The Revised National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for Grades R to 9 was published in June last year with surprisingly little publicity.
There are many good things about the NCS which schools will welcome. It flows on from Curriculum 2005 but is simpler. The central question in teaching is still are my learners getting better at achieving the outcomes? There are fewer outcomes to assess and it’s clearer what the learners must know. And it is still policy that schools should plan their own learning programmes so as to ensure relevance to the learners.
During the NCS writing process, the Natural Sciences and Technology Working Groups realised that they could make life easier for teachers by aligning their Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards. So if you look at the two documents, you see that in both, Learning Outcome 1 (LO1) deals with skills, LO2 with knowledge and LO3 with values.
More than that, the Assessment Standards have been written so that an investigation which learners do for Technology could count as evidence for Science LO1 also, and vice versa. Further, LO3 has the same wording in each Learning Area, and the Assessment Standards match each other. This policy means that a learner’s work in Technology LO3 can count as evidence of progress in Natural Sciences also!
What do you think of that as an achievement on behalf of teachers?
The implementation dates are 2004 for Foundation Phase and 2005 for grades 4 to 6. This means that writers and publishers are hard at work developing the grades 4 to 6 books right now, to meet the deadlines.
In some provinces, the Intermediate Phase committees are using their prerogative and deciding to separate Learning Areas such as Natural Sciences and Technology, which used to be integrated.
These provinces have their reasons: they include concerns that Technology might not get enough focus, that integrated Learning Areas become difficult to define, plan and assess and problems with allocating teachers.
However, there is an option that lies between integration and separation. I call it ‘close-linking†of Learning Areas. Close-linking two Learning Areas involves planning the year’s programme so that learners often deal with topics common to both. This can work well in assessment: the teachers plan an extended task for assessment, in which the learners will need to produce something that requires skills, knowledge and values from each Learning Area.
In the Technology and Natural Sciences policy there are topics which both Learning Areas must deal with, such as food and its processing, physical properties of materials and how they can be used or modified, energy sources and transfers, electrical and mechanical systems.
Close-linking Natural Sciences and Technology has another benefit for the learners. In the new policy, Technology gets 8% of curriculum time and Natural Sciences 13%. If the school puts the two Learning Areas together in the timetable, then the teacher has the option of using all the time in a week (8% + 13%, or about
5 hours) to let children truly get into those important activities – finishing the project they were making, completing the investigation they were doing, discussing the
role-play they’ve seen. Outcomes Based Education (OBE) works when children have enough time to complete their own thinking and making.
There’s a third reason for close-linking Technology and Natural Sciences: Natural Sciences is often taught in an abstract style, not connected to real-life questions the way Technology is, and often there’s little meaningful practical work. Technology strengthens science learning because it corrects those faults. Science, for its part, prevents Technology being seen as crafts and basic techniques; learners’ science understanding of materials, processes or systems raises the quality of their technology projects.
So separating Technology from Natural Sciences may solve an administrative problem but the decision may also mean losses in meaningful learning.
Teachers should be given the option of linking the Learning Areas. Learner support materials are very important resources in planning a learning programme but textbooks which were developed separately offer little help in linking Learning Areas. So, to give teachers one more option for their learning programmes, provinces should invite publishers to submit books which do link Technology and Natural Sciences, as well as books which treat them separately.
Peter Moodie contracts to the
Setlhare Science Curriculum Trust but writes this in his personal capacity.