Pulp Art Making: A Tool for Promoting Recycling through Hand Papermaking for Effective Curriculum Delivery in Art

Recycling to produce new products out of waste materials is not a regular feature of school art programmes in Ghana A previous quasi-experimental recycling project revealed the possibility of using pulp waste fabrics and paper mulberry fibre to produce good quality art paper suitable for teaching and learning of drawing painting stitching colour work and book binding This article reports on the follow up workshop aimed at introducing 15 art teachers in Kumasi to pulp art making to support effective delivery of the Creative Arts Basic Design and Technology and Visual Arts curricula followed in Primary Junior High and Senior High Schools respectively Besides learning to produce papers the teachers tested the suitability of the produced papers using colour pencil pastel poster colour watercolour oil and acrylic paints They also learned to sew sheets of the produced papers together into miniature books to teach calligraphy and encourage development of good handwriting skills among their students This one-day hands-on workshop generated sufficient interest to motivate four participants to successfully replicate the workshop in their respective school

Structural Patterns in Asante Kente: An Indigenous Instructional Resource for Design Education in Textiles

Asante Kente is a richly coloured, intricately patterned indigenous hand woven fabric that is typically produced at Bonwire and Adanwomase in Ashanti Region, Ghana. Kente is woven in long narrow strips with brightly coloured silk or cotton yarns on Nsadua Kofi, the traditional narrow loom, which is a box-like wooden structure in which the weaver sits to weave. The strips are sewn together lengthways to purposely create definite patterns in the constructed cloth. Asante Kente motifs and cloth designs have names with philosophical meanings and colour symbolism that serve as a medium of communication to the indigenes.  The cloth designs consist of dots, lines, shapes, textures and colours that are carefully crafted to form geometric shapes and intricate patterns that exhibit balance, rhythm, variety, proportion and repetition. Unlike Asante Kente cloth designs that evolve on the loom, weaving in the higher education textiles curriculum requires expression of the structure of design concepts as drafts on point paper. To demystify drafting, which many textiles students perceive as “difficult to learn” led to adoption of the quasi-experimental approach to interpret selected Kente motifs to demonstrate the process of drafting to 148 Year One Industrial Art students of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Using the draft as instructional resource, the students were guided to translate drafts they had made into woven Kente stole on the broadloom. The focus of this work was to bridge the gap between indigenous hand weaving and weaving as it is taught in the formal educational system. The structural patterns of Asante Kente designs provided the needed instructional resource and aesthetic experience to ensure successful learning of drafting in textiles design education. The importance of the study is to help preserve this natural cultural heritage of Kente weaving in the youth who are given formal education and again to set the pace for further research to be conducted into the use of motifs, symbols and designs in indigenous cloth as vast resource in design education in textiles. Keywords: Asante Kente Design, Structural Pattern, Instructional Resource, Drafting, and Textiles Design Educatio

Capital Budgeting as a Tool of Management Decision Making: A Case Study of National Investment Bank Limited

Sound financial management and decision-making on capital investments are critical to company survival and long-term success. With this truth affirmed by the global financial crisis, this study sets out to examine the capital budgeting tools at National Investment Bank Limited (NIB) in Ghana, adapted for management decision making. It establishes the various capital budgeting techniques used by NIB in undertaking investment projects and how these decisions affects the firm’s value, profit and growth rate. As methodology, the study adopts both primary and secondary sources which are further analyzed with the use of correlation analysis. The findings reveal that there is a positive relationship between the variables and their effects are significant. The study concludes that, the firm used capital budgeting techniques such as Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return, Profitability Index, Discounted Payback Period, Payback Period and Accounting Rate of Return in order to maximize the firm’s value which is usually affected by the profit and the growth rate. Given the conclusion herein, the study recommends among others that NIB should educate and train their staff on the various capital budgeting tools and the formation of knowledgeable team that will evaluate projects using the capital budgeting tools due to its irreversibility nature, huge investment outlay and its long term effect. Keywords: Capital budgeting, Techniques, Cash Flow, Investments, Decision making, Ghana DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/11-4-04 Publication date: February 29th 202

ACCESS TO LIBRARY FACILITIES AND RESOURCES BY STUDENTS WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENT AT UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION, WINNEBA.

This case study focused on how students with visual impairment access library facilities and resources at the University of Education, Winneba. Data were gathered through focus group interviews from 48 out of 99 undergraduate students with visual impairment. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants for the study. Data were analyzed thematically using color coding for the categorization of themes. The results indicated that students with visual impairment had some difficulties accessing the physical infrastructure of the libraries. It was revealed that learning materials of the University libraries were not in accessible formats, and the braille library only produced chapters of books for students with visual impairment. The results further indicated that students with visual impairment in the University wanted the management of the University to purchase assistive devices for them for personal and independent use. The study recommended that the management of the University’s libraries should ensure the provision of more technological devices that will produce learning materials in accessible formats for students with visual impairment to promote the use of library resources