Abstract:
The research report explores a pedagogic and curricular intervention in the English
curriculum of third year pre-service education students at the National University of
Rwanda. It uses as an implementation instance the Bana Molokai subculture as a means
of relating the teaching of English literature to cultural practices found in the students’
living space which are semiotically more diverse than the traditional literary-linguistic
forms. My research attempts to establish whether and how the pedagogical intervention
of teaching cultural artefacts produced by the Bana Molokai can enrich the
learning/teaching of literature in this context. At a secondary level, the introduction of the
Bana Molokai youth culture phenomenon into a literature classroom calls attention to the
presence of the youth culture phenomenon on the continent as an emerging site for the
articulation of the contemporary interests and needs of African youth. Therefore,
although the pedagogical intervention forms the major component of this Research project, it incorporates a preliminary phase: an overview of the Bana Molokai subculture
as an illustration of the vitality of texts from the field of popular culture on the African
continent.
The study uses an analysis of students’ responses before and after the pedagogical
intervention as a means of providing comparative evidence of students’ perceptions of
existing literary practices in their context in the light of the expansion. In effect, it uses in
the first instance emerging thematic points in the students’ responses in order to
understand their perception of literary practices as a preliminary justification of an
interventionist expansion in Rwanda. In the second instance, it uses emerging thematic
points in the students’ responses to the pedagogical intervention to unravel how the
lesson of teaching Bana Molokai has related them to the exercise of learning/teaching literature in their context. The analysis furthermore attempts to indicate the comparative benefits of teaching Bana Molokai texts in Rwanda in regards to the established literary canon.
