By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
In her talk about literacy and education in her homeland, Burkina Faso, teacher Dhia Sanogo said that in the past not much attention was paid to the arts.
She recalled that when she was visited Bowling Green in 2017, she was impressed by the arts facility. “I was really impressed that art was given so much importance.”
Now schools in her country, which is in the grip of war and social strife, are including arts, especially storytelling and folk tales in the curriculum. The arts have taken on increased importance has a way of building cultural sensibility and resilience by channeling their emotions through artistic expression.
This helps students resist drug addiction, which was not a problem 10 years ago, and violence. The arts promote a sense of belonging, social responsibility, morality, and integrity. It also improves their self-confidence, Sanogo said.
All this is especially important as the crisis, that is driven by religious fundamentalism, grips the country.
Sanogo is in Bowling Green as the culmination of a collaborative project between her and her high school age language arts students, and BGHS teacher Jo Beth Gonzalez and her students.
On Sunday she participated in a panel discussion at the Wood County District Public Library on comparative literacy with BGSU faculty members Tim Murnen and Brigid Burke.
Burkina Faso has one of lowest literacy rates in the world, just over 34 percent for people aged 15 and older.
In the past decade the government made a concerted effort to increase the number of schools, only to have them closed because of unrest caused by the incursion of Islamic fundamentalist rebels, and a coup last year. A few schools, but not all, Sanogo said, have reopened, but thousands of schools remain closed.
Burke noted that illiteracy is also a concern in the United States. She said that 54 percent of Americans have a literacy rate below the 6th grade level. And 47 percent of Americans report that they do not read a book a year, she said.
Murnen spoke of a deeper sense of literacy as creating meaning. This is evident in a number of forms, from Power Point presentations to picture books.
In college, he studied both literature and theater. These disciplines had different ways of understanding Hamlet, for example. In literature class they’d analyze the text and find literary meaning.
In theater the students would memorize those same lines, act it out and become Hamlet.
That approach will be demonstrated when the Bowling Green High School Theater Club presents “From One World to Another,” a play devised as a collaboration between Sanogo’s students and local students this week.
Students presented a brief excerpt from “From One World to Another” before the panel discussion.
The play is based on three folk tales from Burkina Faso, and three stories from the United States.
Drama teacher Jo Beth Gonzalez said that her students found that most American folk tales actually have their roots in other countries, and students found they could not relate to the stories of indigenous people.
So, they turned to the songs of Dolly Parton. On Sunday they acted out the story told in Parton’s song, and later picture book, “Coat of Many Colors.”
The lesson, the students said, was that Parton overcame her own humble beginnings, and once successful is striving to help others, notably through the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which is available kids from birth to 5 throughout Wood County.
“From One World to Another” will be staged in the Performing Arts Center Thursday, Nov. 2, Friday, Nov. 3, and Saturday, Nov. 4 at 7 with a Sunday matinee Nov. 5 at 2.
Admission is free.
