3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Students' responses to the insertion of popular culture into an English literature curriculum: A Rwandan case study(2007-04-10T11:41:59Z) Nyirahuku, BellaThe 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.