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In this article the authors describe how a specific technique--having learners create cartoons based on a reading passage--helped learners explore their understanding of reading passages and helped the teachers reflect on what the learners had comprehended.

Children in developing countries often lack sufficient support for early learning skills prior to beginning school. This research evaluates an educational media intervention using an animated cartoon program, "Akili and Me." The program was originally created in Tanzania to teach early learning skills. This program was adapted in content and language use in this study in Rwanda. The two-week intervention involved primary school students (mean age = 7.1 years) who were randomized into two groups (intervention and comparison group). The intervention group viewed one "Akili and Me" episode a day for five days. This viewing was repeated the following week. Similarly, the comparison watched the same amount of television but the content consisted of local popular programs. Baseline and follow-up assessments evaluated 10 areas of early learning, using an adaptation of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA), and also children's media receptivity. At follow-up, children in the intervention program, "Akili and Me," had significantly higher scores for counting, number recognition, shape knowledge, letter identification, color identification, body part recognition, health knowledge, and vocabulary. The analyses provide promising evidence that locally produced educational media interventions can impact early learning skills, even among children living in resource-poor communities.

This article focuses on the use of the genre of the cartoon strip to convey knowledge to the youth, about the Rwandan genocide as illustrated by Mark Njoroge Kinuthia in 100 DAYS: In the Land of the Thousand Hills (2011). The article seeks to demonstrate that cartoon strip appeals to young readers and allows transferring of knowledge through visual and verbal signs. This article uses Critical discourses analysis (CDA) to analyse the pictures. CDA pays attention to words, pictures, colour, font and all the visuals that constitute a cartoon text. This allows the readers/audiences of cartoon to emerge with multiple meanings. However, this article is confined to analysis the words of the cartoons, because the use of visuals from the book requires special permission that we were not able to secure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how to represent the weighty subject of genocide in Africa's popular cultural and literary genres without minimising, distorting or romanticising this emotive subject has taken centre stage in African scholarship. The problematics of this representation are projected in theoretical arguments that insist that the creative imagination stylises narratives of genocide and in the process gratuitously sanitises the pain that flows from the harm of genocide. Although this argument has merit to the extent that language is the only cultural resource through which humanity can register its agonistic experiences, there is no escaping the reality of preserving the memories of pain through the language of invention. In recognition of these paradoxes, this article seeks to critically interrogate what cartoons and comic strips do to the pain arising from genocide. This article uses the genre of the graphic novel/cartoon tale/cartoon novella as represented in Stassen's work titled Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda to suggest that it is perhaps liberating to multiply cultural sites from which the subject of genocide can be debated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]