Learner Leadership

The main objective of the learner and teacher development programme is to work with learners and teachers to foster greater enthusiasm for learning and a greater belief in the potential of each child and teachers’ ability to help them flourish.

The learner and teacher development programme was designed to address the lack of enthusiasm for learning in schools by working with grade 7 and grade 8 learner leaders. The aim was to fundamentally shake the learners’ patterns of engagement with schooling and thereby create hope for educators.

The learner development programme was also an opportunity for teacher training in a supportive and collaborative environment, one that showed educators they were working with children who were capable of functioning at a high academic level.

Phemba Mfundi

One aim of the learner leadership programme is to foster organic self-organisation among learners. Another is to demonstrate a productive pedagogy and to provide a reflective experience to re-inspire teachers.

The first step in this process was to identify the major hurdles that demotivated teachers face. Many teachers have the misconception that learners are ill-disciplined and academically unproductive, and the teacher development programme aimed to shake up this idea.

The second step was to engage with young leaders. The NMI used the existing but neglected learner leadership programme known as Representative Learner Councils (RLCs) and worked with the selected learner leaders in a hands-on programme that encourages learners to think about leadership.

The programme, which has become known as Phemba Mfundi, teaches learners to initiate their own spaces for reading, writing and creative expression and gives them support through a network of educators and mentors.

Learners participate in three-day camps where they learn about self-organisation and focus on the big ideas of ubuntu, history, Africa, culture and language and young people. After each cycle of camps a learner leadership conference is held where they present their ideas to their peers and educators. In 2009 a booklet of the students’ poetry was produced.

The learners involved in these camps are encouraged to embrace “big experiences” to demonstrate what they have learnt from organising small activities for social justice, establishing ground rules for team work, writing songs to animate school life, writing poetry, learning to dance and establishing reading and writing clubs.

Each camp consists of 160 learners, 30 educators, 20 mentors and the NMI team.

The learner leadership programme works with young people to organise themselves in four ways:

• Caring – to organise and care for each other and to ensure that the environment is conducive to learning.
• Learning – to self-organise and support each other in reading, writing and creative production.
• Playing – to organise fun activities such as sports, art, theatre and music.
• Social activism – to share ideas and act upon them to make schools and communities better places to live.

These aims are founded on a set of methodological ideas that are applicable to both rural and urban children:

• Children are fragile and value being treated fairly and with respect.
• Children respect and respond to rules when they help to create a safe and secure learning space.
• Children are productive and creative and enjoy working when it feels valuable.
• Children enjoy thinking about and engaging with big questions that affect their lives.
• Children develop cognitively through their own language and only learn a new language in an environment that is a safe space for continuous practice.
• Children enjoy a challenge with support and immediate feedback.
• Children like seeing their teachers as human beings.
• Children flourish when their achievements are celebrated.

To download the Phemba Mfundi journal 2009 please visit the resources page.

Teacher development

Teacher development is important to transforming the rural education landscape. The NMI worked closely with a number of rural schools to identify the main stumbling blocks that teachers face, to begin to work out how to address these problems.

The context

• Despite teachers’ enthusiasm there is often a nagging feeling that teachers are unable to translate the new curriculum into classroom learning appropriate to a rural context.
• Teachers enjoy capacity-building and relish workshops, but they often find a serious disjuncture between training and the teaching reality. Teachers also feel that teacher educators and government officials don’t fully understand the reality of the classroom context.
• Both teachers and learners feel that despite their hard work they don’t see positive results and progress, which is both frustrating and demoralising, making both parties feel powerless and useless.
• Teachers don’t have a good understanding of the relationship between language and cognitive development. The misunderstanding of the relationship between research, curriculum development and teacher training means that teachers aren’t equipped with the skills to confidently teach literacy in these specific contexts.
• Education researchers and scholars observe that although the new curriculum is a desirable one, it makes many assumptions about schools and this makes teaching circumstances very difficult. Essentially the research upon which classroom practice is founded does not reflect the reality of the majority of classrooms in our country.

Conclusions

• It has become common to blame the failure of rural schooling on teachers’ attitudes, when in fact it is likely that poor morale is as much a result of chronic failure as a cause.
• Rural schooling is not working because there is a specific misalignment between the curriculum and teacher development tools and the specific context of rural and poor communities. We are failing because we do not have the correct tools for the job at hand.
• There is an urgent and intensive project to develop and test curricular tools for the social and linguistic challenges of rural schooling.
• The above project must be a partnership between rural educators and researchers with a good grasp of the relationship between linguistic and cognitive development.
• For the new curriculum to succeed and become sustainable it needs to be accompanied by pedagogical resourcing.
• The success of teacher development depends on teachers committing to understanding the rural schooling challenge and the development of a model that combines centralised training with meaningful classroom support.

Our response

The NMI has responded to these challenges by creating programmes in the following areas:

Classroom theatre
The learner leadership camps are designed as teacher development experiences. By engaging with children from their classrooms, educators have become inspired about their students’ abilities. The teacher development process has also focused on classroom discipline, teacher behaviour, accountability and modelling, engaging children in authentic production and reading of text, the relationship between first language and second language learning and production, establishing accountable teacher networks and finding mechanisms to counter despair and despondency in teachers who feel largely ignored by the public and the state.

Teacher network
A community of learning and teaching has been established among teachers. Teachers in the network are beginning to rely on each other for support to effect change in their classrooms and schools as well as to engage with district officials.

Teacher seminars
A number of seminars have been conducted with teachers and are tailored to their specific needs. The seminars are meant to address the history of language in education policies, the role of home language in child cognitive development, the role of English as the second language in the curriculum and the relationship and differentiation between the first and second language and literacy acquisition.

Classroom demonstration
For more than a year the deputy director of the Institute has spent one day a week in a rural Mqanduli classroom as part of ongoing research, development and demonstration.

Magic Classroom collective
In addition to establishing Magic Classrooms in schools across the Eastern Cape, the Magic Classroom collective includes more formal teacher development sessions with grade R to grade 3 educators to create a database of curricular lessons and materials for day-to-day teaching through a number of planning and development workshops.