The President of the Republic of Cameroon, Paul Biya, left Buea on Saturday in his helicopter finally leaving things to go back to normal this week. My beautiful diverse city is finally back to normal.

As some of you may know, March 8th is International Women’s Day and this week I have created a fun hands on curriculum focusing on the significance of the holiday along with the struggles and achievements of women world wide. After our lesson, they will be given a document on the IWD Essay contest I have created which will be due next week! Winners will receive some small prizes and publication on the YAN blog.

I had quite an ambitious lesson planned for the Advanced YAN class on Tuesday which was miraculously fulfilled even with some minor setbacks! Last week there were no classes but the previous week (the 13th) I had assigned some homework. Not a single student had finished their homework. The assignment was for each research group (some students are working solo) was supposed to complete 15 strategies to advocate for their research topic at the four levels we discussed in class: 1) individual; 2) community; 3) national; 4) international.

After a short lecture about the homework at being the “Advanced YAN” class we moved onto the days activities. First I handed out corrected homework and went over who was  missing what assignment. Next we reviewed their quiz on photography and critiqued the photos they took. Below is a photo taken by one of our students. It is a balanced high angle portrait.


Because the Advanced class is for the most part well versed with photography (due to their exposure last year) we just reviewed uploading a photo to their blog and moved onto making a list of what photos they wanted on their website. Students worked with their research partners to come up with photos that would display on each of their pages which would obviously be relevant to what they are researching. Then students evaluated whether they themselves would be able to take the photo or if they would have to find an image to use online. These activities went smoothly and quickly so we had extra time to work on the homework assignment which was not completed. After each research group or person completed their assignment, they moved to the computers to type what they had written. This will be transferred to their website on a later date. Check out some of their ideas for advocacy:

How an individual can advocate against corruption: “REFUSE TO PAY BRIBES! TELL OTHERS TO DO THE SAME.” – Jean

At the community level, they can advocate against prostitution by: “HOLDING MARCHES AND PARADES THAT TEACH ABOUT THE PROBLEMS OF PROSTITUTION” – Henry

The nation of Cameroon can advocate for prevention of malaria by: “CREATING AN ORGANIZATION THAT SHARES BUG NETS WITH COMMUNITIES” - Shemilove

How to advocate against online scamming international: “IN MY OPINION LET THERE BE THE CREATION OF INTERNET POLICE” – Desmond

 

For the last 20 min of class we reviewed podcasting. For those of you who don’t know, a podcast is a multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, etc.  As an assignment, the students will come up with their podcast scripts which will be recorded next week. This scripts will introduce them as the researchers, talk about the problem they have decided to research and finally it will give the listener some solutions to this problem. One student, Deril, who was in YAN for the 2011-2012 school year had said, “Madam, when we made ours, we had music!” I told him I would try my best to get music put into it.