Maranyundo School

We arrived last evening from Boston via Amsterdam. Stepping from the plane into the warm Rwandan air I relished returning to the unique feel of the place. There is a new arrival terminal that gleams with efficiency. We were given visas, had our passports stamped and reviewed. All with welcoming stance. I felt I had truly arrived, however, when I was embraced by Sister Juvenal and company and we set off for the school on that familiar ride to Nyamata.

After a welcome dinner at the Residence, and the delight of seeing Sister Josie looking so well, we planned for a day of observations in the Maranyundo classrooms. Each morning we are beginning our day with breakfast with Sr Juvenal to hear from her how she is viewing what is happening in education...at the school, in Nyamata, in Rwanda. She also has a schedule for the day for each of us and we pay attention to her schedule!

I began my Thursday in Biology class with the 10th graders who are the first class at the new STEM high school. The girls were wearing their lab coats and their teacher, Aggery, was having them work in groups of 2 or 3 to set up their microscopes for lab practice looking at cells. He was asking them to prepare slides for viewing red onion skin and pond water taken from the pond on the campus. (I can provide evidence that frogs with lusty lungs live in that pond because they serenade us at night!)

The girls set up their lab spaces, setting up the microscopes carefully, and worked together to prepare their slides. They eagerly invited my participation to view their slides. In one group, I asked them what the "agenda" for this lab class was and they answered, "To observe." I asked them what it meant to observe. They replied with ideas like, to look to understand, to look at details we cannot usually see, to be amazed by small things.

It was clear that working with lab materials is very important to them. One student told me, "When we see something in the microscope that we have prepared, the image stays in our heads. When I see a picture in a book, I forget it." Another student explained why she values lab time so much. "When you practice like a scientist you know a lot more than the theory." She smiled when she said that!

The National Exams are including "practicals" as part of the exam administration in sciences. Sr Juvenal says most of the schools in Rwanda do not have the lab materials needed to give the students opportunities to work together and practice with lab skills and materials. The girls at Maranyundo know they are privileged to have the lab spaces and "stuff" to do "practicals." They also have a teacher who believes strongly that they can learn so much by "feeling like scientists" and having fun working with one another.

The scientific discourse the girls are practicing demonstrated that they are developing solid academic vocabularies to articulate their thinking and how their observations are leading them to consider new ideas. As one student told me, when I asked her what looking at the pond water under the microscope made her think about, she said, "That when you can see water you really can't see ALL of water." I like that talk. I also liked the use of the word colleague that a student used when I asked her to demonstrate for me how she prepares a slide. "My colleague holds this for me so I can..." She made me realize that they are colleagues in this classroom. And for 90 delightful minutes, they allowed me to be among them as a person thinking about science, thinking about the relationship of theory to practice, and how much fun learning can be!