A SECOND LOOK
Don Glass and Ruth Sack
Imagine a place where creative, innovative and critical thinking is highly valued. Imagine a place where multiple ways of knowing are recognised, explored and celebrated. Imagine a place where you can learn about the heritage and cultural practices of your community and others, a place where you have the liberty to reimagine, recreate or reproduce ideas of who you are and who you would like to be.
Now think of some of the educational realities of South Africa. Learners whose second language is English are often asked to demonstrate what they know exclusively through expository writing in English. Teachers in the former department of education and training and former model C schools are teaching students who are from increasingly diverse cultural backgrounds. Muslim and Christian children who share a schoolyard have to make sense of images of the “war against terrorism” in newspapers and on TV.
These issues can be addressed through a high-quality arts and culture curriculum that is well-integrated with learning areas such as languages, and human and social sciences. A key feature of this endeavour is the presence of highly skilled teachers who understand that culture is a dynamic process.
These teachers need to know how to design curriculums that build on the personal heritage of learners and connects their cultural backgrounds to the diverse traditions of the world community. Arts and culture teachers need to incorporate creative and innovative approaches to help learners to know and make sense of the world.
In this light, it was indeed a monumental decision to include this vision of Arts and Culture in Curriculum 2005 as part of what all learners should know and be able to do to become literate, creative and critical citizens of South Africa.
This inclusion underscores the value of the study of the arts, particularly those pertaining to marginalised cultural practices. It also mandates the government to provide quality documents and professional development for teachers so they can design an effective arts and culture curriculum for learners.
Although the Curriculum 2005 review process has made great strides in “streamlining design features and simplifying language”, this simplification has weakened the already problematic arts and culture learning area.
Many in the Gauteng arts and culture community have made submissions at every step of the review process to raise concerns about the quality of the learning area. However, these submissions from arts educationists and educators have made little, if any, impact on the draft curriculum statement. Many are finding the current document unusable for the purposes of professional development and assessment. As a result the document faces the risk of not being endorsed by the professional community.
The submissions have repeatedly pointed to a lack of overall coherence in the document. This is a problem most likely linked to a limited conception of the nature of arts and culture, a lack of grounding in professional art education literature and classroom research, and an incomplete understanding of learner development in the arts.
This has led to a confusing document that has inconsistent descriptions of the progression of learner skills and knowledge, poor alignment between outcomes and assessment criteria, little cohesion between arts disciplines and learning areas, and glaring omissions most notably craft, art history and design. These problems are exacerbated by a lack of clarity in the use of language that will certainly lead to confused teaching, if the document is used at all.
Nevertheless, teachers will be under pressure in the now compulsory learning area to teach about diverse arts and cultural practices. This is a tall order for teachers, many of whom are generalists with minimal training in arts and culture. For this reason it is imperative to provide a substantial and high quality curriculum document that can serve as a guide for the ongoing professional development of teachers.
If we settle for the current document as “good enough” for our children, then we must live with the consequences of a document that pales in comparison to other curriculums from around the world.
Without a document that provides a strong and balanced framework for teaching and learning, the professional development that follows will certainly be weak and idiosyncratic. In the end, teachers will grasp at the only thing that counts the flawed and incoherent assessment standards. It is truly difficult to imagine how learners would benefit from such a scenario.
However, this scenario does not have to become a reality. Additional work is needed to make Curriculum 2005 a powerful document that truly represents the best knowledge of the diverse arts and cultural practices in South Africa.
This process requires a realistic time frame and serious involvement of a wide range of arts practitioners and education professionals. The current document would greatly benefit from a balanced use of this local expertise and a review of exemplary curriculums from around the world.
Let us demand that this occurs, so that quality education in arts and culture becomes a reality for all South African children.
Don Glass, formerly of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, is a doctoral student at the University of the Witwatersrand. Ruth Sack is director of the MTN/Imbali Visual Literacy Project in Johannesburg