The sixth annual Silvaana Udz Lekcha Series, was hosted by the University of Belize Faculty of Education and Arts in Belmopan on Tuesday morning. In attendance to a full house at the Jaguar Auditorium was Deryck Satchwell, a preeminent Belizean educator.
Satchwell has served as Deputy Director of Tertiary and Post-Secondary Education Services in the Ministry of Education, Belize, since January 2011. In this capacity he has championed the development of a quality culture in Belizean tertiary education and is currently focused on building internal quality assurance capacity in Belizean tertiary education institutions.
Prior to his move to the Ministry of Education, he spent almost 30 years in teaching and administration in the secondary and tertiary education systems in Belize. This work included many years as a high school English teacher at the Anglican Cathedral College (where he was principal for ten years), Wesley College and Sacred Heart College. His last teaching position was at Sacred Heart Junior College where he also served as Assistant Dean.
In addition to his current work in the Ministry, he has remained engaged in the development of English language proficiency in Belize and the region. He is the convener for the CSEC English Panel of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) and chair of the Examining Committee of the ATLIB English Placement Examination.
Satchwell is the editor of The Alchemy of Words, an anthology of Belizean literature widely used in Belizean high schools. His academic interests include literacy and rhetoric in multilingual contexts and the treatment of masculinity in African diaspora literature.
Born to two university educated parents in the 1960s, Satchwell shared with students a rich discourse for them to “chew on” and come to their own understanding for dealing with new language acquisition in Belize.
As a multilingual society, Belize offers an interesting linguistic landscape where English has traditionally been promoted as the official language. Then, there is the rich tapestry of Spanish, the Maya family of languages, Garifuna, German, Arabic and other sets of languages in Belize.
Satchwell tackled how new languages can be learned in the educational setting “Especially, when English is a language, “…which almost no one speaks.”
A few years ago, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund UNICEF, along with the Ministry of Education had initiated a special program to promote intercultural bilingual education in southern Belize. Students from the schools in Dangriga, Aguacate and San Jose were being encouraged to learn their first language in Garifuna, Maya and Ketchi Maya. Also the National Garifuna Council (NGC) had spearheaded a program for the teaching of Garifuna in Garifuna Communities with a focus at the Gulisi Primary School. Satchwell made a special plea to student researchers on Tuesday to examine the results from these unique programs.
Sachwell contends that the target language such as English are most easily acquired when speakers are literate in their first language. Students need to be taught the patterns of their first language and how these patterns change when they move to the target language. Speakers have to be “immersed” in the language that they want to learn. Also, it is ok to teach grammar, but that alone will not lead to proficiency in the new languages.
“It has to be applied in real life,” says Sachwell, who is latched to only being an expert Spanish grammarian. “The only way to acquire proficiency in a language is to practice.”
Sachwell recommended that we develop a cadre of persons fluent in many languages. He also encouraged students to develop Spanish language skills. “Non- Spanish speaking Belizeans are automatically excluded from a whole range of scholarship opportunities,” he said.
From the 2020 census, we may come to learn more about language use in Belize. Such a gathering of baseline data will be important in the teaching of language in our classrooms maintains Sachwell.
Sachwell briefly spoke to the millenials about skills in navigating sources in an era where digital intelligence was critical. He does no advocacy on social media for it “…too quickly degenerates. Rather, we need to teach students to intelligently discuss issues and not personalities and to provide the classroom as a setting to the learning of various languages “…or we will find ourselves in a failed state status.”
Previous distinguished lecturers in the Silvaana Udz Lekcha series have been Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lennox Samuels; journalist and news anchor Courtney Weatherburne; poet extraordinaire Jacklyn Burns; literary and musical giant Sir Colville Young; and award-winning author and attorney Godfrey Smith.
The richly imbued learning series has been named in honor of Dr. Silvaana Udz, a former UB lecturer and one of Belize’s Kriol activists. These series introduces students to noteworthy authors, poets and other intellectuals from Belize and abroad so that students may be inspired to pursue a life of letters and critical reflection.
