Whew! We have completed the Mental Health Module with the Medical students--36 students, 15 hours of original lecture, 3 Three hour workshops and a 57 question exam. We have been working 20 days straight including weekends in preparation. Its honest work and something that we really feel good about. Nevertheless one never knows just how much of the material sunk in. Much of it is new to them and some things clearly were different than what they have learned about mental health--which is almost nil.
I am sure that they didn't know what to make of our "American style" teaching--walking all over the room instead of standing behind a podium, small group discussions and insisting on class participation, questions and responses. The students are almost pathologically averse to raising their hands and risk an answer that may be "wrong" or found foolish. It is unfortunately part of long tradition in African education and society in general--don't stand out, always be one of the group, don't take a chance that you will be publicly shamed. It got better as they came to trust us, but often we still had to call on a person directly to get a response. Interestingly they always had a response, many of which were considered and well thought out, but they were still afraid to volunteer them. We did a number of role plays to illustrate various clinical scenarios. Again almost never a volunteer, but once called on to come forward,almost to a person, they were great actors and actresses and very creative.
Kopo and I were a great teaching team, sometimes as a tag team in one lecture/activity and other times on our own. Even with the cultural differences, we were still able to get consistent rapt attention and frequent laughs--I guess we've both still got the right stuff for teaching.
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