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MEDIA REVIEWS
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By Carlo
  
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
 
 
Coastal Journal
Bath, Maine. February 26, 1998. Volume 32. Number 9
Coastal Journal in Maine
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Maine Journal- Sentinel
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“They (the students) are really friendly with me. Whenever they see me they say, “Mr. Sagna, Mr. Sagna.” I like it here. People are friendly…. I don’t feel homesick because people are the same—just like home.”
November 2nd, 1997 |
Learning Africa
Visiting teacher shows students his way of life
By Doug Harlow Staff Writer
70, 80 degrees. Cool there is from 60 to 80 degrees,” Sagna said in an interview the other day at the Atwood-Tapley Elementary School.
Sponsored by an exchange program of the Amity Institute with grant money from the Oak Grove Foundation, Sagna, 29, arrived in Oakland the first week of September.
Candace Hill and Steve Collins of Oakland are his host family.
Sagna spent a week in Amy Peterson’s music class and a couple of days at a school in Sydney and at Messalonskee High School teaching students the sounds and rhythms of his native Africa.
“For the last two months, Oumar has taught students African dance, shared African songs, demonstrated the use of other African instruments and described African landscape through sand and watercolor drawings,” district administer Lisa Stoutz said.
The visiting teacher’s duties in October included a dramatic presentation of an African folk tale in French with Atwood-Tapley students as players, a music concert called “It’s a Small World” with third graders, and a fourth-grade Art Club- sponsored puppet show last Thursday.
In teacher Laurel Power’s third grade class recently, Sagna was busy at the chalkboard, instructing students in the culture and language of French-speaking Africans. He speaks four languages- English, French, and two of Senegal’s 15 main languages, Jola and Wolof.
The children were fixed on the visiting teacher, who earned a master’s degree in English at Dakar, Senegal. He was dressed in a long native shirt called a “sabadore,” or “bou bou,” and a matching knit cap.
“I think it’s nice because he is speaking French,” said third-grader Hanna Patten after the class. “It’s a different language and he’s a really different.”
“We learned the arts of Africa and the songs they sing, too, and how he plays the drums,” added her classmate Sarah Smith.
Peterson, who is on the committee that selects a visiting foreign teacher each year, said Sagna was the clear choice this year from a rich field of applicants.
The visiting teacher in 1996 was from Japan.
“Oumar’s dossier was very impressive with music, art and language,” she said. “His English-language skills are very good.”
For Sagna, all the attention he is getting these days is something new, but he likens the warmth and friendship he is receiving to a concept called “teranga,” or hospitality, that is traditionally practiced in his homeland.
“They are really friendly with me,” Sagna said of the students, whom seem to gather around him wherever he goes. “Whenever they see me they say, ‘Mr. Sagna, Mr. Sagna.’ I like it here. People are friendly.
“I don’t feel homesick because people are the same- just like home,” he said.
Sagna said he can close his eyes these days in Oakland and hear the children around him and feel the rhythm of life as if he were home in Senegal, where he lives with his mother and eight brothers and sisters.
When he opens his eyes and sees all the faces of Maine children around him, he feels the same joy he remembers from home.
“I’m happy to see that people welcome my culture,” Sagna aid. “This is small world, after all.”
Sagna will continue teaching in Oakland schools until Nov. 7, when he is scheduled to leave for Morse High School in Bath, where he will teach until June. |
OAKLAND- The first time Oumar Sagna ever stepped on an airplane from his home in Senegal, West Africa, he was aimed straight for Oakland, Maine.
The French-language teacher, artist and musician has been wowing his students here ever since with his colorful dress, his African drums and songs, and his teaching style, which puts students at center stage.
Sagna even got to see it snow for the first time on Oct.22.
“They say it’s still warm now, but for me, in Senegal, it stays 60,
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The Daily
Tribune
Wisconsin Rapids, Wedsday February 14th, 2001
Artist DRUMS up smilesAuburndale students enjoy sights, sounds of culture this week
By MARK SCARBOROUGH
Tribune staff writer
As artist in residence Oumar Sagna reaches out with rhythm to about 1,000 students in the Auburndale School District this week, he's teaching students to feel the music inside themselves. Thirty three but bouncing around Tammy Wrege's music classroom like a child a few months shy of 6, Sagna breathes in music and exhales joy and happiness. He couldn't even fill up the lunch tray in the cafeteria Tuesday without responding to the legion of fans, including full tables of kindergartners, by shouting ecstatic greetings. "He's cool," said Rebecca Willfahrt, 6.
"We like it when he plays the drums," said Megan Vobora, 5.
"He's fun because he's from a different country, and we get to learn new stuff," fifth-grader Cassie Richardson, 11, said while glancing at a library book after lunch.
A native of Senegal in West Africa, Sagna came to America in 1997 after completing a Master's degree in English at a college in Dakar, Senegal.
He has lived and taught in Maine, and now is a French language teacher and African drumming instructor at a Milwaukee's Lisbon Avenue Neighborhood Development Community Center, an after school safe haven for Milwaukee school children that operates in cooperation with the Milwaukee Community Learning Center.
Although paid for his Auburndale residency, the first he's done in central Wisconsin, Sagna gets much more than money when he popularizes African drumming and culture in schools.
"Whenever a child is happy, that's my blessing for the day," he said. "To see a smile on a child's face, that's rewarding to me. Kids are our best treasure. If we can do anything to make them happy, why not? That's really why I do this..."
Sagna is a virtuoso on the jung jung, three drums of different sizes latched together, with a small section of metal pipe attached, providing four distinctive widely ranging tones or voices.” Here we have the father, the mother and the son or daughter, the whole family together, and they talk," Sagna told a transfixed class of fourth-graders.
Among his other favored African instruments, he performs on the shakere, a hollow gourd with musical beads attached that can be thumped or shaken; the kora, a stringed instrument featuring a gourd base; a balaphone, a xylophone-like wooden and metal contraption. He also plays the conga drums, harmonica and many other instruments.
Sagna performs with his own group and is working on a compact disk. He teaches drumming at foote work Dance studio. He also has helped troubled youngsters deal with their anger by teaching them African drumming as part of the Dragonfly Services program orchestrated by Milwaukee art therapist Sandra Zahn.
Sagna is spending almost every class hour this week passing along his special musical magic to Auburndale pre-kindergartners through high school seniors.
"My whole plan is for our students to see the diversity in this world," said Wrege, a general music teacher at Auburndale Elementary School and choir director at Auburndale High School. "We have such a narrow world view in central Wisconsin, but there is a great big world out there. ..."
She found funding for the artist-in-residence project from the Auburndale Music Boosters organization, the elementary school principal’s office, and the district gifted and talented program.
"This has been so much fun, Wrege said.”We've been having such a good time. I couldn't get the parents out of here last night. I finally had to tell them, "Hey, I've got to go home..."
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Marshfield, Wisconsin Rapids
Wednsday, February 14th 2001
News-Herald
 
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sunday, June 16, 2002
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