The central role of teachers

A collaborative effort, Teachers Upfront is lending a helping hand to the teaching profession in South Africa. In a series of education dialogues started in March 2011, Teachers Upfront seeks to address the problems faced by teachers in South Africa today through presentations and seminars on different educational topics.

These dialogues are later reported in the Mail and Guardian in an effort to continue the series’ aim to encourage public discourse around these issues.

Teachers first

The first of these dialogues was dedicated to the central role played by teachers in the South African Education System. It took place on 29 March 2011 at Wits School of Education in Johannesburg. The session examined the treatment of teachers by their peers, learners, and parents, and highlighted the challenging environments in which teachers have to work. Too often, it seems teachers are blamed and shamed, rather than supported and appreciated.

Delivering the keynote address, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, urged delegates to support teaching professionals, particularly those working in challenging environments. Referring to teaching as a “noble profession”, Ramphele remembered her most influential teachers, from her mother to her primary school teachers who encouraged her love of science and medicine.

Ramphele’s speech added weight to one of the main aims of Teachers Upfront – to support teachers as key agents in creating a quality education system.

Vision of a teacher

Ramphele also positioned teachers as role models who give with love to push their students to greater heights. For Ramphele, the gap between this vision of a teacher and the perception of teachers today (unmotivated, ill-equipped, and uncaring) can be attributed to the deep wounds that characterise our society – wounds that manifest in self-destructive, negative, or apathetic behaviour on every level of society, from the individual to the community that should serve that individual.

For Ramphele, the effects of apartheid and of a society unable to properly cope with its history are obvious in South Africa’s damaged teachers who have lost a sense of connection with their purpose and their learners. The cure for this disconnection is healing and support, rather than blame and shame, which leads merely to further feelings of negativity.

Speaking about teacher morale, Yael Shalem, Professor at the Wits School of Education, supported this view, pointing out that ‘teacher’ should not be a homogenous category – teachers are individuals with different races, genders, cultures, and languages. Not all teachers face the same socio-economic challenges, so thinking about them as a single group is counter-productive.

Shalem reminded delegates that teachers working in improvised schools have very different work challenges to those in well-resourced schools. Shalem described this as a “dual economy of schooling [that] exists between those children who have a second and third site of knowledge acquisition”, such as access to books and the Internet at home, and “those children whose only site of learning acquisition is the school”.

Teaching in South Africa

In Shalem’s view, the following four variables are important to a good quality teaching environment yet up to 70% of South Africa’s teachers are not in a position to benefit from them:

• Access to learners who are prepared for schooling, mentally and physically
• A reservoir of cognitive resources at school level
• A well-specified curriculum
• Functional school management

The absence of these variables proves that school failure cannot be blamed solely on teacher inefficiency. So many more factors are at play – difficult home environments, poverty, lack of learner preparation, and inadequate resources all have roles to play in the challenge that is teaching in South Africa today.

The challenge of teaching in a township

This multifaceted view was supported by Phumi Mthiyane, a teacher at Realogile Secondary School in Alexandra, Johannesburg, whose contribution to the discussion highlighted the day-to-day challenge of being a teacher in a township. In Mthiyane’s words, her success as a teacher is based on a teaching mind-set that is “open, humble and willing to change”. At present, Mthiyane and her school are benefitting from training support for Mthiyane from Wits School of Education and a community radio project for learners, courtesy of Alex FM.

While the teaching profession has a long way to go when it comes to changing its reputation, initiatives like these education dialogues and related projects can offer opportunities to rework how teachers experience their own development and are perceived by others. As Mthiyane points out, “Fear does not make us work; being inspired does.”

One Laptop Per Child comes to South Africa

CoZa Cares is delighted to be working closely with the new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) South Africa Foundation as its implementation partner in South Africa. A number of pilot projects are planned for 2013, and as part of our own preparation, we organised a three-day training session at Kingsmead College in Rosebank, Johannesburg from 10 to 12 December.

As part of our mission to share knowledge as openly as possible, we invited stakeholders involved in ICT in Education to join us for the training, including the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, Bridge, and the Kliptown Youth Program, who are already using OLPC’s XO laptops in their aftercare programme.

Also present at the event were two award-winning school principals from Limpopo, Phuti Ragophala and Mmipe Mokgehle. Both their schools form part of the Mankweng Cluster, which is the proposed area for the OLPC SA pilot programme.

One Laptop Per Child

The three-day event was originally designed to be five days long, but was compressed to fit the schedules of stakeholders. It was run by two members of the Rwandan OLPC programme, Desire Rwagaju and Jimmy Intwali, and supervised by OLPC’s Vice-President of Operations and Africa, Sergio Romero. Both Rwagaju and Intwali are based at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.

The first day of the event was dedicated to giving an overview of what OLPC is and does (locally and worldwide), the focus on teacher practice and its impact on learning, and the journey from traditional to 21st century teaching methodology. Trainees were also introduced to the XO laptop and the Sugar Operating System that runs on it.

The second day covered the Sugar learning environment, looking at teaching principles and methodology, the OLPC deployment guide and logistics.

The third and final day had the trainees getting to grips with the technical side of the XO laptop during a hands-on workshop covering XO assembling and dissembling, installation and configuration, maintenance and repair; with trainees getting to dismantle and reassemble the laptops.

OLPC in Rwanda

The event was very well-attended and all the trainees present expressed their excitement about the XO and an extreme desire to get OLPC implemented in South Africa.

Rwagaju handled the majority of the first day’s presentation with assistance from Intwali and Romero, illustrating his presentation with several different models of the OLPC XO laptop. Rwagaju’s presentation can be simply summarised in the video below, which is the first part of OLPC’s marketing video. According to Rwagaju:

We only ever need to play this video to governments once and they buy into our project.”

Rwagaju also spoke about the OLPC project in his homeland. Rwanda’s deployment began in 2007, supported by G1G1 donations and by President Paul Kagame’s vision for the country that included universal access to the Web. In 2008 the XO was introduced to the first 10,000 students.Rwanda currently has the highest deployment level in Africa with around 210 000 laptops distributed to schoolchildren across the nation. They estimate that they will have full nationwide saturation by 2017.

Besides Rwanda, OLPC is in 44 different countries on 6 continents. OLPC’s mission is to empower the world’s poorest children through education:

We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”

Education has a brighter future B Smart ZA Cares

Schools and communities

Categories: Education

With the support of the Wits University’s School of Education, the University of Johannesburg’s Education faculty, the Bridge Education NGO, and the Mail and Guardian, Teachers Upfront is encouraging debate around the teaching profession in South Africa through a series of education dialogues.

The third dialogue was held at the University of Johannesburg on 2 August 2012. Discussion centred on the topic of Schools and Communities.

It takes a village

The education crisis in South Africa requires the commitment of teachers, learners, schools, and communities if solutions for success are to be correctly implemented. This was the message from the third Teachers Upfront dialogue. Misheck Ndebele, Education lecturer at Wits University, emphasised the importance of parental involvement in learner success. In his words:

“Lots of improvement in attendance, achievement, and participation can be attributed to the involvement of parents and a close co-operation between schools and families.”

Noting that success goes beyond the classroom, Ndebele pointed out that learners whose parents are actively involved in their education tend to be more successful as adults. Ndebele described his own research into parental involvement at 40 Gauteng schools – through which he identified the following as critical criteria for learner success:

• Communication
• Parenting at home
• Student learning
• Volunteering
• School decision-making
• Collaboration with the community

Based on this research, Ndebele recommended that a school-family partnership course be part of every teacher-training curriculum in the country.

Community involvement in student success

This view was supported by Theresa Moila, Senior Manager for Education at the Transnet Foundation, who later reminded delegates that parents have a responsibility to educate and socialise their children while teachers get on with the job of delivering a quality curriculum.

In research in South Africa, where parents and communities are involved, learner success is seen more frequently. Dr Al Witten of the Centre for the Community School at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, expanded the definition of ‘community’ to include universities such as his own, which works with the Eastern Cape’s Manyano community schools network.

Calling on communities to collaborate to ensure the success of education programmes, Witten said:

“We should think about the community beyond geography, though, and involve individuals [such as school leaders] or organisations that support schools, wherever they may be.”

Speaking of school leaders, Witten called on individuals to cross boundaries and work towards the common goals of teaching and learning.

Quality teaching and learning

One such leader is Lamile Faltein, principal of Limekhaya High School in Uitenhage’s Kwa-Langa township in the Eastern Cape. Faltein highlighted the challenges at the school, rebuilt in 1995 after a 1976 fire. Reviewing dismal Matric results, Faltein remembers thinking “there must be challenges I don’t know about”. He asked previous learners to complete questionnaires about their experience at the school and learnt that many of them were not able to complete their exams because their teachers were ill-equipped to teach them.

To remedy the situation, Faltein invited in experts to ensure his staff had the knowledge base necessary for their subjects. With these helping hands, teachers at the school are now formally accountable to the school’s governing body and Faltein has instituted measures such as class visits to monitor teachers’ lesson preparation.

Limekhaya High School’s vision reads:

“We strive to provide a quality education service to produce balanced learners who will play a leading role in advancing the respect of human rights and the economic development of the country.”

According to Faltein, this vision was crafted by the community itself.

Communities’ participation and support

Communities are crucial, Faltein said, to monitoring and supporting schools. Limekhaya works with the community, reaches out to poorly performing schools, employs social workers to help learners, and has developed a learner resource centre. Faltein urged other school leaders to work with community steering committees that monitor teaching quality and hold their school accountable for learner performance…

The dialogue was marked by strong consensus that schools cannot solve the education crisis on their own. Strong leadership and community participation and support are essential to creating a sense of common responsibility for learner achievement.

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