Thinking Aloud - January

Dear friends and colleagues of the NMI

One of our goals this year is to become better at communicating about our work. Our goal is not only to communicate about our work formally, but to have opportunities to informally share our experiences and thoughts, with people like ourselves, who are committed to creating an education system that works for all our children.

First we will enter the world of ‘blogging’. Over the course of this year, we will encourage the NMI team, and people working with us, to share their thoughts and experiences with you. In this way you will hear diverse voices – and perhaps, through the mosaic of our voices and experiences, you will start sensing our world, and the ideas and possibilities that we see emerging around us.

We have also started this monthly ritual of ‘thinking aloud’. This will be a ritual of the senior team of the NMI to more intimately share with you some of our thoughts and experiences as we walk (and run) forward.
There has been a lot of attention recently in the South African media around the challenges of education, the challenges of rural education in particular. We welcome this growing concern about the state of our public school system.

If the dream of equality and democracy rides on a public school system, which provides all children with confidence in learning, then our dream rests on shaky ground. There are increasingly two worlds in South Africa – an urban middle-class world whose face dominates media and marketing imagery – and a much larger ‘real’, which exists outside the media’s coverage. When you spend days in rural classrooms, and experience the day-to-day conditions in which rural teachers and learners try to create an atmosphere that encourages education, it is extremely difficult to watch the image of South Africa tick forward as if everything is basically okay. Public concern makes sense.

And yet we are concerned about the direction of the current conversation. There is an emerging conversation in the media where frustration is increasingly directed toward the rural poor, including educators, parents, and even students. The experience gap, and the economy gap, between the middle class and the rural poor increases, and rural educators are lumped together and blamed for the failure of our public education system.

Our experience is different. There are some educators who are trying very hard – despite a whole range of day-to-day frustrations. And yet, even the educators who are truly putting their shoulder to the plough are not winning. Human beings cannot tolerate consistent failure over time. They give up; turn on themselves, and others.

Our response is larger than being frustrated with educators. The system of education, as it is currently constructed, is misaligned with the educational needs of our children. Our work to date provides us with a set of ideas and understandings about education that allow us to move beyond frustration to a careful, step-by-step, reconstruction of the humanity, knowledge base, pedagogy and structure that must be brought together to establish “solid ground” under our system of education for the future. Hopefully this process of ‘thinking aloud’ will allow us to share some of these ideas more systematically along the way.

For this month I thought I would share with you some photos taken during the first week of school opening. See our School Opening 2010 gallery.

We currently work in the rural areas of Mbizana, Mqanduli and Qunu. Over the holiday period, many of these schools co-ordinated their third round of ilima lokufunda. In the coming days the people working with schools to achieve these iilima will share their stories with you.

Many people misunderstand the ilima lokufunda. Many people assume that the power of the ilima lokufunda resides in volunteerism and school refurbishment. We have built classrooms, repainted whole schools, fixed roofs and generally made schools bright and colourful. Children are overwhelmed. Human beings love beauty and order. It brings basic beauty and order back to the classroom. This, in itself, is moving.

But the main objectives of ukuilima are not the physicality or the outcomes of the work. We do not undertake ilima lokufunda because we think rural communities should be held responsible for school renovations, for example. We are working hard at other levels of the education system to ensure that school renovations and maintenance systems start to work.

The main objective is to create a new kind of solidarity, between local communities, teachers and other citizens, who create their lives in solidarity with the rural poor. Over the past three years we have established an annual ritual of ilima lokufunda, where the extended community of the school, including committed citizens living outside of each community, come together to ensure a dignified school opening. Over time they hope to set an example for South Africa – calling all South Africans to use the weekend before school commencing to clean, paint and get schools ready for opening.

Some schools are on fire – they pull large numbers of parents and community members and the teachers also jump in. Other schools struggle – they have had limited working relationships with their local communities, and so, they are building them bit by bit. In the past, too many teachers would sit on the sidelines and watch others work. Slowly, more and more teachers are “getting it”, and jumping in and sensing the solidarity of the joint venture. Some schools surprise you. One school that we had put at the top of our “frustration list” seemed to miraculously step up to the plate over this period. Not only did they manage a successful ilima and school opening, but teachers and learners were engaged in classroom activities on the first day of school. See the school team in Photo 1.

On the second day of the new term, I went to visit some of the schools. My main intention was to greet school teams in the new year.

I always think more clearly when I am in schools. I think our minds work differently when we can feel things on our skin, rather than just think about them. Either we think in new ways, or we just come across more clear thoughts.
One of the things I was thinking about was how deeply appreciative teachers and communities are to be working with the Nelson Mandela Institute. I could pretend that this is only because we are so fantastic. (Which I think we are.) But it goes beyond that. First, these teachers get so little support. Most of these schools are very rural. There is very little contact, even by district officials. When outsiders do come, they are often judging (in one way or the other) rather than supporting. There is very little opportunity for teachers to discuss the day-to-day challenges they have in their classrooms, and to brainstorm pedagogical solutions. Second, the little support that does emerge is in the form of short-term training or projects. For a range of reasons, short-term projects are somewhat ritualised. Teachers are very grateful, but often little translates into new classroom practice. This is made worse because many of the teacher trainers (district or NGOs) have not themselves experienced teaching successfully in the conditions in these classrooms. Pedagogy and curriculum is suggested – and may even appear child-friendly and creative – but has not been ‘”road tested” in rural classrooms.

The relationship between the NMI and this particular group of schools is approximately 2.5 years’ old. Each year the relationships deepen. Each year our understanding of the barriers to quality education deepens. Each year teachers sense more and more authentic support. And each year teachers take more and more new steps in their classrooms.

When we went to visit teacher teams during the first week of opening, and we were not there to judge or investigate anything, teachers continually said, “Hey, but you really love us.”

Love in this context is about so many things. It is about knowing that rural education is not working because the system is not yet set up to work. It is about fighting for the basic conditions for education to be put in place. It is being committed to establishing knowledge workable in the specific socio-economic and linguistic context of these rural children. And yet, at the same time, it is about insisting that we, as educators, can and must make a difference in our own classrooms, if our next generation is going to have a fighting chance.

So as I moved from school to school my mind was both heavy and inspired. The heaviness comes because it is a long road ahead. Our history has been so violent, and so undermining of the mind of the rural child and rural educator. We are not building from clean ground. The inspiration is in seeing new steps – and seeing new steps that are librating for a teacher, parent, principal or child. Sometimes it is the smaller things that move me most. The ground holds old patterns of pain and the dirt is tightly packed around our roots. It takes special conditions for us to loosen the old roots and find a new step.

So let me share with you some of the smaller things that catch my eye.

Photo 2 shows the second day of school at Gwebinkundla. It shows the community women who cook food each day for the children at the school, serving food to the children from Grade R. The school nutrition programme in the Eastern Cape is well-known for being a disaster. The story is more complicated than it may seem from the outside. A few years back, most children at rural schools were either not being fed, or were being fed just a slice of bread on some days. This was called a “nutrition” programme. A few years ago, there was a shakeup of the system; the menu called for cooked meals, so service providers were pushed into alliances with local women who would prepare hot food. There are still many problems with this system, but it is still somewhat miraculous to see the power of local women, with little or no support, preparing cooked food for so many children on a daily basis.

Photo 3 shows learners’ shoes outside their classrooms. One of the rituals of the Magic Classroom is wearing “Magic Slippers”. In this ritual, children take their shoes off before entering classrooms, and put on their Magic Slippers (often a pair of socks) when they enter. On the most basic level, this helps keep the classroom cleaner. (With no cleaners and mud up to the front door, the challenge of keeping mud out, and children in, seems impossible at times. Teachers spend a disproportionate amount of their energy worrying about cleanliness.) But on a deeper level, it provides children and teachers with an entry ritual where they let go of the world outside, to enter the more “magical” world of the classroom. This ritual has become important for many teachers and children. The ritual was designed for Grades R through 3. You can see, in this photo, this school applies the Magic Slippers idea to all classrooms. From the first day of school, shoes are neatly stacked outside.

Photo 4 simply shows a blackboard with a clear, clean Xhosa lesson. In a future contribution to ‘Thinking Aloud’ we will share our thoughts on the relationship between bi-literacy and cognition. We will suggest that one of the most fundamental problems underlying all of the more superficial frustrations in education is a systematic misunderstanding of the bi-literacy challenge. Xhosa is not taught well; literacy is not related to the language of the “real”; and Xhosa is not approached as a language to deepen cognition. English is taught poorly and overly relied upon in early education phases as a language of cognition. So it may be a bit funny, but this chalkboard, on Day 2, made me smile.

Photo 5 shows a “fantasy area” in a Grade R classroom, set up by a teacher from Bijolo over the holiday period. There are few educational materials in rural reception classrooms. Through this “fantasy area”, this dedicated teacher is giving children a profound opportunity to relate early learning to their environment and lived world.

Photo 6 shows a Grade 7 classroom where learners have already started writing in their school books. This is a bigger victory than it seems. The current school registration system leaves most schools using the first week of school only to register and settle classrooms in the most basic sense. One of our goals over time is to make the first day of school a day of teaching and learning. This classroom did it!

Photo 7 is a bit blurry but I don’t have a better one. I like this one. We have established Magic Classrooms from Grade R to Grade 3. In this school (Bijolo) they dedicated their ilima lokufunda to building and setting up bookshelves to establish classroom libraries. Look at this beautiful classroom!

The last few photos (Photo 8, Photo 9 and Photo 10) are of learners. If we get frustrated with the walk forward, one look into the eyes of these children and you can call yourself to order. Kids here love school. And their parents spend a huge portion of their resources supporting the dream of education. There was one child (I don’t have a photo) who really jumped out at me this trip. It was the second day of school and she was entering Grade 1. She had been in Grade R the previous year, and was now entering “big kids” school. Last year her parents could not afford a school uniform; her teacher told me that her parents really struggle; her clothes were almost rags. Her parents spent the entire year saving up for a FULL school uniform – shirt, skirt, sweater, and big blue knee socks. The entire uniform was slightly oversized – she would grow into it soon. She had a school backpack snugly on her shoulders, with some paper and a pencil. The determination in this child’s eyes somehow overwhelmed me.

Well, we hope that some of you enjoy these reflections. We would be really appreciative of any feedback you may have (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

I hope you enjoy our website. We are new at the website business – and so any thoughts you may have to improve it are appreciated.

We recently finished a Social Report putting forward some of the work and ideas emerging from our work from 2007 through 2009. If you are interested in a copy, please contact Sis Sindi (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
May this year be a good one for our children.

Kim Porteus
Executive Director
Nelson Mandela Institute