Relevant science education, but relevant to what? Moyra Keane University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
[email protected] Cliff Malcolm University of Durban-Westville. Durban, South Africa The context for ‘relevance’ Here in the Midlands of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, we are sitting beside the car in front of a High School we are working with. Before us is a deep valley and green hills with sunlight slanting through the morning mist. Tiny huts, some round, some square, are dotted on the slopes, the smoke of morning fires wafting upwards into the haze. Beyond the valley are private White-owned farms, but the land here belongs to Zulu Tribal Authorities, and villagers live and build on it by arrangement with the Chief. In the distance, small boys follow cattle down to the streams, and muffled drum beats sound dimly. Goats lie in the middle of the dirt road next to us and young girls walk past carrying firewood on their heads. Just down the hill, some other girls are filling plastic containers at a water pump. Behind us the school is a rectangular block of concrete, surrounded by a high fence and a locked gate, though there is little in the school to steal. The school’s name and motto are hand-painted on the side of the building. Inside, children sit two or three to a desk. Few children have books: the government is supposed to provide them, but deliveries are invariably months late. From the classroom nearest to us, we can hear the children responding in unison to their teacher, chanting a definition she sees as important. We can’t make out the words, but the music and rhythm are familiar. The Induna (a Headman or Chief’s Representative) arrives and chats with us, a big, warm man with furrowed face. He has never been to school, but is strongly supportive of our project and its possibilities for the school and community. (Only 7% of the population have completed secondary school.) The public meeting will be late, perhaps hours late, he tells us, but the people will come. Time passes slowly here. As we once walked through the village with a few of the children it was easy to envy the cosy scenes: smoke rising gently from a three-legged pot, and in front of it chickens scratching in a vegetable garden of scraggly maize plants and cabbages, naked toddlers hanging on to grandmother’s skirts... In fact the pot is almost empty, children have not eaten all day and the grandmother is ill. Unemployment here is standard, and completing Grade 12 seems to make little difference. 40% of South Africans are poor and 20% ultra poor. 75% of the poor live in rural areas – this community is not unusual (Gordon, 1997). About 50% of local income comes from meagre pensions: later in the nearby town we see old people huddled in the rain on the footpath, wanting to be first collecting their pensions the next day.
Poverty, violence and illness often hunt together. One boy recalled for us his first experience of school: “In 1992, I was at school doing Grade 1. The first week, I was so happy. Then things changed. The following week, the teacher came to class with Stick in her hand. From that time, I was so afraid of Stick. “When I was in Grade 3, I left school. It was winter and so cold. In the morning there was frost on the grass and on the roofs, so it was not easy for me to go to school. I was wearing short trousers and short-sleeve shirt, and no shoes and no jersey… I went back to school the following year.” For many children, household chores, running errands and looking after younger siblings or sick adults keep them from school. The Induna tells us that, in this small community, 5-6 people are buried every week. He believes AIDS is the cause, but no-one knows for sure. The common wisdom is simply that people get sick and die. In unexpected or dramatic cases, people suspect that someone has cast a spell or spread muti (potion). With such deaths increasingly common, the community is fragmenting with suspicion, in spite of an active AIDS NGO working in the valley. Young people never talk to their families about HIV and condoms, and if they did the school would be likely to suffer the blame for promoting promiscuity. In the months since our morning meeting with the Induna, he has been ‘ousted’ from his public office. People proffer different explanations: he was too much a reformist; he was receiving bribes/commissions; he was not local enough (he was born some kilometres away, but lived his adult life in this village); some powerful people became ‘jealous’ of him and his influence. He fears now for his personal safety, and the possibility of conviction by a ‘kangaroo court’. Contrarily, this kind of fragmentation, suspicion and exclusion sits alongside ubuntu – a deep belief in the connectedness of ‘self’ and ‘other’, community solidarity and human dignity: “I am because others are” (Malcolm 2002). The experience of ubuntu is real. It is articulated as a central value in the South African Manifesto on values, and in the platform of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party. At a day-to-day level, the optimism and spirit of ubuntu are often natural parts of social interactions and conversations. For example, when we asked Grade 7 children to draw their homes, many included their neighbours. One student explained to us (Fig 1): “A person without a neighbour is not a person”. It is an interesting idea that such ‘connectedness’ and ‘community’ can be taken to a point where dissenting voices are silenced, and the community becomes bounded and exclusionary.
Fig 1. A Grade 7 student’s drawing of home includes neighbours’ homes
In similar fashion, the preference to strengthen traditional Zulu culture in the community can slide into stubborn conservatism. There are many issues here, of course. Three hundred years of colonialism and apartheid assailed traditional values and social structures from all sides, consciously promoting European ways and Europeans as superior in wisdom and technical achievement. Further, continuity of people with their ancestors is a central part of ubuntu, with ancestors serving as mediators between people and God, passing on knowledge and reinforcing traditions. One effect of this is to look back for wisdom and guidance, more than to look forward to youth and innovation. This imposes a tension that reaches deeply into education. So the children tell us “My father is always right” even though they know he is not. Add the recent history of the liberation struggle from apartheid. During the 1960s, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned and their leaders sent to jail, exile or underground. To fill the gap, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) was formed, with leadership from the Zulu nation. Ideologically, it was similar to the ANC, though it gave stronger emphasis to traditional culture and decisionmaking (so, for example, it favoured traditional forms of democracy over ‘oneperson/one-vote’). The relationship soured between the IFP and ANC in the eighties, not so much on ideological grounds as strategic ones. War resulted between ANC and IFP factions in communities through the Midlands of Kwa-Zulu Natal and elsewhere, fanned by the apartheid government. Violence continued through the early nineties. Though it subsided following the democratic elections of 1994, animosities and suspicions remain. The community in which we are working is predominantly IFP, and many see the government (and its education policies) as ANC driven. Teachers can be in a difficult position – teaching the children during the week and commuting back to their families in towns and cities over weekends. As outsiders they are suspected of ANC allegiance. Further, while the land and much of the social life are managed by Traditional Authorities, democratically elected municipal governments are centrally responsible for infrastructure and social services. The tensions between traditional and modern cultures become personified. The research: defining relevant science education It was in the above context that we embarked on our research project, to explore the meaning of ‘relevant science’ and ‘science education’ for communities such as this. How might science education contribute to the community’s needs and aspirations? How might local goals and knowledge be incorporated into the school curriculum? How would teachers, students and parents resolve tensions between local and national pressures? What recommendations might emerge for policy, learning programmes and assessment? With the aspiration of transformation we were clear from the beginning that the research process would need to be participative – we would work closely with the community and schools over time, getting to know each other, and inviting input into the agenda and research questions as well as sharing information.
Accordingly, we began with a series of public meetings – teachers, students, parents, elders, the Induna and iSangoma, representatives from the Education Department. The meetings were long and animated, characterised by trust and creativity. The community set up a management committee, and gave the project a name Sisonke Masihlangane (we are together; let’s meet). We ran workshops to explore perceptions of the current curriculum, what the community would like from schooling, how it envisaged itself in ten years’ time. The decisions were radical. The community was adamant that science education in the current system offered little of value for them and their children. The curriculum needed to be strongly connected to the community and vice versa. Indeed, the science curriculum should be embedded in a community development project, whereby students learned as a part of community development and contributed to it. That project should encompass many things: traditional and modern, care and entrepreneurship, long term and immediate. It should centre on a project in agriculture, aimed to increase the well-being and self-sufficiency of the community. These choices raised a number of issues for us. First, our own roles in the process were now unclear – ‘research’ had become inextricable from curriculum development and a participative community project in agriculture, with all the demands of project management. The Principal of one of the schools assured us that he and the local committee would manage the project. Further, we successfully approached two NGOs to provide input and leadership in the agriculture project, even knowing that this might sideline our curriculum project. A second issue was the nature of ‘curriculum’. While curriculum is seen as occurring essentially within a classroom, geared towards particular learning outcomes, the process of curriculum design is in principle straightforward: explore students’ interests, community’s needs, available resources and existing knowledge, define some outcomes and create the curriculum. However, the resulting curriculum is still likely to be largely abstracted from the community, conducted ‘out of context’ in the classroom. The community’s idea was quite different: the curriculum was life itself, and the learning that occurred as part of life within the community. It was the school’s job to support this. Learning from the students Students showed us, through interviews, workshops and questionnaires, that their interests were wide. Many of their goals were practical, to overcome poverty, find work and help the community. They suggested topics including computers, growing vegetables, farming, machines, electricity and health, consistent with the community’s suggestions. However, one problem in asking students about relevant science topics is that they are constrained by their perceptions of ‘science’ and school. Students in the secondary school showed us that they saw science as a way of solving immediate problems and giving them skills, but when it came to topics it seemed almost anything would be helpful (with possible exceptions of what they were already learning). In the primary school, on the other hand, students tended to take current lessons as examples of relevant science: nutrition, growing vegetables, types of soil. Our questioning had not delved into processes, or deeper matters of epistemologies, African science, traditional
beliefs and ways of knowing, though we knew from the community that these were important. Working with students whose first language (and culture) is Zulu while ours is English, coupled with a classroom tradition that does not invite debate or opinion, makes it difficult to probe students’ deep concerns and ideas through interviews. We also wanted students to benefit from the research process, not merely provide information. We therefore extended out strategy to assignments. For example, we gave Grade 10 students cameras and asked them to take photos of ‘Science in my life’, which they would then write about. (The Principal warned us it was risky to allow the cameras off the school property, and that it was asking too much for students to complete the task in two days, sharing cameras. However, all students completed the task, with a great sense of achievement and delight.) From 64 photos, 46 showed aspects of farming, animals or common technologies. Usefulness was all-important and often linked to pride in being able to do things, in learning and in helping people. Fixing TVs, cars, radios, cell phones was a theme that boys focused on, although some girls too took photos of fixing cars and working with electricity. Being able to farm and fix things meant earning money but also not spending money. Many students photographed and wrote about the interdependence of plants, animals, people, water and nature, consistent with ubuntu. Caring was a strong theme: caring for family, neighbours, animals, health and nutrition. A few students explained the beauty not only of flowers, trees and nature but also of water, cows, goats and cabbages. What did this tell us about relevant science and the lives of the children? Firstly, students were enthusiastic about being part of the research activity. Second, they had no difficulty seeing relevance everywhere. Third, their expectations and themes were ‘simple’ insofar as no student posed deep questions about their lives or why and how things work (with the exception of the interconnection of all things). Two students told stories of fear and desolation. One spoke about learning from books. Their photos and stories carry a sense that with knowledge of farming and simple machines, caring for one another and looking after animals, life could be perfectly happy. They express a joy in the beauty of their immediate environment (more than the beauty of nature on a large scale – the rolling hills half hidden in mist, and the spectacular storms of summer.) Is the simplicity misleading? Does it imply an acceptance of the predicament of poverty, authoritarian structures and given belief systems as unchangeable? One student wrote: “People have a natural nature…. And the dog has a natural nature… and the plant has a nature to make a beautiful world….” This sounds too fatalistic to be ‘scientific’, but it is also the case that one’s nature can change. For example, another boy wrote a proud history of his life, in which he recounted problems and stresses at numerous points, and wrote confidently about his learning. Underlying his story was the notion that the child has one nature, the boy another, the adult another.
So what is relevant science curriculum? The question has two aspects: relevant ‘science’ and relevant curriculum. Either way, ‘relevance’ has to be qualified: relevant to whom, for what purpose? We have shown above that life in this community is complex. Adults reveal many contradictions – connectedness and isolation, optimism and hopelessness, participation and authority, equality and hierarchy, traditional and modern, young and old, local and immigrant – that work between people and within people. Even at a practical level, there are contradictions. For example, hunger and nutrition are threatening, but land is there, with fertile soils and reliable rains. The people manage contradictions in part by compartmentalisation (whom you talk to about what), but also, it seems, by capacity to be comfortable with contradictions and irony. For the children, the tensions seem less obvious, but must be present. The children express pride in achievements, show admiration for skill and cleverness and appreciation for the kindness and care of parents and neighbours. They do not question traditional authority structures, yet they voice unhappiness at Stick and are uncertain about whom they can talk with about what. How deep is their sense of agency? How does science education fit? Elders Parent s
Teacher s
Value of current curriculum Social Conditions
Social Structures
Researcher s
Science Curriculum
Education advisors
• Relevant science: relevant to what?
Researchers •
School
Student s
Government
Model A
Community leader s
Education Deparment
How to balance tensions?
African knowledge
What people want
Model B
Fig 2. Two conceptions of curriculum. Model A analyses various inputs to the design of a curriculum. Model B is more organic, permitting underlying interactions and knowledge to express themselves in the learning. This brings us to issues in the definition of ‘curriculum’. Our first plan was to collect ideas about relevant science, putting together interests from various groups (Fig 2A) to design ‘the science curriculum’. This is essentially a technicist approach, treating the various influences as separate inputs to a resulting, abstracted curriculum. It takes too little account of tensions, contradictions, underlying knowledge and dynamic interactions across outer structures and between mental constructs (Fig 2B). It restricts scientific processes, questioning, reasoning, working together and managing tensions across these fields (and many of the tensions are hidden). Yet ironies, ambiguities and relationships (between ideas, values and people) are central to the community and the children’s lives, and potentially a rich resource for scientific inquiry. The conception of a ‘relevant science curriculum’ is in part about defining dimensions of relevance and in part about assigning priorities. There is no doubt that the community
sees the current curriculum as having little relevance. They are unconvinced that ‘passing exams’ is in itself worthwhile, given the lack of opportunities for employment and higher education their children face. They have provided pointers to relevance – practical knowledge and skills, cultural knowledge and skills, integration of school and community through working together. There is no question that useful knowledge and skills have high priority. We are arguing that there is another priority, perhaps as important as the first. That is to expose, explore and maybe explode some of the beliefs, tensions, structures, habits, ideas and ideals (including our own) that simmer in the community and within individuals, and seem to limit personal and social development. Within these tensions lies immense knowledge that is not acknowledged and not explored – indeed it is submerged and isolated. To bring science to bear on it and hold science itself up for scrutiny, are parts of relevant science; to include not only knowledge and skills but the values and attitudes that are inherent in ways of knowing, acting and relating (Malcolm, 2000). If we can address them, in the context of the community project, inventing another discrete curriculum will not be necessary. The new curriculum will come about organically, through negotiation: it is in the nature of the community. However, this is a conception of curriculum that is out of step with traditional schooling (though encouraged in government policy), and the existing skills of the teachers. Further, even though the model has arisen from the community, the Principal of the school fears that, if we were to proceed with it, parents might withdraw their children in favour of other schools who teach from text-books and prepare for examinations. Solutions can only come by working closely with the community, in planning that provides space for the various tensions to be discussed. It is a risky idea for all of us. We welcome your response to this article, and have provided our email addresses. References: Gordon, A. (1997), “Multiple inequalities; challenges facing South African rural schools,” paper presented to the conference Developing Quality Schooling in Rural Areas, Mpumalanga, South Africa. Malcolm, C. (2002), “Thoughts from South Africa: Values, knowledge and science,” Labtalk, Science Teachers Association of Victoria, Australia, Vol 46, No.5, Aug, pp 4346
