Johannesburg - Student doctors have, for years, been able to get on-the-job training in hospitals as part of their studies, but for student teachers the scenario has been different.
There weren’t any dedicated teacher training institutions in the country.
That is, up until five years ago, when the University of Johannesburg (UJ) education faculty opened a teaching school – the first of its kind in the country.
Funda UJabule at the Soweto campus started with two Grade R classes offering education in either English and Zulu or English and Sotho.
The centre has since grown into a fully fledged public primary school, offering lessons up to Grade 5.
Professor Nadine Petersen, the head of UJ’s Department for Childhood Education, says the school is modelled on institutions in New York and Finland. “It was made to dispel the myth that teaching in primary school is like babysitting. It is meant to serve as an education laboratory.
“It provides prime opportunities for prospective students to study the development of young children, focusing on how they learn, change and develop over time.”
Education students are assigned a child each in their first year, and they follow the child for the duration of their four-year teaching degree.
“From our preliminary research, we found that this is an extremely valuable experience for the teachers of young people because it bridges the gap between theory and in-class learning,” Petersen says.
She admits that running the school hasn’t always been easy.
One of the problems the school faces is the fast-paced school curriculum.
Funda UJabule teachers can also find it hard to work in a teaching school.
“Nothing prepares teachers for the expectations of working in a very different kind of primary school. This work takes patience, tenacity and an incredibly hard-working group of dedicated staff,” she adds.
The school has 377 pupils and 15 teachers.
Principal Rebecca Maboya explains the admission criterion: “We are a public school, so we admit on a first-come, first-served basis.
“For next year, we have admitted 60 pupils and had to reject 194 others. Parents want their children to come to our school because we have dedicated teachers and there is constant teacher development.”
In the past five years, research conducted at the school included the projects on maths competence and mathematical concept development, mathematical learning difficulties, science concept development and remediation of reading difficulties.
Education expert Elizabeth Henning emphasises that the school isn’t meant to experiment on children.
“We have published so little (on the school) because we want to protect our children. What we may have published is about teacher development. The children are only used in this work because we want to have a test that can help them and many other children.”
Henning says that when the school was started, the team decided to research how children learnt concepts because there was a knowledge gap in that area.
“We know our teachers, we know our curriculum, we know our policy but we don’t know our children. We embarked on a project at Funda UJabule to come to grips with how they learn maths. How do we assess their metrics? So we searched in different parts of the world for a test that can tell us that.”
Henning says they found a questionnaire in Germany and it was translated into English, Afrikaans, Sotho and Zulu.
So far at least 3 000 children in Gauteng have been tested.
“We can now with great conviction say we can test young children in the four languages on this test and see where the child struggles. We are now norming the test and it is a game-changer. We have a test that will tell you that on a certain level a child needs remediation and learning support,” Henning says.
In the next five years they plan to do more research in the intermediate phase.
“We’re going to check out their ability to use the English language and how it helps them to read and write biology, physics, chemistry and astronomy. How they read and write and do science, technology, engineering and mathematics combined with language. We’re going to try to develop a model of integrated intermediate phase teaching, and with it learning, in which these components of curriculum are integrated so that the children read more science and maths.”
Henning says the faculty is also keen to attract more black researchers.
“We want to develop African language, black researchers to do this work, but they don’t study full-time. Our future is black researchers who can understand Zulu and Sotho.”
However, she is aware of the difficulty of attracting good teachers.
“You have to give people enough money that will equal their salary so they can study full-time. To study full-time in a PhD in education you get very little to live on in comparison to a salary of a teacher,” she says, adding that South Africa can learn from Finland.
“Teaching is seen as a lowly job. When you look at the hierarchy right up to CEOs, teachers are at the bottom.
“We can only draw them if we give them nice incentives. What Finland did right is to make teaching attractive and pay it quite well. The unions in Finland are very strong, so the unions have to be there because they protect teachers and children.”
The Star