The time for a national curriculum that dumbs down learners and teachers is over.
These were some of the sentiments shared by Professors Esther Ramani and Michael Joseph during their presentation on the first day of Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网’s Community Engaged Learning Symposium.
Their presentation entitled: “What university staff and schoolteachers can learn from each other: a community engagement project in biliteracy for epistemic access in a township school” delved into the challenges faced in the classroom and proposed solutions to them.
Ramani posed the question: does the teacher-training model work or do we need to look at something else?
Their proposal is a model which allows academics and teachers to collaborate with the goal of bettering the education system, as they have done in collaboration with local schoolteacher, Nompumelelo Frans.
Ramani condemned the current CAPS curriculum for dumbing down both learners and teachers by not giving the teacher room to teach as they see fit: “everything the teacher has to do is written down”, she stated.
Ramani provided an example of an exercise wherein pupils had to interpret a graph and answer questions testing their comprehension. Instead of doing this, Frans divided her pupils into groups wherein they could gather their own data and construct their own graphs in order to help them understand that process.
Joseph noted that one of their project’s aims is to be able to see problems in the classrooms through the eyes of teachers. One such problem was a lack of motivation amongst learners. This was, however, dispelled when they saw pupils not playing during break but rather, voluntarily remaining in the classroom to do schoolwork.
In this ‘self-initiated’ work, the pupils would go up to the black board and write as the teacher had previously done. “The black board”, Joseph stated, “should be a site for teaching and learning for both teachers and learners”.
Their project also aims to promote biliteracy. “We want to dispel the colonial myth that African languages are not suitable to use for academic purposes”, commented Joseph.
The trio of two academics and a teacher spoke at length about their promotion of biliteracy in a class of grade three learners at a local school. One such example was Frans’ use of an isiXhosa book to tell a story to her pupils in order to develop their narrative learning. The foundation phase teacher shared the challenges she encountered when teaching this. In particular, how the pupils tried to remember every sentence in the story in order to retell it. Ramani worked with her to teach the pupils that they don’t have to tell the story as it is written but that they can tell it as they remember it.
The trio played a video showing Ramani retell the isiXhosa story to the grade three pupils. One pupil stood up to recite the story in isiXhosa after hearing both Ramani’s English version and the isiXhosa version told by Frans.
“We are essentially teaching IsiXhosa as a third language”, remarked Frans after the video. The learners tell the story entitled “uWide no Jack” in non-standard isiXhosa because that is the language they speak at home, whilst they are taught in standard isiXhosa as well as English.
This encourages language comprehension- a problem Frans observed in students in their senior phase of school and what she believes is the cause of many school failures.
Encouraging self-initiated learning has been criticised as a possible cause of unruly classrooms. But as IkamvaYouth branch co-ordinator, Bulelwa Mangali commented at the end of the presentation: “If we have such classrooms we’ll have learners that are able to ask questions”.
Article by: Tsholofelo Tselaemang