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The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) Carole Bloch (bio) The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA: www.praesa.org.za) is an independent research and development organization affiliated with the University of Cape Town. Established by Dr. Neville Alexander in 1992, PRAESA emerged from the struggle against apartheid education, to document educational alternatives that had been tried out during those years, which could inform the new education process. Circumstances since 1995 focused the project’s work on language policy, especially the key area of language-in-education policy implementation (Alexander). In multilingual South Africa with its eleven official languages, a central focus of PRAESA has been on early language and literacy teaching and learning as the essential foundations for learning. Our approach appreciates the storytelling hearts and minds of children (and adults) and how meaningful encounters with reading and writing are as critical for learning to read and write as the mechanics of the literacy learning process (Bloch “Don’t”). We thus have always had the aim to help enable the kinds of conditions for learning (Cambourne), inside and outside of school, which motivates children and adults to want to read and write in African languages and in English. [End Page 156] Over the years oftrying to support government to provide appropriate learning opportunities for all children, our goal was to perform a catalytic role in the two major overlapping areas of language policy implementation and pedagogical approaches to literacy. We did this via a series of small-scale research projects (Bloch and Alexander, Bloch “Helping”) and the facilitation, production and dissemination of storybooks and other materials for multilingual education in African languages and English (Bloch “Building”). PRAESA’s view is that any serious thinking about and action for literacy development and support for reading and writing habits needs to take place from within an overt multilingual frame of reference. Most South Africans want to be proficient in English because of the immediate and obvious economic and social benefits of English, but this does not mean that literacy is equal to English. Nor does it mean children have to leave their “mother tongue/s” at home either in Grade 1 or at the end of Grade 3. To provide the best of both worlds for all, we use and promote mother tongue based bilingual approaches to language use, in formal and non-formal education. In addition to the lack of political will by government to implement its language in education policy, one of our greatest challenges is to find ways of supporting adults from all cultural, linguistic and class backgrounds to become well-read, interactive reading and writing role models for children. In 2006, PRAESA began to establish community based reading clubs to promote and support reading cultural practices and biliteracy development as part of creating literate communities using an apprenticeship approach (Rogoff, PRAESA). Neville Alexander retired at the end of 2011, and in 2012 PRAESA began a new phase. Under my directorship, we took what we had learned in the preceding two decades to scale and initiated a national reading-for-enjoyment campaign with main financial support from the DG Murray Trust (www.dgmt.co.za). The Nal’ibali National Reading for Enjoyment Campaign (www.nalibali.org), now in its third year, means “Here’s the story” in Xhosa. With its key message “It starts with a story,” Nal’ibali aims to revive and deepen our appreciation of stories and narrative as being not only [End Page 157] essential as the primary way we as human beings remember and organize our thoughts and conceptual worlds (Gotschall), but also the basis for critical thinking and a meaningful education for all children (Krashen, Clark and Rumbold,). It does this by sparking connections between adults and children as they tell, read and talk about stories in languages they understand as well as those they want to learn. By overtly (re)positioning oral and written stories as valuable in daily life, parents and other adults have the chance to experience for themselves how homes, community venues and after school spaces, can contribute richly towards children’s literacy development. Their role, even those...
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