Abdullah Sujee was named one of South Africa’s most innovative teachers last year.
Representing South Africa in Philadelphia in the United States at the Worldwide Innovative Teachers’ Awards, Sujee was voted runner-up in the best teacher category.
He believes in teaching with flair by making lessons memorable, exciting, worthy and contextual. Learners in his literature classes use ICT to extend their learning experiences beyond the confines of the classroom to include principles of life itself. It was pragmatistst philosopher James Dewey who once suggested that ‘schools should be like life itself”.
Sujee is the deputy head and language teacher at Roshnee Islamic School, a secondary school 50km south of Johannesburg. He strongly believes in Sally Tweedie’s (co-author of English for Tomorrow) view that the language teacher’s challenge is to exploit the rapidly evolving resources of ICT. The creation and publication of information is part art and part engineering. Like Tweedie, he wants to exploit new technologies to extend learning into new areas without losing the art, but rather enhancing it.
Uppermost in Sujee’s mind is the question: ‘Is my classroom a springboard to the world outside the classroom?” When considering his multicultural teaching environment he decided to adopt the whole language approach when teaching literature. This means that he has tried to weld all aspects of language into the teaching of the novel or play. Sujee explains: ‘Current trends in outcomes-based education (OBE) and further education and training (FET) show that learning must phase in all learning areas and the assessment standards are all interlinked. All aspects of English, such as language, poetry and writing an essay are combined in extracting the best lessons for a literature study.”
Sujee has put this method to use in the study of literature. In a study of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country some years ago, learners went beyond the norm to produce a short audio production. The brief was for the insert to resemble a main news item that included all aspects of such a bulletin. The learners became more critical of news broadcasts in the process.
As part of the exercise, learners had to design audio tape covers. Today, Sujee’s learners use digital audio and design CD covers as if they are marketing the CD in a shop, developing an understanding of the marketing processes and elements of graphic design in the process.
As a result of these methods, learners from Roshnee and Sharpeville are working together to prepare a real news broadcast and Roshnee Islamic School now has its own radio station.
In a recent study of Macbeth, Sujee incorporated the use of new technologies that had become more accessible, such as video. ‘The results were amazing,” says Sujee. ‘Learners acted out their plays and learnt about the cinema industry in ways that formal lessons could not teach. The classroom is in fact the reality of the world and the learners must see it — the problem is that we keep telling them that the real world is outside!”
Sujee concludes: ‘Teaching with flair means that educators should enhance the worldview of the learner to such a level that he/she becomes a productive person in a holistic, global, socio-economic and political environment.” ICT resources make that very achievable as long as teachers are prepared to set the challenges and create the opportunities for learners.
First published by SchoolNet SA