Editorial

You can read an article by winners of the Simon Greenall Award here.

 

"Dau Dau" means "Long Time Ago". The project we describe here explores local folk culture in Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. It was started by two lecturers at  Keningau Vocational College in Sabah, Sirhajwan Idek and Nurazilah Othman, with the help of many other colleagues including Sydney Engelbert.

The team are developing English language teaching by exploring  traditional stories from the rich language and cultural resources of ethnically diverse Sabah: using story-telling, dance, sign language, shadow puppetry, drama, radio plays, mime, poetry, flash fictions and short stories, song lyrics, essays, as well as visual work with comics, paintings and cartoons.

In the middle of last year, we were delighted and honoured to be invited by the trustees of the Simon Greenall Award  to act as 'mentors' for their first project in 2021.

The Simon Greenall Award was established to commemorate the life and work of  leading ELT expert Simon Greenall, OBE, (1954 - 2018) by supporting projects with the express aim of bringing people together through learning English.

Over thirty organisations and projects applied for the first award in 2021, and the final  decision was made to support the "Dau Dau" project.

We started working with the team  in  July 2021 and generally made contact by email and regular monthly Zoom discussions.   We are based in New Zealand, so it was  easy to fix a convenient time for these meetings (New Zealand is 4 or 5 hours ahead of Malaysia depending on the season).

The Dau Dau team have tremendous energy and enthusiasm and were already well on the road to developing very useful and exciting areas to work  in when we joined them.

They are holding a series of monthly webinar workshops for colleagues around Malaysia and the wider region. Topics explored so far include the use of comics, using poetry, and the art of story telling. They have close links with the dynamic Kuala Lumpur Shakespeare Project - a troupe of actors who adapt Shakespeare for Malaysian audiences and schools - they developed a  spellbinding play based on the traditional Sabah folk tale, "Kanang and the Serimpok". (If you thought that Cinderella had a difficult step mother, just wait till you meet  poor Kanang!) In December 2021 and February 2022 Dau Dau participated in the Macmillan Education Winter Fair  and the Macmillan Global Teachers Festival webinars.

As 'mentors'  we were there to help and support the Dau Dau team, to act as a 'sounding board' for them to bounce ideas and suggestions off. We felt very privileged to be involved, and they were always ready to listen to our suggestions and develop them in the ways that best suited them. We attended most of the online activities mentioned in the paragraph above and were always very impressed by the education colleagues linking with Dau Dau from around the region. Teachers and learners have gained a lot of publicity in the Malaysian public and educational press and TV radio media.

Malderez and Bodsczky (1999) in their classic book  MENTOR COURSES emphasise five different roles for a mentor.  Summarized by Orsdemir and Yildrim in 2020, these roles are 'being a model who inspires and demonstrates, an acculturator who provides a clear understanding of the education system, a sponsor who introduces the mentee to the appropriate people, a supporter who acts as sounding board and provides safe opportunities for the mentee to discuss teaching practices, and an educator who facilitates pedagogical ideas to help the mentee achieve professional learning objectives.' (*)

Without explicitly referring to any 'sources', we both found ourselves covering these areas,  perhaps drawing on our own long experience of teaching and training in a wide range of cultural contexts. 

At first we were a bit concerned that the 'hands off' approach necessitated by the global Covid pandemic would be a hindrance to our work.... in the 'old days' in 'normal' times, we would probably have felt the urge to board a plane.... perhaps stopping off in Malaysia on one of our regular trips back to Europe. However this was not to be, and we were pleasantly surprised to find how much support we were able to give from a distance.

Typically, in preparation for each monthly Zoom session, we would email the team asking for suggestions for a brief 'agenda', any queries or ideas they were working on, and describe back-up work we had done with our contacts.

We would set up a Zoom chat, usually during the morning in Sabah, our New Zealand afternoon, lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. We would agree on activities and targets for the next four weeks. We would then write up brief 'minutes' to send to everyone involved (the SGA committee and sponsors, and the Dau Dau team).

To categorize our interventions as 'mentors':

1. mostly listening to and reacting to their descriptions of work in progress
2. supporting and encouraging
3. sometimes helping with goal-setting
4. minutes, summaries of what was said and action points for the next month
5. suggestions for actions. Very often these were already in hand, or we thought of the same thing at the same time (for instance, we mentioned Shadow Puppets,  and found they were already working on this)

The central idea behind the Simon Greenall Award is 'connectivity' so the main way we were able to help was by making connections: we put the Dau Dau team in touch with the Hands Up! project run by Nick Bilborough,  helping Palestinian teachers and children in Gaza and other places. Together they applied for a British Council grant to further their drama work. Although this first application was unsuccessful, there will be many opportunities to work together in the future. We also put them in touch with the master storyteller David Heathfield, work with whom is developing as we write, and encouraged Dau Dau to apply for the ELTons awards and are delighted to learn that the project is one of the finalists in the Local Innovations category.  In addition they have written several articles for publication in teacher magazines and journals.

Working as 'mentors' was a great privilege. We cannot emphasise enough how pleasurable and rewarding this process was for us:  we learned just as much, if not more, from our 'mentees' than we could possibly give them. We have discovered the riches of Malaysian folk tradition,  been able to learn from the monthly webinars run by their colleagues in fields such as story telling, poetry, and drama, and been able to continue our work as teacher educators  during our 'retirement' .

The work was, to us, very similar to our work as teachers and trainers, working with a small tutorial group of 2 or 3, but with one very important difference: these are probably the most highly motivated and able 'students' we have ever had the pleasure of working with!

This project is the first to be given a Simon Greenall Award, and it is a great tribute to the whole team in Borneo and in Britain that  it has proved so successful, especially given the particular difficulties caused by the global Covid pandemic. Congratulations to you all. And our very best wishes to future Simon Greenall Award participants.

We  encourage any readers who are thinking of getting involved in such mentoring work to 'go for it', and will be happy to offer advice and ideas - do please just write to  us at:  crhadfield@me.com

Below are a number of suggestions for you to explore the exciting and very rewarding world of Mentoring.

1 Link to the April 2022 presentation by Dau Dau summarizing their work over the past year

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PrSIAqEFd3O2BN8DN56XgGH948JtZJXZ/view

2 Videos of work

Puppet show: https://youtu.be/h_XiJeE0B-k

Readers’ Theatre: https://youtu.be/euDH94MRkeM

Poetry recital: https://youtu.be/tv500U-YC2o

Storytelling: https://youtu.be/zfauRqS4Xck

3 Some further reading

(*) “I would like her to...:” ELT Student-Teachers’ Reflections on Mentoring Practices  Esra ORSDEMIR and Rana YILDIRIM in PASAA Volume 59 January - June 2020

Angi Malderez and Caroline Bodsczky, MENTOR COURSES: A resource book for trainer-trainers (CUP, 1999), Cambridge Teacher Training and Development series. 

4 Some links to information on mentoring:

https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/auckland/business/current-students/PDFs/mentoring-guide-final.pdf

https://www.td.org/talent-development-glossary-terms/what-is-mentoring

https://www.togetherplatform.com/blog/what-is-the-purpose-of-mentoring

 

 

Please check the Pilgrims f2f courses at Pilgrims website.

Please check the Pilgrims online courses at Pilgrims website.