Finding children's voices

This article deals with a British Academy funded pilot project carried out in December 2005 and January 2006 involving six primary schools in Eritrea. The project was led by the author, Jane Plastow, a Theatre for Development academic and practitioner, and John Holmes, an educationalist. Both partners work at Leeds University and have involvement with Eritrea dating back to soon after its independence in 1991. We worked with five Eritrean colleagues; three from the Asmara Teacher Training Institute, which is responsible for training all primary school teachers, and two from the Bureau of Cultural Affairs Yakim Tesfai and Mesmer Andu. Building on previous work that had identified a lack of child-centred teaching strategies and of creative arts work in the Eritrean education system, the project aimed to run, in parallel, training sessions in child-centred pedagogies for teachers and theatre projects for Year Five (top grade) children where they would explore their attitudes to school and present their work theatrically to teachers and the community. The project worked with two Eritrean language groups; Tigrinya and Bilen. Notes 1. Information on Kenya from Simon Peter Otieno, PhD student at Leeds, currently working on HIV/AIDS work with youth in Kenya. Numerous articles have been published on the health-based work of DramAidE. 2. For information on youth theatre in Africa see Etherton (Citation2007). 3. There are approximately 60,000 Blin speakers out of a total Eritrean population of circa 4 million. There are only 30 primary schools using Blin as the language of instruction, mostly clustered fairly near to the city of Keren. 4. Teachers’ housing is provided by the community and state. In She'eb teachers were lodged in small breezeblock rooms built on to the school, while in Bogu they lived in traditional mud brick huts

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