Fiona De Villiers

My class mates and I grew up enduring this kind of torture in the form of geography textbooks. They were dense, grey and boring and crammed with facts that seemed completely useless to us – the principal export crop of Bolivia, for example, or the exact length of the Nile river. No-one told us about […]

As author Peter Ackroyd points out, the most singular defining characteristic of humans has always been our ‘endless and inexhaustible curiosity”. Even as our first ancestors busied themselves with colonising Earth, they gathered around the evening fire and turned their gaze heavenwards, and through myths and stories tried to make sense of the infinite bodies […]

Fiona de Villiers reviewsUSING MEDIA IN TEACHING – LEARNING GUIDE by Carol Bertram, Peter Ranby, Mike Adendorff, Yvonne Reed, Nicky Roberts (Oxford University Press, R250) Published in conjunction with the South African Institute for Distance Education, this book is Oxford University Press’s third module in the Study of Education project series, which was designed to […]

<i>Theteacher</i> views <i>Drama with Children</i> which forms part of Oxford University Press’s successful <i>Resource Books for Teachers</i> series and is aimed at younger learners. This particular volume is intended to supplement English language learning through using techniques most often found in drama classrooms.

Around the world, bullying has always been part of the hidden curriculum at schools. Despite the strategies that have been developed to deal with this scourge, it continues to threaten the well-being of many young people and creates serious barriers to learning. Author Keith Sullivan’s handbook is firstly an attempt to get schools to view bullying as a serious challenge.

It’s a fact that while many teachers are uncertain on how to deal with the subject of HIV/Aids in the classrooms, some learning materials on the subject are a real turn-off. The <i>Red Ribbon</i> series, aimed at foundation- and intermediate-phase learners and their teachers, marks an important breakthrough in the way HIV/Aids awareness can be approached in the classroom.

By way of introduction to the book <i>Learner-based teaching</i>, authors Campbell and Kryszewska explain that it was developed in response to teaching conditions in Poland in the early 1990s. Many language teachers complained about outdated textbooks, and their students were dissatisfied with repetitive course material.