories are about “I” (an individual), they are also about “we” (their families and community).
Table 1. Student Responses Referencing Ubuntu
| “I dream of opening my own hospital. I imagine helping people across the country. When I become successful, I will be donating food to the poor and orphans. I will also use my expertise as a surgeon to help the young when they are ill or injured. I also dream that many people from in and out of the country will visit my hospital for treatment. I also dream and imagine having my own medical training center for young Kenyans to acquire skills in the medical field to help in the health sector because a healthy nation is a successful nation.” Amos Kilonzi |
| “I want to become an English language teacher. It’s my wish that I teach students to express themselves well through writing and speaking. It’s my hope that I will be able to produce poets, writers, editors, and public speakers. With my guidance, I have confidence that my students will be passionate about language.” Mutheu Mulandi |
| “There is nothing better than to see someone smile after you have done something for him or her. Being a medical doctor, I will make everyone’s life better and it will make them smile. Improving the health sector in my country is the most important thing to do.” Kawila Daniel |
| “I will be helping the needy people like orphans and the sick people who are less fortunate, paying their school fees and providing them with foodstuffs. I would not like to hear of anyone in my community suffering … .I will be helping my village, my county and my country.” Sharon Wango |
| “In the future, I want to be a role model to others. When I pay a visit to my former school, the students will have someone they can look up to and they will be motivated to work hard to the best of their ability. In addition, I do hope that I will become someone who can be depended on by my former school by giving them material support, food, and stationery and motivating those who have performed well academically. I imagine myself being someone who is successful, free from stress, comfortable, and helping the needy.” Masila Damaris |
| “When I clear my studies, I will look for a job so that I can earn a lot of money so that I can build my mother a big house as a gift for striving so hard to take care of me. I’m also planning to buy her a good car, a red one in particular. I will help my community and my former school by providing food, water, and clothes. As for my school, I shall bring books, food, and other necessities.” Gloria Peter |
We recommend teachers and researchers take time to understand the meaning of community from an African perspective. More specifically, we ask rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers to consider how African worldviews and philosophies like Ubuntu shape people’s relationships and interactions with each other. Looking back, as collaborators with students and teachers in Kūtha Primary, we realize we emphasized community (“we”) over individuals (“I”). Our goal was to bring good not only to Kūtha Primary School but the entire Kūtha community. When we envisioned the Writing Our Dreams project, we hoped that it would have a lasting impact in the lives of current and future students of Kūtha Primary. More specifically, this project was aimed at improving the students’ reading and writing literacies. Consequently, we hoped that the students can use their skills, knowledge, and talents to bring good to their community and to the world in the future. We also wanted to empower teachers through writing workshops by sharing our knowledge of rhetoric and writing to expand the teachers’ approaches to teaching writing and language arts in Kūtha and beyond. Most Importantly, we practiced a “multi-epistemological” approach to research and teaching when working with students, teachers, and other community stakeholders. As discussed above, while we exported writing process theories from the U.S., we made sure we allowed the students to write stories in ways that affirmed their ways of being, seeing, and doing.
Spirituality
Another theme that emerged from the students’ stories is the importance of spirituality in their everyday lives. One of the most famous statements ever made about Africans and their love for religion and spirituality is by John Mbiti (1969), who, in African Religions and Philosophy, writes: “Africans are notoriously religious” (p.1). In other words, many Africans’ perception of reality (known and unknown) is rooted in spirituality. Every action—including speaking and writing—is rooted in spirituality. Even before the introduction of Christianity, across multiple contexts in Africa, it is believed that the world was organized and governed by a supreme deity and spirits. There is a continued belief that the supreme God created and continues to organize, order, and sustain everything in the universe. In everything that Africans do, they must acknowledge God’s supremacy, whether it’s through invoking their traditional African God(s) or the Judeo-Christian God. Spirituality is also tied to the concept of Ubuntu discussed above; nothing works in isolation; beyond the I/we relationship, the material and the spiritual are also interconnected. Bagele Chilisa (2020) cites Desmond Tutu, the archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church of South Africa, who explains “the I/we relationship as an organic relationship between people such that when we see one another, we should recognize ourselves and God, in whose image all people are made” (p. 101). As such, the students’ realization of their dreams depended on their hard work, others, and God. Because most of the students we worked with are Christians, they invoked the Judeo- Christian God in their stories. Table 2 includes excerpts from students’ stories, where students referenced God and spirituality.
Table 2. Student Responses Referencing Spirituality
| “I will go to hairdressing school to acquire more skills in hairdressing. It’s my hope and prayer that my pleas will be heard by the almighty.” Grace Mbiti |
| “I will work hard in my studies to achieve my dream. I hope my father in heaven is hearing my prayers. I imagine becoming the best doctor in Africa and in the world. I will encourage the ones with talents and abilities like mine to do things the right way in order to succeed. I hope my father in heaven is hearing me. One day, one time, my dream will come true.” Amos Kilonzi |
| “I hope that the lord almighty will help me go to America for further studies so that I can become a school principal of any school in any country.” Mutheu Mulandi |
| “In order to achieve my goals I will work smart. I have to put effort in all subjects. I will ask questions on topics that are challenging. I should also put God first because he’s the giver of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding.” Kawila Daniel |
| “I am praying to God that I learn to drive and save money for buying my own Simba Coach that I can drive.” Joshua Maingi Peter |
| “For me to achieve my goals I have to use my time properly. In the morning I should wake up early, pray to God to help me so that I can understand what I am learning and pray for his protection throughout the day. I must involve God in everything in my education.” Faith Mwandikwa |
| “Whichever secondary school and university I will be admitted to, I shall study hard and avoid bad company so that I achieve my goals. Only God knows what my future holds so I will always put him first before anything else.” Esther Musyoka |
| “When the almighty Lord will help me to achieve my goal, I will be so happy and excited.” Annah Daniel |
| “After all the good deeds that I have been doing, God will repay me. I will pray and he will answer my prayers.” Mutiku Kiilu |
| “I intend to learn so well that I excel in exams and become a doctor who can be relied on in the community and in the family as well. I pray to the lord that my dreams shall come to pass.” Kitheka Musyoka |
Western scholars and teachers who are not religious or spiritual, or are trained to separate education and religion, might find this excessive reference to God uncomfortable. Yet, as the stories analyzed show, spirituality is critical to the students’ ways of being and doing. According to Chilisa, Major, and Khudu-Petersen (2017), within African worldviews and cosmologies, “connectedness and spirituality, promotes harmony and balance as well as critical inquiry” (p. 328). As such, if communities bring up spirituality in the process of community engagement projects, researchers and scholars must acknowledge and create space for it; otherwise, their research might create an imbalance for the community being researched. In our case, the headteacher and teachers requested we invite spiritual leaders from the African Inland Church, Kūtha, who are also the sponsors of the school, to be part of the launch and celebration of the Writing Our Dreams book project. The spiritual leaders and church’s responsibility was to bless the project and pray for future collaborations between us, the school, and the community. This practice is consistent with Bagele Chilisa’s (2020) observation that in African cultures, knowledge is “regarded as a sacred object, and seeking knowledge is a spiritual quest that may begin [and end] with a prayer or ceremony. Knowing can thus come through prayer as a way people connect themselves with those around them, the living, the non living, and the ancestral spirits” (p.103). To reciprocate and honor the community’s spiritual way of being, in writing the introduction for the book, we cited a Biblical scripture to encourage the students to pursue their hopes and dreams:
When you are feeling discouraged, remember that you don’t have to keep moving forward alone. You can rely on your family, community, your mentors, each other and most importantly your faith. As you all powerfully expressed in your stories, continue trusting God to help you achieve your dreams. As the Bible reminds us, Kwake ũsu, ũla kwĩsĩla vinyanĩ wake, ũla ũtethasya wĩa nthĩnĩ waitũ, na wĩna ũtonyi wa kwĩka maũndũ manene kwĩ ala tũvoyaa kana kũsũanĩa. With God’s power working in us, God can do much, much more than anything we can ask or think of. (New Century Version Bible, Ephesians, 3: 20)
Another way we valued African epistemologies, particularly African spiritualism, is to connect the project to the history of the community by acknowledging and honoring the eight ancestors who spearheaded the introduction of Western education in Kūtha village and surrounding communities. In African spirituality, ancestors are believed to play a critical role in the lives of the living, such as by offering guidance and wisdom. Ancestors are also considered intermediaries between the spiritual and physical world. As such, we decided to dedicate the Writing of Our Dreams project to the eight ancestors, noting that, “The stories honor their hard work and contribution, a reminder to Kūtha primary school students, current and past, that they stand on the shoulders of eight giants.” This editorial decision was deliberate; it captures the essence of Ubuntu philosophy, a reminder to current Kūtha students that they are because their ancestors were.
Acknowledgement
We want to thank Racheal Muthangya, Faith Mwinza, and Angela Mutunga for agreeing to collaborate with us on this project. We also thank all the teachers and students in Kūtha Primary School for participating in the project in various ways, and for their continued love and support. Gratitude to Valentina Sierra Niño for digitally illustrating the students’ drawings, and to Charles Mwongela for typesetting the students’ stories and scanning the drawings. We are grateful to the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, the International Center at the University of Florida, and Language Access Florida, LLC for sponsoring the project.
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