By Mustapha Kamara Jnr
Read Initiative Sierra Leone (Rise), a network which comprises of four non-governmental organizations working to improve education in Sierra Leone, has started a two-day training workshop for teachers drawn from different primary and secondary schools across the country aimed at equipping them with skills to man libraries.
The workshop, which commenced on Tuesday at the Sierra Leone Library Board, Rokel Street in Freetown, attracted teachers from fifty primary and secondary schools, as well as serving Librarians from different academic institutions in the country.
RISE network comprises The Sierra Leone Library Board, the Learning Foundation, Village Link and the Society of Knowledge Sierra Leone.
Umaru Bangura, Director of the Society for Knowledge Sierra Leone, who is also the coordinator of the Network, said the training aimed to equip teachers and librarians as part of a larger effort to promote the culture of reading in the country.
Even though there are no statistics, Sierra Leone is known to have a very low reading culture, and this, education experts have said, is responsible partly for poor performance in schools and other academic spheres.
This RISE training was also designed to improve on the structures of libraries as there are concerns that most libraries are largely nonfunctional because of how they are structured. It will also look into management issues.
“Our vision is to see more libraries in all schools where pupils can have access to read books and acquire knowledge so that the literacy rate in the country will improve because that is what is lacking in our societies,” Bangura said.
To achieve that, he added, the Rise network had over the years been supplying books to school libraries, training teachers to become librarians and also provided aid for schools without libraries to establish them.
Bangura encouraged participants to endeavor to join the network and help it achieve its objectives.
Doing a presentation on the significance of school library and its organization, lead facilitator and senior lecturer and head of department at the department of Library Studies at Fourah Bay College, Solomon Sellu, said libraries in schools and academic institutions across the country were mostly underutilized.
He said most schools had libraries but that those libraries were substandard and do not have the requisite structure and appropriately books for usage by pupils.
“Library is very important especially in this 21st Century,” Mr Sellu said. “Therefore, I am happy that this network is fighting against the under utilization of books at academic institutions.”
Libraries, he went on, help to complement the effort of teachers and lecturers by providing students and pupils learning materials that help them to acquire knowledge themselves outside the class room.
The Library specialist added that most students and pupils underperform at universities and schools because they don’t use the library, nothing also that those who perform excellently were those who spend most of their time in libraries reading and conducting research on their subjects of interest.
To ensure academic performance of pupils at schools improve, Mr Sellu said, government should initiate a policy that will mandate all schools to put standard libraries in place.
“Pupils would perform better if they are using libraries regularly in their respective schools,” said Theresa Wusha Conteh, Chief administrator at the Sierra Leone Library Board, who commended the initiative of the organizers of the workshop.
She said there was the need to train more teachers on how to operate libraries because the library is also a school where pupils can access academic materials to read and to acquire knowledge.
(C) Politico 15/07/15
