Reading Photographs

The past couple of days we have been running teacher workshops at two different schools. The purpose is to teach the teachers the LTP method so that they can use the method in their classrooms. The first day I was a bit nervous because I would be teaching about 10 Tanzanian teachers LTP, and I didn’t how the language barrier and cultural norms would impact our interactions. The past three days I have been working with Cameron, which has turned out to be a really good team. The first couple of minutes everyone was a bit shy but it didn’t take too long for people to get comfortable, myself included. I did learn that language can be a bit of barrier and sometimes it takes Pele to translate for instructions to finally be understood. However, sometimes, the quite and shy teachers (mostly women) turn out to be the best English speakers and writers. Working and getting to know the teachers has been really rewarding.

Reading photographs is a primary activity in LTP. First, the group looks at a photograph and lists all the objects in people in the photograph, aka simply stating what the photograph shows. Secondly, everyone in the group chooses a person in the photograph to write a creative story in the first perspective. This is my favorite part because it is great to see the creative side of whoever is doing the activity (in this case teachers, and soon to be the students).


After the reading photographs exercises, we decided to make a social studies ABC book with the teachers for their students. The different groups were assigned different letters of the alphabet and then we brainstormed social studies words with the letters we were assigned. Once the words were chosen we went around the town and took photos of the words. After shooting we went back to the school, printed the photos and created our alphabet flipbook. One of the great things this year is that the ministry of education is getting involved and trying to make LTP MANDATORY in the schools. Another amazing thing is that we are creating a camera and printer resource room so that the teachers can check them out to use in their classrooms (the teachers don’t even have visual aids in the classrooms). Overall, the teachers seemed really excited about LTP and the ones that I talked to said they were defiantly going to use it.