Children's role in education ‘is largely ignored’

Picture: Motshwari Mofokeng

Picture: Motshwari Mofokeng

Published Sep 18, 2018

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Cape Town - Since the demise of apartheid, transformation efforts in education have mainly been focused on higher education, and the role children play in transforming society has largely been ignored.

This is according to UCT Professor Karin Murris, a specialist in the field of pedagogy and philosophy in the School of Education.

She is the principal investigator of a National Research Foundation-funded project on “Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses”. She said current education systems had low expectations of a child’s understanding, which limited the ability for transformation.

“Categories of exclusion are still focused on race and ability, but not age. Age is not used in terms of transformation and decolonisation. If we want to transform higher education, we have to start from pre- pre-school.

“We need to engage with young people as not lesser beings. The logic of childhood is the logic of colonialism,” said Murris.

Colonised norms identifying children as lesser beings, who need to be moulded into adults, confined their educational experience, she said.

Subjects are therefore categorised and information is forced upon children in confined institutions.

Murris said this lacked academic freedom and in order to decolonise education, experiential means of teaching was needed, involving the body and the senses.

“Teaching materials can limit teachers from engaging children in a creative way. Materials often focus on one ‘language’ in education which is reading and writing and doesn’t engage the ‘other languages’, such as the use of educational technology, visual arts, music and physical education as part of learning content knowledge.”

Initiatives established at UCT, such as Philosophy for Children, she said, helped to transform education in all phases through a hosting of voluntary sessions with interested teachers and parents once a month, where practicals were held to show how enquiry-based teaching could be done through questioning approaches.

Reggio Emilia is another network for learning about creating an emergent curriculum, which shows teachers how they can diverge from a prescribed curriculum.

Instead, teachers start with children’s questions which emerge in class and become the vehicle to create new knowledge with one another and the teacher.

“The world has changed dramatically and yet education systems haven’t. We need to move towards a thinking-based enquiry curriculum.”

@IAmAthinaMay

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