Jodi's Adventure to Ghana 2014: The Denver-II and other fun things at the Grace School...

The Accra team spent most of our fist week working at the Grace International School. You can read more about the school here: http://www.sgmghana.org/#!grace-home-international-school. The school was literally built by VCU students with the founders back in 2005 and has been steadily growing - they're up to three floors and are looking to construct another building for the preschool.

The school is in the suburbs of Accra and serves the local neighborhood children pre-K - junior high. The classrooms don't have electricity but the big windows and cross breezes keep the rooms cool. The classrooms, especially for the young kids are crowded, often 3 students to a desk. The 2-3 year old classroom had 45 students! The teachers there were truly amazing.

Our main purpose at the school was to do development screenings (Denver-II) of the 2-3 year olds to see if there were any children that may need some extra attention and to begin tracking their development. The OT group that goes next summer will be able to re-asses the students and check for progress. There were a few students we were concerned about and we provided the school's director with a summary of our findings and recommendations on how to support the child. It is hard because our recommendations had to be based on what was actually available and what was feasible. In the U.S. we would probably have advised a battery of interventions: OT, PT, medical check-ups, etc. But that is not possible there. The experience really made me think about how important it is to understand the circumstances before advising a client - just because we think we know the best way, doesn't mean it would be the best way for them if it's not attainable.

Administering the Denver-II

Overall, we assessed about 30 students - it was a really great experience to get hands on practice with the screening tool. We can read about them every day in school, but it takes practice (over and over again) to really get the hang out it. I will definitely feel more confidant doing this kind of assessment again.

Another reason for conducting the Denver-IIs was to begin to look at how the tool can be modified to better fit Ghanaian culture. I conducted the language portion of the assessment and it was really interesting to see how language and culture plays a role in the outcome of the assessment. Ultimately we could not use the language section in our reports because we could not determine if problems in the section were due to actual developmental delays or just language/culture differences. For example, in one question, the child is asked to identify a horse based on a drawing. No one could correctly identify it! We learned from a teacher that horses are not common in Ghana and most kids have never seen one. Another interesting thing we discovered is that many of the children could name color words (red, blue, etc), but they could not associate the word with the actual color. We discovered that they don't typically learn this until 4-5 years (we were testing 3 year olds). The children speak Twe at home and don't learn English until they begin school at 2 years. It really made me realize how U.S.-centric my thinking is. I will likely have clients from other cultures and backgrounds and my experience in Ghana will remind me to consider culture when giving assessments and to look for cultural bias when analyzing the results.

Besides the developmental screenings, we also helped by painting a couple of their classrooms, and of course just playing with the kids! A fellow hokie (Virginia Tech) alum taught the kids the hokie pokie, which they loved. Duck-duck-goose was another favorite. We also did a lot of singing and dancing. While obedience and discipline are greatly stressed in the school's culture, I was really impressed with how they acknowledged kids' natural need to get up and move. They had frequent breaks throughout the day when the teachers would lead the kids in song (usually religious songs) and let them run around and dance. While I don't agree with all of their teaching methods (rote memorization is the norm there as is corporal punishment), I think U.S. schools could learn a lesson from teachers there about the importance of movement and exercise.