Educators face the hardships of poorly resourced schools, hostile farm owners and a lack of crucial training.
‘We are struggling. There is no electricity, no toilets, and no running water – which is the biggest problem. Nobody supports us and nothing changes. There is no transport for the children. This year we also got nothing from the government’s feeding scheme.” This is the picture painted by Florence Moeletsane of her decade of teaching at Upperransho farm school, deep in the rural eastern Free State.
Sadly, Moeletsane’s struggle is shared by the majority of edcucators at farm schools. Worse still, while Moelentsane has no relationship with the land owner, some schools that had enjoyed a more fruitful relationship in years past are now feeling the effects of the farmers withdrawing their support.
Martina Platland farm school in the Northern Province is one such school. A recent government effort to renovate the school had an unexpected side-effect, says teacher Florina Mokgolabone: “I can only guess the problems started [with the renovations], because no-one communicates with me what is happening. We used to have electricity that the farmer paid for, but now we have it no longer. The farm owner was digging pits for the toilets, but then the work stopped. He was promising water, but now we don’t hear anything about that.”
With the origins of most farm schools embedded in the racist philosophy of apartheid, it is not surprising that the relationship between farmer and educator is often one of “all-powerful” and “powerless”. An extreme example of the abuse of this power relation is contained in a report Facing the forces of exclusion: the challenge of the right to education through multigrade schools by Geoffrey Lungwangwa, in which a group of teachers relate the following: “… In 1996, a farmer killed one of the teachers. Our colleague asked the farmer when he would come to repair the telphone at the school. After he [the teacher] left, the farmer followed in a van and ran over him. His body was badly mutilated. We all protested against such inhumane treatment. We live in tension here …The farmers do not want educated people. They think you will bring about change”.
While this is an extreme case, it remains commonplace for teachers and learners alike to be considered as the “subjects” of the farmer.
Add to this the professional challenge of teaching multigrade classes, and these educators have their work cut out for them. The practise of multigrade teaching, which is when one educator teaches two or more grades in the same class at the same time, is often the only option because of the limited number of classrooms, students and/or teachers. The problems that face the teacher as a result are numerous, and all come down to the simple fact of one teacher having to negotiate spreading time and attention around a group of children who can be in as many as seven different grades, and all at the same time. It is hardly surprising that one multigrade teacher described her job as being “stressful and strenuous”.
But what is surprising is the dearth of training available to teachers in such a situation. In a report entitled Multigrade teaching in farm schools, Lungwangwa notes “Colleges of educ ation have not integrated [multigrade teaching] in the pre-service teacher’s education curriculum. No policy guidelines related to the operation of multigrade schools have so far been drawn up. Teachers working in multigrade schools approach their teaching on an experimental basis.”
Rectifying the situation by providing additional training on multi-grade teaching is also a difficult process: because there are often only one or two teachers at a farm school, they can’t be spared to go on training courses – even if they could pay the transport costs to travel the long distances.
With education officials typically unavailable and farmers often hostile, underqualified farm teachers are having to go it alone.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, January, 2001.