The African National Congress has proclaimed 2002 the Year of the Volunteer. In its statement issued on January 8 this year, marking the 90th anniversary of the organisation, the concept of letsema, ilima was explained in this way:
‘Historically, this spirit was fundamental to the strengthening of the cohesion of our societies. It encouraged cooperative effort and a collective commitment to the improvement of both the individual and society. It encouraged respect for every member of the community. The combined effort of the people made it possible for them to achieve results which no individual family could achieve on its own.
‘These are the values we seek to restore to all our communities as we engage in socially useful work. As a nation, we will have to find the means to encourage and reward such cooperative endeavours as part of the critical effort of building a new society based on a sound value system.”
Inspired by this call to participate in community service on a voluntary basis, my colleague Lefa Ngalo and I decided to respond. Lefa and I met last year at the Sacred Heart College Research and
Development Unit in Johannesburg.
We were both part of a team involved in training teachers in the Free State. On one of our numerous trips to Thembalihle township on the outskirts of Vrede, we discovered that we had both grown up in Welkom. Well, actually I grew up in Welkom and Lefa in the adjacent township called Thabong.
Now, all these years later in a democratic South Africa we found ourselves doing the same work together in the Free State. We talked about the idea of going back to Thabong together as ‘home-girls” to give something back to the community there by training teachers on a voluntary basis.
We held our first workshop in Thabong on a Saturday in February. We targeted Senior Phase teachers and head of departments in all learning areas. We planned to give teachers a policy update and to suggest some strategies for managing the implementation of C2005 in the light of the imminent policy changes.
Each school was asked to pay a nominal fee towards photocopying of materials, tea and lunch. To our amazement, 60 teachers turned up. There was no accreditation for the course or any other incentive to attend other than the need to know.
As always the workshop was very instructive for us. Most of the Grade 7 teachers had some idea of what the existing policy is but were struggling with implementing it.
A sizeable percentage of the Grade 8 and Grade 9 teachers had received no training at all in outcomes-based education (OBE) and C2005. Some teachers had never even heard of the critical and specific outcomes.
We began by talking about what the essence of OBE is. We did this by outlining the following OBE cycle or spiral (see right).
This was followed by a policy update that highlighted the key findings and recommendations of the Review of C2005. Here we pointed out that, while C2005 in its original form had been very strong on
integration, it had been very weak on the sequence and progression of concepts and skills from one grade to the next.
As a result, teachers did not have a clear idea of what they needed to teach in each learning programme in each grade. The textbooks did not help in this regard as different textbooks for the same learning area in a grade do not cover the same content and concepts.
Next we talked about the process of revising and streamlining C2005. Lefa and I divided them into eight groups according to the learning areas they taught and gave them copies of the draft Learning Area Statements that form part of the National Curriculum Statement (NCS).
We explained that these documents were still work in progress and were being refined on the basis of public comment. Most groups expressed enormous relief at finally being given some indication of what they needed to focus on in each grade.
When we told them that NCS would only be formally implemented in Grade 7 in 2006, Grade 8 in 2007 and Grade 9 in 2008, they began to protest. This was a useful resource that they felt they should be able to use as soon as the NCS became policy.
Together we worked out a way of creating a bridge between C2005 in its original form and the NCS. We did this by linking the learning outcomes and assessment standards of the NCS to the specific outcomes of C2005 in its original form.
So succesful was this exercise in the spirit of letsema, ilima that Lefa and I are planning a series of follow up workshops with this group of teachers in Thabong.