The Mwanza Process Journeys in Co-Learning

Li, Qiao

Abstract

The theme of the summer school held August 2019 in Mwanza, Tanzania was Researching Conflict, Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development. Effort was made to translate the theme into actual learning processes. Participants were a mix of students and academic staff from St. Augustine University of Tanzania, as well as a small number of academic staff from Germany, China and Malaysia. This diversity in language, generation and status presented a challenge, but it was in finding ways of working together that important work was to be done.

Co-learning spaces would need to be created which would stretch from the campus to community. This is the idea behind ‘service learning’, which seeks to include all the actors – pupils, teachers, students and professors – in the creation of knowledge in levelled spaces. One of the ways of levelling the space is to offer tasks which are equally unfamiliar, or tasks which require a broad range of abilities. When these require creative activity, the pressure of correctness is reduced. Artistic forms also provide multilingual settings with ways of communication not restricted to language. This involves direct engagement with real people in real situations. To each space, a participant brings a mixture of aptitude and inaptitude!

Citation

Li, Q. (2019). The Mwanza Process Journeys in Co-Learning

• Report Type: Other
• Online Publication Date: Dec 15, 2019
• Publication Date: Dec 15, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 25, 2025
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4245787
• Publisher URL: https://www.ew.uni-hamburg.de/einrichtungen/ew5/religionspaedagogik/alt/art-peace-projekt/files/2019-brochure-the-mwanza-process-klein.pdf