Narratives of Educational Reform in Rwandan Secondary Schools

Beth Samuelson

In Rwanda, a country where approximately 800,000 citizens were killed in the 1994 genocide, secondary schools today are widely considered high-stakes social institutions. Educational reforms of history curriculum, language curriculum and assessment policy are invested in preparing youth with vastly different experiences of the 1994 genocide to be leaders in nation-building for the future. The proposed project studies the stories that Rwandan secondary students, parents, and teachers tell of their experiences with these reforms. These stories can reveal how Rwandans view reconciliation and tolerance through the lenses of their social, economic and cultural conditions. The stories that teachers, students, and parents tell as they make sense of critical changes in education will shed light on how these reforms may contribute to or interfere with the building of a free and open society.I will analyze narratives collected in Rwanda in 2001 and will return to Rwanda to collect new data for the purpose of testing and refining hypotheses. Variations in stories among distinct sub-groups of Rwanda society and deviations of these stories from official versions will provide a window into the processes of developing collective memory through narrative in Rwanda and beyond.

About Beth Samuelson

Beth Lewis Samuelson teaches linguistics in the English Department at Central Michigan University, where she is involved in pre-service teacher education. She also teaches courses in methods, assessment, and curriculum development in the MA TESOL program. She has extensive experience living and working in non-Western international contexts. In high school, she lived in Europe, where she began learning French in a Swiss public school, and in a remote northwest section of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). After college, she worked in central Africa, studied Chinese, and taught ESL in China and Taiwan. During graduate school, she worked for an educational non-profit serving public schools in south-central Los Angeles and joined a human rights research project in Rwanda.