Interview with Lydia Abel & Debbie Staniland, ORT CAPE South Africa

 Educational Technology, Pedagogy, Projects  No Responses »
Jun 122012
 

Next stop: South Africa. I caught up with Lydia Abel – Director – and Debbie Staniland – Development Manager – from ORT SA CAPE. ORT SA CAPE is a part of ORT South Africa, and works with young people and educators from disadvantaged communities in the Cape Town region.

What are the distinctive educational challenges that you face in the Cape Town region?

Young people living here come from a very low educational base. Most children come from very poor homes, where they receive very little educational input. Parents themselves are often illiterate. Given that many parents often have to work very long hours, perhaps away from home, a number of young people are raised by their grandparents – who are likely to be even less educated.

Linked to the first challenge is the issue of language.  The everyday language spoken in the region is a colloquial mixture of local dialects.  This offers little opportunity for young people to develop proper language skills. If their ability to speak in their mother tongue is limited, it is extremely difficult for students to acquire the skills necessary for learning English as a second language. They will only hear English spoken in the couple of lessons they have at school in the morning. Even then, many of the teachers themselves are not proficient English speakers.

The size of classes is very problematic. There are never less than 40 children in a class, often more than 50. Schools are often stretched beyond capacity because they are loathe to turn away local children who would otherwise have to travel large distances to another school. In addition, there is no money available to government sponsored schools for employing teaching assistants. As a result, one teacher is left responsible for controlling a classroom of 50 energetic young people – not an environment conducive to serious learning. Another difficulty within the school system itself is that children can only spend one extra year in any phase (collection of year groups) of the school. This means that they are moved up beyond their capabilities, resulting in real problems when they get older and yet still lack basic literacy and numeracy skills.

A further challenge is that the regional authorities do not like outside organizations coming in to support teachers in the classroom – for example, to provide expert advice or to teach model lessons. This is because a new and very structured curriculum has been implemented across the region, with little room for outside input. This is a shame because the huge pressures on the schooling system necessitate teachers going beyond conventional pedagogical methods and thinking outside of the box. A little bit of outside help might just prove to very helpful.

Given these numerous challenges, where do you start? What areas of work has ORT Cape been focusing on?

One of our most important projects is running educational after-school clubs. Life at home, and the educational opportunities – or lack of educational opportunities – which children have at home, make a huge difference to their educational attainment. Children who go home from school in the afternoon to nothing are massively disadvantaged.

In response to this need, we offer constructive educational programs which take a community-wide approach. Reading and maths support programs are staffed by retired teachers and university students, who will be able to continue this work after our involvement finishes. It is crucial that we aim to make our programs sustainable in the long-term. We also encourage mothers to join their children at these clubs. Owing to high unemployment and seasonal work in the rural areas we work in, mothers are often at home with little to gainfully occupy them. By coming to these clubs, they can improve their own literacy and numeracy skills, as well as building confidence to offer more learning opportunities to their children in their own homes.

Of course, in addition to the young people and their families, we must work on upskilling teachers as well. To that end, we provide training in English and maths teaching. In order to have the biggest impact possible, we our concentrating our efforts on reception class teachers – who can positively influence students at the earliest stage of their school careers. In terms of raw numbers, we have over a period of 5 years delivered accredited training to over 300 teachers. We have also set up professional support networks for teachers.

A lot of your educational programs make use of robotics. Why is this?

Kids find robotics fun! They get excited about making things and using computers. Practical, hands-on activity stimulates young people, particularly teenage boys who are traditionally very difficult to engage.

Drawing on engineering, electronics, and bio-engineering, robotics teaches young people how to think and solve problems. They have to plan, design, make, assess and improve on their designs. They also write up and present what they have done. Therefore they are using and developing a whole range of cognitive processing skills.

We make sure that the activities in our robotics workshops and clubs link to concepts in maths and science, like vectors or acceleration, which are difficult to illustrate in poorly-equipped school laboratories. Using robotics is not only cost-effective but also encourages active learning.

The final important point about this is that we run our robotics workshops and clubs on a socially inclusive model. The programs are funded so as to be self-sustaining. As a result, for every child who pays, we are able to sponsor a child who cannot pay.  We provide lunches – including both kosher and halal food – to ensure that everyone gets the same whilst they are with us. Given that robotics activities require teamwork and cooperation, we have found this to be an excellent way of encouraging young people from different racial, religious and financial backgrounds to not only mix and get to know each other, but also to really work together for a constructive purpose.

Khan we kick it?

 Educational Technology, Pedagogy  No Responses »
Feb 272012
 

In a recent blog post Karim Kai Ani wrote of Khan Academy (and reiterated by Audrey Watters):

“Some even wonder whether it will eventually replace teachers altogether”

Teacherless Classroom Cartoon

Teacherless Classroom, Matt Hall

You don’t have to be a teacher to understand that there is a complex and sophisticated interaction between a teacher and a learner where the teacher sensitively tests, encourages, explains and tries different models until the teacher knows the learner understands.  So I would hope that every teacher and every parent would reject that statement. Repeating some of the viewpoints in the blog’s comments, Salman Khan never argues that Khan Academy should serve as the only source of instruction that a student should receive. If any teachers think that Khan Academy can relieve some of their teaching burden then the criticism should be directed at those teachers.

“Our obsession with Khan Academy may be one of the most dangerous phenomena in education today”

Can our obsession with interactive white boards, ipads, virtual learning environments, mobile, social and other new fangled pedagogies not be more dangerous?  Perhaps, if they remain undeveloped, unfamiliar and only for those schools that can afford them and their infrastructure. But Khan Academy is constantly developing both in terms of technology and pedagogy (and gameification).

Gamification – The New Loyalty from Gamification Co on Vimeo.

If we take the successes of KA for granted and rest on our laurels then perhaps we’ve got something to worry about. Where KA could also be seen as dangerous is when learners work at their own pace and hence cease to be a cohesive classroom where a teacher can bring everyone with her. But then one could argue that the potential to use Khan Academy to enhance differentiated learning (i.e. when students progress at a pace suitable to them, rather than be restricted / pressurized by the class pace) is surely a good thing.  Perhaps teachers can’t expect to bring everyone with them at the same pace and they should use the tools and attitudes that allow them to deal with the challenge of mixed ability classes.

“Maths: “I don’t know what it means or when I’ll ever use it.” This is understandable.”

Can this be understandable as a reasonable attitude for any accomplished maths teacher?  At the very least, basic maths and even some quite advanced maths (compound interest, probabilities, unit conversion, etc.) are, or should be, essential life skills. If nothing else, students need to learn it simply to pass the test but if you want to work in engineering, science, finance, logistics or a host of other roles (including academia) then you’d better understand what it means and when to use it. Most young people will not (and may never) have developed the sense of perspective, maturity, breadth of knowledge and controlled imagination to love maths for maths sake. Numberphile might help though and who could not be moved by the fact that Pascal’s triangle, squares, triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence and Sierpiński gasket can be derived (to some extent) from powers of 11. But parents and teachers have the responsibility to ensure that their respective charges understand why mathematics is important and relevant (and fun).

“Khan Academy’s repackaged paint-by-numbers method is ineffective instruction related to ineffective content and is identical to what students have seen — and rejected — for generations.”

Firstly, students are not rejecting KA. Secondly, it is not identical, it is not ineffective and is not paint-by-numbers. What KA may be suffering from is somewhat clumsily constructed questions in some topics due to their digital origins. And questions where the questioner has some purpose in mind and which the student must divine through symbols and various levels of obfuscation are in most textbooks and exams. Even the Centre for Innovation in Mathematical Teaching is guilty of this and while Mathelicious lessons are dressed with multi-media, when it comes to understanding, they’re not that far away either. How does video instruction, providing multiple mental models of concepts, practice within a hierarchical framework of concepts and multiple methods of feedback, reflection and review constitute ineffective instruction?

“the real issue with Khan Academy is its lack of underlying pedagogy.”

Why get wound up about a lack of, say, a constructivist pedagogy [or any other pedagogism] when learners are not even invested in their own learning? By saying that students do not learn maths in any meaningful way is describing them as inside Searle’s Chinese room - Erlwanger’s 1973 study is dated and limited. Teachers at all levels of education can be effective good teachers without any knowledge of Bloom and are arguably better for it (although the world seems to struggle to find good maths teachers – so we should thank Sal for stepping up).  And you can’t expect students to follow an underlying pedagogy when you run student led classes, peer mentoring and transparent teaching. But wait, isn’t self paced gameified instruction just another pedagogy?

There is much more to read and discuss in the, I must say, entertaining and thought provoking blog post of Karim Ani. So if you haven’t already, please read it in full and comment there or here.