/ 20 August 2010

A reality we’d rather ignore

A Reality We'd Rather Ignore

It is very easy to condemn teachers as they go on strike, but ponder this for a moment. Imagine trying to teach 30 children aged between five and 15 in one room, ranging from those with no school experience at all, unable to read and write, to those who are literate and want to get enough subject and literacy knowledge to survive (if indeed they can afford to go on to secondary school and escape a future of rural poverty as a commercial farm worker).

Imagine, too, that some of your five-to-15-year-olds have parents who move between farms seasonally and are illiterate, and that some have passed foetal alcohol syndrome on to their children — meaning that some of your learners have very low attention spans and an inability to learn.

What you are imagining is the reality that faces many of our teachers.

The Education Policy Consortium’s recent analysis of education department data for 2004 to 2007 reveals that multigrade teaching is prevalent in more than a quarter (26%) of South African schools.

Multigrade teaching involves the teaching of a number of grades in one classroom and by the same teacher.

In some developed countries, England for example, such teaching has been adopted as a pedagogic experiment.

But in developing countries, including South Africa, multigrade teaching arises from necessity, as a result of low population density in the area served by the school, declining learner and teacher numbers in the school, and high teacher absenteeism with ineffectual or nonexistent supplementary arrangements being made.

What this amounts to is that multi-grade schools tend to be found in poor, remote areas in which public transport is less than reliable or even nonexistent.

Such schools are also usually under-resourced.

Our education system is designed with mono-grade or single-graded classes in mind.

This is evident in the policies and practices regarding teacher training and the curriculum, as well as in the support provided for teachers and schools.

Departmental support for multi-grade schools doesn’t generally differ from the support provided to mono-grade schools, in spite of the fact that the multigrade situation presents unique challenges.

Officials aren’t sufficiently familiar with the situation in such classrooms to provide the necessary support in how to deal with multigrade learners.

Teacher training workshops for different subjects and grades are often run concurrently so that multigrade teachers are forced to attend only one aspect of the training, despite being responsible for teaching ­several learning areas and grades.

Timetabling practice follows an inflexible 30- to 35-minute period.

This means that two or more grades share the 30 minutes provided period. It results in reduced contact time for multigrade learners compared with that of mono-grade learners.

Some multigrade teachers admit to paying more attention to the highest grade in their particular classes, meaning that the lower grades are relatively neglected.

The thinking behind this is that the teachers feel they can focus on the lower grades in later years as they will remain in the same class.

Aggravating it all is the fact that the department of basic education’s provision of teachers is based on the number of learners rather than the number of grades the school offers, with obvious consequences.

Recently the department has begun to think of strategies to support multigrade teachers as part of its rural education strategy.
In addition, one provincial education department — the Western Cape — has started a programme to train and support multigrade teachers to improve learners’ performance in reading, writing and mental mathematics. But the efforts to improve multigrade teaching are still minimal.

Education policies relating to curriculum and teacher training and development need to take the multigrade context into account.
Teacher training institutions need to prepare and equip teachers to deal with multigrade learners.

Departmental officials need to be equipped to support teachers with strategies for multigrade teaching.

The sensible way to kick-start the process of acknowledging the reality of multigrade teaching is to create dialogue between the department of basic education, multigrade teachers and organisations and individuals with expertise in the area.

It would enable all concerned to better comprehend the situation faced by multigrade teachers and learners with a view to finding collective ways to deal with the challenges.

Not to acknowledge this evident reality is tantamount to setting the learners and teachers in those schools up for failure.

Tsakani Chaka is a researcher at the Centre for Education Policy Development. The Education Policy Consortium, which analysed official data and concluded that about 26% of South Africa’s schools use multigrade teaching, consists of the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD), the education policy units (EPUs) at the universities of the Witwatersrand and Fort Hare, the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (based at the University of Cape Town), the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (Cert) at the University of Johannesburg and the Nelson Mandela Institute at the University of Fort Hare. In particular, the analysis was conducted by the CEPD, Wits EPU and Cert.