The dire socio-economic challenges many teachers and their learners face are why the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) Education Faculty has embarked on an effective teacher-training student excursion to expose first-year students to the obstacles that might lie ahead.
The faculty arranged an orientation weekend excursion to Betty’s Bay to introduce the new cohort of foundation phase teaching students to a South African future education workforce experience. Professor Josef de Beer, Director of the Science Learning Centre for Africa (SLCA) at UWC, said the excursion was a perfect base for them to build on and to provide foundation phase student teachers exposure to the social background of their future learners, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds, while sensitising them to the complexity of the teaching profession.
As an example, some learners are forced to warm water on a fire to wash themselves before school, and thanks to these excursions, teaching students can better relate to some of their future learners’ lived experiences.
“We use a teaching method of play that would disrupt their current thinking by asking critical questions such as whether they are truly inclusive and what barriers they will be facing as a teacher in the making. It is a way of addressing their fears and confronting their biases,” said Prof De Beer.
An activity was developed where students built sun stoves or solar cookers from scratch using recyclable materials such as boxes, aluminium foil and cling wrap. They then had to boil water in cold drink cans to as high a temperature as possible.
“The idea with this exercise is to prepare students for any situation, whether they teach at a rural school or a school in an affluent area, the aim is to bring them to the real-life situation to address another goal: to make students aware of the socioeconomic divide they will face in a classroom.” The sunstove activity also required out-of-the-box thinking, where student teachers had to design stoves taking the laws of physics into consideration, and also outsmarting the baboons in the area, who were very curious about these contraptions.
One specific activity, the Famine and Abundance Game, made students aware of some learners’ limited access to resources.
“This is just one of the important characteristics of the education environment
that students may encounter, and it is important that they experience it
themselves through the activity we applied. Students could engage with questions about what they have to do to be a truly inclusive teacher and think about how they should include it in their teaching methods.”
Prof De Beer said that according to research; student teachers often hold very naive perceptions of what it means to become a teacher.
It is called the apprenticeship of observation. This means the 12 years we spend in schools, as with our first years, we are exposed to observing teachers who are very often bad role models, resulting in new students having the perception that they are ready to teach, but this is definitely not the case.”
A visit to the Harold Porter Botanical Garden showcased activities highlighting the environmental crisis the country is experiencing. Teachers have a significant role to play in advocating for environmental education because they work closely with a new generation of learners who may have yet to be exposed to nature, and need to realise the importance of conserving this natural asset.
Dr Carli Schoeman, a first-year education lecturer at UWC, said: “It is very important that students should be exposed to the complexities of education as a profession. The activities we’ve been doing with students exposed them to some elements of the multi-dimensional classroom they will encounter in future, opened their eyes to the social backgrounds of other students, and helped them experience totally new perspectives.
“We received positive feedback from our students. It was important for them to form a unit in the classroom setup. It also helps us as lecturers to link our lessons to what we experienced here during this excursion.”
