The Uncertain Business of Doing Good in Africa

The Uncertain Business of Doing Good: Outsiders in Africa by Larry Krotz

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Total impulse buy of a book that apparently nobody else has read. University of Manitoba Press probably doesn't have a bit marketing arm.



Krotz recounts various stories from his experiences working in Angola, Tanzania, and Kenya. I know woefully little about Angola, so Krotz has at least given me a frame of reference for learning more. His take on the UN prosecution of a few Rwandans after the genocide was enlightening and matched up perfectly with the interpretation I have come to get from my Congolese friends. The genocide was obviously a horrific period in that country's history and in the history of global inaction, but to say that the Hutus simply slaughtered innocent Tutsi's is a gross simplification of the back and forth, civil war like dimension of that conflict. Krotz came to believe that the UN went into the tribunal with the verdict already determined, and the one judge who really wanted to get the story straight was removed from the 3 judge panel. So much for outsiders doing good. The account of how the tribunal brought money but also problems to the small Tanzanian city is also enlightening.



About half the book covers HIV research in Africa, and what a rush of scientific inquiry happened on the continent when research dollars became available. At one point, a group of scientists in South Africa abandoned their research because they came to believe that circumcision was so successful in preventing the acquisition of the virus that they could no longer ethically maintain a control group of uncircumcised men. Another team of researchers thought it was unethical to abandon their research until the study was completed. Related issues of IRB interference will be of interest to all academics who wrestle with IRB boards.



Not riveting or heart-wrenching stories, but that is more than okay--insightful, thoughtful, outsider perspective.


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Mutt Genres and Writing About Writing

I see that Alex Reid has already responded to (or alongside) Elizabeth Wardle's CCC article on "Mutt Genres and the Goal of Fyc." I am sure this essay will get a lot of people thinking hard, again, as she and Doug Downs wrote a much discussed piece on "writing about writing" that came out in the much read June issue of CCC two years ago. Heck, I blogged about that piece, too.

I'm very sympathetic to Liz's arguments because we graduated from the same PhD program although some years apart, same advisor I assume (David Russell), and this article draws on most of the same scholarship (and more) that I usually draw on when thinking about writing courses and programs. I've been practicing and encouraging a modified "writing about writing" approach in our fyc program at NDSU for the past 6 years as Director of FY Writing, but what this article really got me thinking about is the challenge of being Upper Division Writing Director. Over the past few years we have been extending our genre-based, rhetorical approach to 300 level classes in multiple disciplines (as many other universities do), and we have been worrying about both the transfer from fyc into udw and the transfer from udw out into the profession or other disciplinary courses. I do a first-day assessment / review in my UDW courses, and I see that only a handful of students remember the meta-knowledge, the concepts, from fyc. As I teach my courses, I am always painfully aware that I am not really able to teach students, even at the 300 level, how to write in their field and discipline. The nursing students, for example, might want to learn how to "chart," but the nursing faculty have said "don't teach them charting, we'll teach them that." And they are right to do so.

So what are we doing in UDW? To a large extent, "we" (or at least "I") am still teaching my own version of writing about writing (and doing it via mutt genres, I have to admit). I open my Writing in the Health Professions class with a "Health Literacy Report" and end it with a "Medical Report to Media Story" analysis. These assignments ask students to investigate how writing / communicating works in their field, and while I do so via genres like "report" instead of rhetorical analysis, and "public information document" instead of "essay," I know that my students will have to learn how to write reports appropriate to their future employers and I know they won't really write anything like my mutt genre final assignment, but I try to talk to them about how "reading the medical literature" will transfer to their other courses and assignment, and how "writing a literature review" will be a component of some future scholarly writing for some of them. I try to show and help students make some of the connections Wardle says we would need to make if we use the mutt genre approach. I also use portfolios with reflection and a "personal fact sheet" assignment, both designed to capture some of the skills, strategies and concepts from the class so that (with any luck), something will transfer.

Her scholarship continues to challenge me to take that next step and get students reading the scholarship about writing in their field, and to get them to do research on writing / literacy in their field. I'm not entirely sure what is holding me back, except that comfortable rut I have found myself in as a teacher and administrator.