Workshops

To enhance the skills of Lesotho’s people in the areas of critical multimedia literacy and creative writing Ba re e ne re designs and facilitates workshops. These have taken place as part of our literature festivals and as their own events, utilizing curriculum we’ve created specifically for our local audiences. Creative writing workshops offer dynamic exercises that get participants on their feet and engaging with media in order to stimulate story ideas. Critical literacy workshops have encouraged relationships with Sesotho language and have been a lab for inventing new Sesotho words and artistic dictionary pages.

Skima Sesotho

Between April and August 2018 Ba re e ne re organised a series of 3 workshops called “Skima Sesotho.” These workshops married exercises and discussions about critical multimedia literacy with our imaginative BA RE Dictionary Project.

The workshops were designed to get Basotho excited about Sesotho language and demonstrate the playful malleability of Sesotho. Through these workshops, which were free and open to the public, we introduced a process for cultivating new Sesotho words complete with definitions and example sentences. Words could be entirely new creations or acknowledgment of pre-existing slang which have relevance in various social clusters (schools, villages, churches, neighborhoods etc.).

We also discussed how images, texts and sounds could be combined to create contrasting meanings about the same subject matter. We then talked about ways to read context and meaning in multimedia. These points were illustrated through archival British news footage about Lesotho and current newspaper stories.