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South Africa: the high drop out rate of first-year university students

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South Africa: the high drop out rate of first-year university students

Subethra Pather

The opening up of South Africa’s universities after the end of apartheid has proved to be a double-edged sword. Enrolment figures have doubledfrom close to 500,000 in 1993 to 938,201 in 2011, which means that far more people have had the chance to earn a university degree.

But universities have been largely unprepared for this astonishing growth. This has contributed to a high drop-out rate. First-year students have borne the brunt of this, with more than 40% of them dropping out in their first year of study.

The best way to create programmes and policies designed to support these students is to understand them: who they are; where they come from; and what the structural stumbling blocks are to their success.

I conducted a case study of first-year teacher education students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, using both a survey and personal interviews to gather data. The purpose was to investigate what factors outside the academy were affecting their fledgling university careers.

Family responsibilities

The approximately 200 students involved in the study are older than the average first-time university entrant. They have a mean age of 21 and 84% are the first in their families to attend university.

Many of the mature students did not enter university out of choice, but more out of desperation to change their circumstances – as this student explains:

I decided I want to study; I’m gonna quit work because it’s not the life I want for me and I just said to myself, ‘No! you need to change your life, you need to go back to study.’ I wanted to do something better for me and my son to have a better life.

They feel an urgency to succeed and view a university degree as being key to their financial stability. This attitude is part of the reason many chose a teaching degree. Teaching is perceived as a job that offers security to both the students and their extended families.

One student said:

I want to prove to myself that I can do this, even with all of the challenges that I have, but it’s just that the need to succeed goes into supporting my family and putting them onto the map as well.

Money troubles

Almost 94% of the students surveyed rely on bursaries or scholarships to study. Many have taken part-time jobs to have some income and don’t spend a lot of time on campus. There is simply no time to spend at a cafeteria chatting with fellow students or to socialise between lectures. They also miss out on the benefits of being full-time students, like visiting the library. One said:

I’m working every weekend now to pay, like, for my food. I work on a wine farm in Stellenbosch. So every Friday I take the taxi home and I work the weekend and then my dad brings me back Sunday night because the hours are long and there is no taxi so late into the city. I take my university work with me and then when it’s quiet and when there is [sic] no customers I would take my bag and quickly do some work.

Unlike their younger, less financially constrained peers, these students tend to make friends only with those they think might advance their own academic success:

I am here to study, not worry about other people’s marks. You need to put yourself with people who know they are doing something positive; people that can help you achieve your goal. You are not here to make friends, friends are a bonus; focus on your marks, you are here for something, focus on that.

Their family commitments are another reason these students say they can’t socialise or spend a lot of time on campus. They are trying to balance their academic work, family life and part-time jobs. Something has to give, and in this case it’s the amount of time they spend physically at university.

Feeling of belonging

These students’ circumstances mean that they don’t feel as though they “belong” to the university. If universities listened to their first-year students’ stories more closely they could design programmes and policies that consider these students’ needs. Once a student “belongs”, feels valued and receives the support they need, they are more likely to stick it out and complete a degree.

Universities should consider extended first-year orientation programmes that enhance both the social and academic life of a student. These should encourage peer-to-peer interaction and support as well as positive engagement between students and staff. The formal curriculum should be blended in parts with co-curricular activities to encourage more meaningful social and academic integration between students and academics.

Finally, universities should stop viewing first-year students as a drop-out risk. These youngsters are often determined, optimistic, enthusiastic and open to learning – qualities that will ultimately benefit themselves and their academic institutions.

Subethra Pather is an Academic Development Lecturer, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
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Cricket South Africa: getting transformation right

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Cricket South Africa: getting transformation right

Mosibodi Whitehead

One only has to look at the way in which Kagiso Rabada grabbed headlines this week to appreciate the way in which South Africa has changed over the last two and a half decades.

Rabada, a South African cricketer who plays all formats of the game, was sanctioned by ICC match referee Jeff Crowe. Crowe gave him three demerit points and a fine of 50% of his match fee for an incident involving  in the second Test at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth

The 22-year-old paceman was said to have made “inappropriate and deliberate physical contact” with Smith when the two players brushed shoulders. This incident took place after Rabada dismissed the right-hander lbw and screamed in celebration as he walked towards the batsman.

To counter the fine and the demerit points, Cricket South Africa enlisted the help of Advocate Dali Mpofu who managed to change the earlier judgement. Independent judicial commissioner Michael Heron QC of New Zealand said he was not “comfortably satisfied” that Rabada intended to make contact with Smith and found him not guilty of a Level 2 breach of the ICC code of conduct.

This is a big deal.

The fact that South Africa’s hope for winning a first home series against the mighty Aussies rests on the shoulders of a black player is testament to just how much the country has changed since The Proteas faced India back in 1991. Here, we were represented by a lily-white cricket team in their first tour after sporting isolation the world sanctioned because of apartheid. Rabada was not even born when Clive Rice led South Africa at the famed Eden Gardens in Calcutta,

But now here he is, KG, from high school prodigy to global superstar.

KG, as Rabada is affectionately called, illustrates a movement towards transformation in the sport.  Some may argue that Rabada’s success is not a good example of the strength of transformation because his cricket talent was honed at St Stithians College – one of the country’s most expensive and well-known cricket schools.

When one makes this point, their analysis fails to consider South Africa’s sporting history. We have always had talent, but not representation. There were scores of extremely talented cricketers who never got to represent South Africa despite their tremendous talent because they were black. The most famous example is probably that of the late Basil d’Oliveira, a coloured player from the Cape who eventually played test cricket for England in the late 1969s because South Africa’s apartheid state prevented him from representing his country.

This is why KG representing South Africa, as a black player, in a historically very white sport, is worthy of a celebration.

There are other wins.

Cricket has progressed significantly compared to other historically white sporting codes such as rugby when it comes to their transformation scorecard.

The sport has managed to introduce the quality of opportunity provided to black children at school level through Hubs and Regional Performance Centres (RPC).

In South Africa, private and former Model-C schools produce over 80% of the nation’s cricket players. However, for every 20 white players there is an average of 3 Black African players.

Because of this imbalance, Cricket South Africa decided to get South African black communities to become more involved in the game through the establishment of the HUBs and RPC’s across the country’s nine provinces. The main goal of this is to develop and maintain effective cricketing structures from grassroots level right through to senior cricket.

As of March 2017, the Hubs and RPC’s cricket development programme boasted 58 clubs, 195 full-time coaches, over 4500 players, 464 feeder schools in townships and regional offices. It is good to note that this development programme is bearing fruit.

Black children across the country have been given the opportunity to fall in love with the sport. This is a strong and significant step towards transformation

For example, the Hammanskraal hub has already produced 24 provincial players, while their girls under 13 and under 19 teams won the 2016 school champion league. Hubs such as the Hammanskraal Hub are showing the necessity and importance of identifying and nurturing talent.

The Hubs and RPC programme is making sure that the opportunities that were made available to Rabada at St. Stithians are increasingly on offer to aspirant professional cricketers from the rural areas and township schools.

Once given the opportunity, those who shine are then selected for regional, provincial and eventually national age group and senior national teams.

Kgaudisa Molefe is one of these players.

Molefe, who was discovered at the Orange Farm Hub, represented South Africa at the U19 World Cup in New Zealand earlier this year.

He then attained a scholarship to attend Jeppe Boys, a prestigious cricket school, facilitated by the Gauteng Cricket Board and CSA.

Cricket SA Acting CEO Thanag Moroe believes that this approach will bear even more fruit. It shows that the RPC and Hubs programmes work, and we just have to push as hard as we can to unearth the young players like Kgaudi.

Moroe’s assertions are supported by the latest Eminent Persons Transformation Report. The annual EPG Report, produced by the National Department of Sport and Recreation, essentially audits South Africa’s progress in transforming the sporting landscape.

The report revealed that in the 2015/2016 financial year, cricket, rugby and netball all improved in getting more African, Coloured and Indian youngsters to play sport. More school children now get the opportunity to play sports once reserved for the privileged few.

It is possible then that in another 25 years there will be no need for a column such as this one. Rabada will have retired after leading South Africa to a maiden home series victory over The Baggy Greens. Yours truly might be in the grave and the fact that the next Proteas captain might be a boy from Orange Farm will matter little because wherever your birthplace, regardless of how deep your parents pockets may be – your dreams would come true.

Mosibodi Whitehead is a sports columnist and a sports presenter.

 

Walk Fresh, a youth company changing township life

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Walk Fresh, a youth company changing township life

Staff Reporter

Lethabo Mokoena started his shoe-cleaning business at the age of 23.

He was at his friend’s house in Daveyton, a township in the Ekurhuleni Municipality in Gauteng, when the idea came to him.

Mokoena says he watched Thabang wash his mother’s sneakers while the two of them sat on the porch.

“Are you getting paid for that,” he asked his friend.
“Paid? Paid my friend… nxa, who would pay for this,” said Thabang.

It was from this seemingly mundane activity that the idea to establish Walk Fresh, a sneaker-cleaning and shoe-care company that polishes, repairs and refurbishes all types of shoes, took root.

This was back in 2015 and Mokoena had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in corporate and strategic communication from the University of Johannesburg. At the time, he was employed as a brand activator for Sony Mobile.

Mokoena tells Inside Education he saw a gap in the market. However, what drove him to establish his company was the “hopelessness” and “nothingness” he saw in the faces of his friends and extended family members in the township.

“I left my township six years prior to go to university. I left these guys sitting at street corners with nothing to do. When I got back, they were still sitting at the same street corners, doing nothing. I wanted to do my part,” he said.

The Labour Force Survey (2018) produced by Statistics South Africa show the country’s unemployment rate at 26,7 %. However, it is worth noting that the expanded unemployment rate, which includes people who have given up on finding employment and are no longer looking for jobs, is higher at 33.7 %.

The unemployment rate sits much higher for youth aged between 15 – 24.

The Labour Force Survey shows the unemployment rate for this group is at a staggering 63,9%.

Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town Derek Yu says this should be of great concern because the high levels of youth unemployment may lead to social upheaval. He says a deeper analysis of the numbers reveals an even scarier picture of large sections of the population suffering from chronic joblessness and worrying details about the country’s youth unemployment statistics that haven’t been sufficiently highlighted.

Yu adds that the very high unemployment rate also highlights that many young people struggle to find their first job.

“The youth struggle to find their first job despite actively searching through and answering job advertisement. Most have matric, that is they have completed 12 years of schooling,” said Yu.

This is why Mokoena started his business.

He had R700 in the bank. This money was supposed to pay for his work petrol for the week, but instead, he used it to buy his cleaning supplies. He used the train to go to work. For months he would use his little salary to buy cleaning material.

At first, Walk Fresh was an informal business which ran in Thabang’s backyard. The shoes would arrive, and the two men would place them, “Ko stoepung, ko fatshe.” [On the porch, on the floor].

Where it all started, Photograph, Lethabo Mokoena Facebook page

Mokoena and Thabang would clean about 60 shoes a month. They soon realised they would need a full-time person responsible for Walk Fresh.

“Thabang still had a full-time job at Pick n Pay. We had a conversation and decided he should work full time at the company while I used my salary to pay him what he earned at his job. He was the business’ first employee,” says Mokoena.

There were struggles.

The Gordon Institute of Business Science and FNB’s Entrepreneurial Dialogues State of Entrepreneurship in South Africa report found that Start-ups fail at a rate of about 9 in 10 in the first two years of operation. This is troubling because starting a small business in South Africa is often presented as the big hope for millions of unemployed South Africans, and SMMEs have been regarded as being crucial for the country’s economic growth.

The National Treasury regards small to medium enterprises essential for both urban and rural areas, and as useful for alleviating poverty. In his PhD study titled, Retrospective analysis of failure causes in South African small businesses, Dr.Peter Pandelani Nemaenzhe finds that the reason why small businesses fail is because of deficiencies in management and leadership. His findings also indicate the importance of education and training to ensure that more enterprises succeed, and less small businesses fail.

The importance of teaching entrepreneurship in schools is also emphasised by educationist and community developer Matthew Botsime. In an interview with Inside Education, Botsime said schools have failed in preparing us for the future.

“The main focus of education is finding employment. At no point were we encouraged to think beyond our qualifications. We were not taught to create our own jobs or opportunities, nor were we encouraged to establish our own companies. Why else do we find graduates standing at street corners with placards begging for jobs? The education system has produced graduates for graduates. It only gives us information but not the dexterity we need to invent our own things,” said Botsime.

Mokoena knows this too well.

He says he never imagined himself start a business. He says he was taught to go to school, pass and then go to university where he was still encouraged to study, pass and find a job.

“But while at school I had to work to pay for my fees. I had to pay for my accommodation and so I thought, if I was able to do this for two years, why do I need to get a job,” says Mokoena.

He says one of the big challenges they faced earlier on in their business was access to markets. Because they were based in Daveyton, they could not reach people outside of the area. The challenge, as he puts it, was understanding that although people around him wanted his service, they did not necessarily have funds to use the service in a way that the business would be self-reliant in future.

“This is how drop-off points came about,” he says.

“We approached laundromats across Gauteng. People drop off their shoes at locations closest to them and we bring them back once clean. Currently, we have eight drop off points in and around Joburg and we will be opening another store in Durban this coming July,” he says.

Walk Fresh has since created seven full-time jobs, including a driver, an administrative person and sneaker cleaning technicians. The company currently handles an average of 450 pairs of footwear a month. They offer services that include leather shoe care and polishing, as well as cleaning nubuck and suede shoes. Walk Fresh also sells inner soles, shoe laces and “anything to do with shoes”.

Walk Fresh employees. Photograph taken fromLethabo Mokoena Facebook page

This great, yet simple idea won Mokoena the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) South African Youth Award for the Entrepreneurship category in 2017. He has also received sponsorship from J&B Hive, a community of entrepreneurs and creatives in Johannesburg bringing revolutionary pieces of work into the world, to build new flagship store in Johannesburg.

But it is not all rosy.

On 15 March, Mokoena posted the following on his private Facebook page: “Damn! Today is a sore day man  😟, I took an L [ leap] & I have chest pains. I was invited by the GEP [ to a pitching competition with a R40k cash price. The boy didn’t even make it to the top 30.  The attitude hasn’t changed though! We’re still coming for everything, we’re still rewriting the township narrative.”

Another set-back happened earlier in his business. Mokoena applied for a grant with NYDA. He was told the agency’s resources were exhausted. He then applied for a voucher but was told the vouchers had been discontinued.

“That’s why I was surprised when the same agency awarded me Entrepreneur of the Year for 2017. I found that very awkward,” he says.

Mokoena says he sees Walk Fresh as “an escape” from the monotony of township unemployed and “not-in-school” life that leads many young people to drug and alcohol abuse. He says he wants to change the thinking of township youths and instil in them the confidence to have faith in their own abilities.

“I clean shoes for a living. Someone would not think to start a business from cleaning shoes, but we have done it. And we have done it in a creative and low-cost manner. We use free marketing in the form of websites and social media to give us access to a highly targeted market. We have a digital marketing strategy which is well managed, and our customer engagement through these channels is consistent and ongoing,” he says.

“We are self-taught.”

He adds: “Mo kasi [In townships] alcohol is all we know. But if we, as Walk Fresh, can come through and say, ‘guys we’re going to employ you and pay you this salary but out of the salary we’ll take certain percentage and put it away for you until you come with a business idea’ that gives us hope,” he says.

Facebook: Lethabo Mpho Mokoena
Walk Fresh: www.walkfresh.co.za
#WeAreComingForEverything

 

 

African board games should be introduced into the classroom

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African board games should be introduced into the classroom

Rebecca Y. Bayeck

When most of us think about learning, we imagine a teacher and a classroom. In reality most of the things we know, and a great number of the skills we acquire as children and adults, are learned outside the classroom – in conversations with peers, engaging in community service, on the playground.

Educators and researchers are increasingly recognising opportunities for growth presented outside the classroom, and are working to integratethem into classroom learning experiences.

Games, in particular, are being seen as learning spaces. This is because they enable players to develop non-cognitive skills, such as patience or discipline, which are important for career and life success. Gameplay also develops a number of cognitive skills, including critical thinking and problem solving.

The African continent has a long history of gameplay that extends backto pre-slavery and precolonial times. Board games, in particular, have been used to teach, or reinforce, values as well as cognitive and motor skills.

Games have been part of the social fabric of many African societies for hundreds of years. The Morabaraba board game was historically used to share cattle herding strategies in parts of southern Africa (for example South Africa, Bostwana and Lesotho) and discuss information related to war strategies. And legend has it that Oware was used in 1700s Ghana by Ashanti King Katakyie Opoku Ware I to resolve issues between married couples. Today, board games remain equally popular and culturally significant.

Though a growing number of researchers around the world are making the connection between playing and learning, the learning potential of African board games remains severely under-explored. My research – which focuses on mechanics, rules and context – suggests that the creative use of these games could play an important role in formal education.

Similar but different

The board games explored in my research include Oware (Ghana), Bao (Tanzania), Moruba (South Africa), Morabaraba (South Africa), as well as Omweso or Mweso (Uganda).

I broke down some of the mechanics and rules of each game, as well as the context in which they were and are played. This enabled me to identify some of the learning outcomes of each game’s mechanics.

Popular board games across the continent.

The boards games could be referred to as “strategic games” as they involve strategic thinking. Most – with the exception of Morabaraba – are also from the same family of games, Mancala.

My analysis shows that the board games should be viewed as unique, and different. Each has its own mechanics, requires specific skills and produces distinctive learning outcomes. This means that the games could potentially be used to teach a variety of concepts and skills across a number of subjects and at different educational levels.

Focus on Oware

Oware is one of the most played and known African board games in the world – and its rules show its learning potential.

It is played on a board of 12 holes, with 48 seeds or pebbles equally distributed between two players. The seeds or pebbles are dropped one by one into consecutive holes by players who take turns to play. The aim of the game is to capture 25 seeds. This requires players to use multiple strategies and techniques.

But the game mechanics of Oware suggest that it could even prove to be useful in a biology classroom. The life cycle of a cell is defined by a series of events that lead to its division and replication. Like the cell, Oware gameplay is characterised by a series of cyclical, repetitive movements, guided by the game mechanics or rules. Thus, using Oware mechanics or rules, the concept of cell life cycle can be explained to students in a biology course.Playing Oware teaches strategic thinking and arithmetic. Patience, spatial thinking, communication, decision making and negotiation skills are some of the other learning outcomes it facilitates.

The full learning potential of games like Oware is yet to be completely uncovered, but it’s clear that it can be used to introduce students to new concepts they may easily understand because of their familiarity with game. Learning is made fun and enjoyable.

What’s next?

Games are certainly alternative spaces for learning and can advance education. The educational potential of African board games has long been argued by ethnomatheticians (who study the relationship between mathematics and culture) and anthropologists – including scholars such as James Owusu-Mensah, Arthur Powell, Oshon Temple, and Kofi Poku Quan-Baffour.

The moment is therefore ripe for African board games to assume their proper place in this emerging field. An inventory of these games is an excellent first step, but there is much work to be done.The field of Game Studies is emerging and, across the world, educators and researchers are exploring games to understand and enhance learning. But many of the digital games that are celebrated for their educational value are expensive and inaccessible to most people. African board games, on the other hand, are simply made and can even be reproduced, or designed, in a playground by digging holes on the ground.

Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a PhD Candidate, Learning Design & Technology & Comparative & International Education, Learning Performances Systems Department, College of Education, Pennsylvania State University
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After school clubs aren’t always safe spaces: what should be done about it

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After school clubs aren’t always safe spaces: what should be done about it

Nicole De Wet

Young people around the world are encouraged to get involved in extracurricular activities. These range from choirs and drama clubs to sports teams, with many other options available depending on the school. These activities are important for several reasons.

Sports and other physical activities, such as drama clubs, support the development of young people into healthy adults. For parents who work long days, these activities are a productive way to keep their children busy when nobody is at home to supervise them. Finally, these activities often differ from what children are taught in class, so they encourage new interests beyond school work.

But, as research I’ve just published with my colleagues shows, after school clubs can also be risky environments because they’re not always properly supervised. This can present opportunities for risky sexual behaviour and drug use. Our study focused on South Africa, and bears out an extensive global body of research that’s found an association between young people’s participation in sport and their use of drugs and alcohol.

South Africa’s Department of Sports and Recreation has found that 51.7% of the country’s young people participate in sports and recreational activities.

This is not to suggest that after-school clubs and teams should be scrapped in South Africa. Rather, greater supervision is needed; parents need to get more involved so they know exactly what their children are doing in their after-school time and policies must be created that better monitor and evaluate extracurricular activities.

Risky business

Risky behaviour, including sexual and illicit drug use, have devastating health consequences. Some of these relate to health: young women may fall pregnant and contracting HIV is a real risk especially in a country with such high prevalence rates of the disease.

There’s also a real risk of young people becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol. They may also be separated from their families, lose out on future and current employment or even end up in jail.

To many parents, after-school activities are a way to prevent their children from engaging in risky behaviour. The idea is that if youth are kept “busy” during their leisure periods they will not have time to experiment in these behaviours. They also believe that their kids will benefit from the social interaction and physical exercise. And research has confirmed that these benefits exist.

But after-school clubs are not always entirely safe. They can be spaces where young people try their first cigarette or experiment with alcohol for the first time.

Our study concentrated on young people aged between 10 and 22 – in South Africa, it’s not unusual for those aged between 18 and 22 to still be in the secondary school system. This is usually because of prolonged absence through illness, the responsibility of caring for an ill relative, pregnancy and grade repetition.

Our statistical analysis of the South African Youth Lifestyle Survey 2009controlled for a number of factors. These included age, sex, race, whether they lived in an urban or rural area, the number of income earners in the household, food security in the household and whether or not the youth had set goals for their future.

We found an association between sports participation and youth group involvement and risky sexual behaviour as well as illicit drug use. The risks were higher for females and those who live in the country’s rural areas; they were lower for those who’d identified predefined goals for their future and those involved in choirs or drama groups.

Finding solutions

Several things can be done to tackle the issues raised in our research. For starters, there’s a clear need for better supervision and organisation of after-school activities so that they don’t become enabling environments for risky behaviour.

Young people who participate in sports and other clubs should not be left unattended. And supervisors, coaches and other authority figures should be monitored to ensure that they’re not allowing anyone to engage in risky behaviour on their watch.

Parent involvement is also key. Parents should attend practices and events to meet the people who supervise these clubs, and ask their children about their activities. Of course, it can be tough for parents who work long hours to make time for this; other adult relatives could be asked to get involved here.

National policies and programmes also need to be aware of these issues. Policymakers must broaden their scope to include the monitoring and evaluation of after-school programmes.

This will allow South Africa to protect its young people from peer and adult pressure to engage in acts which risk their health and social well-being.

Nicole De Wet is Senior Lecturer, Demography and Population Studies, Schools of Social Sciences and Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand
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Facebook and the role it plays in education

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Facebook and the role it plays in education

Craig Blewett

It’s a rather impressive, if controversial, resume for a teenager: blamed for the election of Donald Trump, increased divorce rates, rising syphilis cases, and the advent of fake news.

Facebook turns 14 on February 4. And the controversies continue unabated. But there’s one aspect of Facebook that should not be lost in all the noise: the extraordinary change it has brought about in how we connect, communicate, consume and share content – in the classroom, as well as in other spaces.

Putting the words “Facebook” and “learning” together may seem like an oxymoron. But my research has delved into the role Facebook has played in shaping how the new generation consumes and shares content. Understanding this is pivotal to understanding how we should be using technology to teach in the digital age. Quite simply, Facebook has changed the way that children learn.

How students learn

That’s what I’ve discovered through my research, which used a cyber-ethnography approach to try and determine how students are learning in our modern digital age. This involved essentially “living” with students while they connected, communicated, and learned in a Facebook space.

I spent an entire semester watching and interacting with students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa as they used a Facebook page as their primary learning portal. The students were given admin access to the space. This meant they could determine how the space was used: who had access to it, how it was designed, what was posted on the page, and even the level of anonymity of their posts.

This provided me with an opportunity to watch the students learn, unfettered from traditional learning constraints. However, it would take a while for the students to fully explore their learning within this new space. Initially the students would often attempt to defer to me and my guidance. Only after I repeatedly refused to control their learning experience did they begin to behave in a self-oraganising way and allow me to observe their “natural” learning patterns.

The research revealed that Facebook provided students with a series of learning affordances. Affordances are “can do” oppportunies, some intentional and others unintentional, that technology spaces provide. In this instance the research revealed that the affordances at play were accessibility, connection, communication, control and construction. These affordances provide valuable insights into how students learn in digital spaces.

Once I understood this, I could turn my attention to the key need: developing ways of teaching, called pedagogies, that are appropriate for the digital age. Currently the focus on technology – the what, has distracted us from pedagogy: the how. Without understanding how best to apply these new technologies’ affordances, educators will not be able to effectively impact teaching in the modern classroom.

However, providing educators with a list of “how tos” isn’t much use without a system that makes the list easy to implement. As Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says:

I can tell people they need to teach better. But if I don’t give them things that are easy for them to implement, they won’t do it.

Activating the classroom

That’s where the Activated Classroom Teaching (ACT) model comes in. I developed this model in a bid to create a taxonomy of teaching and learning for 21st century classrooms. A taxonomy is an ordered arrangement of items. One of the most famous of these is Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking. The ACT model attempts to provide a taxonomy of digital-age teaching approaches.

The ACT model consists of five digital-age pedagogies that seek to maximise the affordances of technology, modern students’ approaches to learning and the development of key 21st century skills such as creativity, problem solving, curiosity, critical thinking, etc.

The focus is a shift from passive ways of teaching (consumption) to active approaches (curation, conversation, correction, creation and chaos). This aligns with research that shows children are spending more than half their online time actively engaging: creating content, getting involved in “interactive consumption” and communicating.

Ignoring the tectonic shifts taking place in our classrooms is not the solution. Simply dropping technology into our classrooms is not the solution. Simply training teachers to use computers is not the solution. As British author and education expert Sir Ken Robinson has said, we need a paradigm shift, but it’s more than that – we need a pedagogy shift.

The young teen, Facebook, has changed how we connect and learn. But, as the OECD pointed out in its global study about educational technology: “If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”

Craig Blewett is a Senior Lecturer in Education & Technology, University of KwaZulu-Natal
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Why kids should be taught how to start a business at school

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Why kids should be taught how to start a business at school

Michael Gaotlhobogwe and Adri Du Toit

The African continent is home to a large number of young people – and it simply doesn’t have jobs for them all. Youth unemployment is highacross the continent.

Some countries, like Nigeria and Kenya have tried to tackle this problem by equipping children with entrepreneurial skills while they’re still at school.

This equips children with essential foundational knowledge and skills such as emotional intelligence and risk taking; it also develops their appreciation for self-employment opportunities. This means that when such children find themselves in a situation where they are unemployed, they don’t give up and succumb to self-pity. Instead, they are able to use their skills to create new opportunities as entrepreneurs.

Both have long made entrepreneurship training part of their schools’ vocational subjects and technology classes. For some years, teachers in these subjects have been trained in entrepreneurship education.

Of course, inculcating a culture of entrepreneurship can’t entirely eradicate the problem of youth unemployment. But it can reduce unemployment by giving young people the skills they need to create their own businesses and generate work for themselves or others outside the formal job market.

And a large body of research from around the world has shown that entrepreneurship education should start from an early age.

We set out to see whether Botswana and South Africa could make some inroads into their youth unemployment problems by introducing entrepreneurship into their schools’ curriculum. South Africa’s youth unemployment rate stands at about 55%. Botswana’s is around 34%.

Botswana offers an optional subject called Design and Technology from junior high school level (pupils in these grades are aged between 12 and 15). In South Africa, Technology is offered as a compulsory subject at various phases of the school curriculum.

We found that the current curricula in both countries do not include explicit entrepreneurship content. On top of this teachers in these subjects aren’t trained to pass on knowledge or information about entrepreneurship. This is a real missed opportunity given that in Nigeria and Kenya the subject of technology is a good vehicle for supporting and developing pupils’ entrepreneurial skills.

Entrepreneurship in schools makes sense

In Botswana and South Africa, entrepreneurship-related programmes are offered to people who have already left school. Botswana’s government has introduced initiatives like the Youth Empowerment Scheme and the Youth Development Fund to encourage and empower young people with entrepreneurial and survival skills such as interpersonal, risk taking, emotional intelligence, as well as being able to identify opportunities, and financial skills in general.

In South Africa, the National Youth Development Agency includes an entrepreneurship development programme. This aims to help young entrepreneurs access the relevant skills, knowledge, values and attitudes needed to develop and create their own businesses. But entrepreneurship programmes are not coordinated and often not managed well in South Africa. So very few young people actually benefit from them.

In principle, the programmes are good. But they haven’t worked because the people they’re meant to benefit don’t have the right skills to take advantage of what’s being offered. This could be addressed if entrepreneurial skills were being instilled at an early age – in the school curriculum.

Use existing resources

So why don’t schools in Botswana and South Africa simply introduce an entirely new subject that’s devoted to entrepreneurship?

The reason, as we point out in our research, is that the school curriculum is a hugely contested space in any country. Many subjects are competing for space and recognition, and it’s a long, complex process to introduce an entirely new subject.

That’s why we suggest that the southern African neighbours could learn from Kenya and Nigeria by merging entrepreneurship education with an existing subject. Technology, or Design and Technology, is the ideal home for this since these subjects already incorporate a number of skills any good entrepreneur needs. These include problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork and production or making skills, which learners develop in Technology when they design and physically make a product.

When learners can see the results of applying their knowledge and skills into actual products – which could be sold or somehow used to create an income – their learning immediately becomes more valuable.

Technology teachers will need to be trained in entrepreneurship education. But this is a worthwhile investment both for the individual teachers and their own skills and the value they’ll be able to add for their pupils.

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A strategy for mother-tongue based education is needed

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A strategy for mother-tongue based education is needed

H. Ekkehard Wolff

Africa is the home of 2144 languages. Oddly, most development theoreticians consider this a barrier to economic and social growth. Sociolinguists and educationists know better: the African continent’s multilingualism is a powerful resource.

The problem begins at school, and continues right through the education system. This includes tertiary level.

I have watched South African university students’ call for “fees to fall”, and – coming as I do from a country that offers free primary through tertiary education and whose economy thrives partly for this reason – I fully support them. However, in terms of just and sustainable education, fees are only one side of the coin. Language is the other. As a linguist whose work has focused for decades on African language matters, I remain convinced what Africa needs are political campaigns that tackle language: #EnglishOnlyMustFall. #FrenchOnlyMustFall. #PortugueseOnlyMustFall.

The continent needs a new strategy for mother-tongue based bilingual education, from primary through to tertiary level. In this, it can draw from what many other emerging markets and societies, as well as developed countries, do very successfully. From South Korea through Japan and China, to Russia, all of Europe and North America, schools’ language of instruction is children’s mother tongue (also known as first or home language). They also learn “global” languages like English and French so they can later function and communicate all over the world.

Crucially in these countries, the mother tongue is not suddenly abandoned at university. That’s because research has shown the level of a foreign language acquired at school is not enough for the required “Cognitive Academic Linguistic Proficiency”, or CALP. So students continue to learn in their mother tongue, while also studying a global language – or two, or even three. They do this at a stage when their cognitive, creative and critical potential are reaching maturity. In this way, they come to fully grasp the complexities and applications of their own home languages and a foreign language.

Applying these lessons in postcolonial Africa means embracing truly multilingual education. Unfortunately too many African tertiary systems operate solely through a foreign language – English, French or Portuguese. This disadvantages mainly black African students and creates what South African educationist Neville Alexander called a kind of “neo-apartheid”.

Putting African languages first

Research has made it explicitly clear: if efficiency of learning and cognitive development is the target, the mother tongue should be the medium of instruction from primary school, through secondary and into universities. Other languages, like English, can be introduced as subjects from lower primary level.

There are several objections to introducing African languages into the education system. Cost is one. But this is a myth. Sociolinguist Kathleen Heugh has shown that “…investment in such programmes in Africa at the moment is usually less than 2% of a country’s education budget – and is recovered within five years”.

Another argument is that multilingualism is somehow difficult to achieve. Yet many African children learn two or more languages before they ever reach school, and often use such languages interchangeably. Sociolinguists are intrigued by the ways in which Africans communicate mainly in urban contexts – in what appears to be talking in two or more languages at the same time. The new academic terminology for this is translanguaging or polylanguaging.

Why not use this as a highly welcome asset to teach through both African and European languages across the educational system, since people freely apply this strategy outside classrooms and lecture halls anyway? Why should educational authorities insist on using only English rather than “translanguaging” when teaching content subjects?

Others have inferred that African languages are simply not fit for teaching and learning at university level. This argument combines ignorance with racism. And it’s not borne out by evidence. In fact, the reverse is true. A recent PhD thesis currently being submitted at Rhodes University in South Africa, where I am a visiting Fellow, found that students with a background in languages other than English profit immensely from being assisted with teaching materials, terminology and translation aids in their mother tongues.

At Rhodes, isiXhosa features as more than a language subject. It is used as a medium of instruction in support courses for Journalism and Media Studies. Pharmacy students are taught vocation-specific isiXhosa skills. Bilingual teachers in Politics, Commerce, Sociology and Economics are recognising the linguistic diversity of their classes by using students’ lived experience as an important aspect of teaching and learning.

There’s more. The University of Limpopo offers multilingual studies, including a BA in Contemporary English language studies in both English and Sesotho sa Leboa. Masters and PhD students write their theses in any official language of their choice – recent examples have included theses in Sepedi, Tshivenda and Xitsonga. Both Stellenbosch University and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology offer multilingual glossaries in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans for various faculties. These are also accessible online.

Multilingualism opens doors

These and other initiatives work towards two outcomes. The first is to produce university graduates who are able to converse freely in both a world language like English and in one or more African languages. A good command of global languages will open a window to the world for all those who’ve come through such a tertiary system – and put an end to the marginalisation of Africa.

The second outcome is that ultimately, African societies can be transformed from merely consuming knowledge to producing it. Until today and exclusively, knowledge came to Africa from the North, wrapped up in the languages of former colonial masters. This one-way road must change into a bidirectional one. For this, universities are the hub.

One of the ways to ensure this happens is to upgrade teacher (or lecturer) training. Whatever language is used in teaching content subjects, when language is the subject it must be taught professionally and well. Good English, but likewise good isiXhosa, for instance, must remain the teaching goal. Teacher training is critical.

All of this work is a worthy investment in the quest to give African languages their rightful place in African societies. Re-empowering African languages is a way to contribute sustainably to societal transformation and economic progress by fully exploiting the cognitive and creative potential of all young Africans.

H. Ekkehard Wolff is Emeritus Professor of African Linguistics, University of Leipzig.

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Universities are turning into corporations

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Universities are turning into corporations

Sioux McKenna

Universities in many parts of the world are buckling under multiple financial, societal and political demands. This has led to increasingly loud calls for what are called “enhanced efficiencies” – a term drawn from the business world.

And some institutions are heeding those calls. They’re drawing wholesale on the logic of the market in their bid to survive. They are becoming administrative universities without truly understanding how such initiatives chip away at the very purpose of higher education: the academic project.

The nature of the academic project differs from institution to institution – some will focus more on workplace employment, others on critical citizenship, and so on. But it will always be about the furthering of knowledge and the development of knowers.

In 2011, Benjamin Ginsberg, political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, argued that US universities were losing hold of the academic project by becoming administrative institutions.

He also showed that as student numbers increased across the US, the number of academics being employed to teach them and guide their research rose at the same or a slightly slower pace. But there was an astounding simultaneous increase in executive positions, usually people with business rather than academic acumen.

Despite these warnings, other countries have followed the US’s lead. South Africa is among them. This is cause for concern for both those inside universities and those in broader society who benefit from having a strong academic sector that fosters sustainable development, builds democracy and contributes to various other public goods.

It is crucial to ensure that the academic project at South African universities is vigorously and bravely safeguarded.

Five signs

South Africa’s universities are turning into administrative institutions for several reasons. They’re dealing with crippling financial constraints; their costs are rising, but state funding is not matching these increases. There’s also a need to decolonise the structure and content of the curriculum.

Massification – the rapid growth of student numbers – is another issue. More than 20% of South Africans aged between 18 and 23 are now at university. The system has to attend to a diverse student body with highly uneven schooling and other prior experiences.

Leaders at many institutions seem to think the solution lies in learning from the world of business and putting more administrative structures in place.

There are five tell-tale signs of the administrative university:

1. New executive positions (and salaries): These positions, almost always prefaced by the words “executive director”, are becoming increasingly common. Their roles are related to everything from human resources to strategic planning to quality assurance. Each comes with a number of support staff – and a lot of meetings.

Individually such posts seem reasonable. Collectively, they shift the institution from university to corporation.

2. Appointments, not elections: In administrative universities deans are appointed by a selection committee, usually with a strong focus on their management skills. They must implement management decisions down into faculties and are often hired on contract with clearly stated performance targets.

Gone is the elected dean, chosen by a specific faculty to offer academic leadership, defend the academic project, and represent the needs and concerns of staff and students to management.

3. Decisions and policies: The moment the “executive management” team is made up of more administrator positions than academic ones, it is unlikely that decisions will primarily serve the academic project. Administrative efficiency, legal compliance and financial sustainability are all vitally important. But decisions and policies around these issues must first and foremost follow the logic of the academic project

4. Regulatory frameworks: Administrative universities love a politically correct catchphrase. In South Africa, the current favourites are transparency and social justice. These terms are then used to justify the implementation of many one-size-fits-all regulatory frameworks which govern every process from admission through to graduation.

Of course decisions need to be transparent, recorded and justified but we also need to make sure that decisions are based on what is fairest in a particular context. It cannot be considered social justice when processes become swathed in bureaucracy with no flexibility to take individual contexts into account in a very uneven society.

5. Quick fixes: Because these administrators set themselves up as being responsible for instilling efficiency into every aspect of the system, there is significant role confusion.

Soon, as Ginsberg showed in the US, administrators are commenting on issues which are entirely entwined with the academic project. Proposed common sense “interventions”, like add-on remedial classes, are advocated as being supportive. But they actually fly in the face of well documented teaching and learning research.

Bureaucratic bloat

This article is not an attack on the dedicated individual administrators who help universities run smoothly. They are as crucial to keeping institutions going as academic staff. And they, just like academic staff, become badly overburdened in an overly administrative university. The issue is that introducing significant, expensive administrative structures too often comes at the cost of the pursuit and development of knowledge.

The blame for this bloat of bureaucracy doesn’t only rest with executive administrators. Academics have ceded the academic project to the empty rhetoric of efficiency. For academics to collectively resist these processes, they need to put up their hands to take on leadership roles and to participate in processes aimed at keeping the academic project as their university’s central driving logic.

Sioux McKenna is Director of PG Studies & Higher Education Studies PhD Co-ordinator, Rhodes University 

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Schools in Nairobi slums work with 3-way partnerships

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Schools in Nairobi slums work with 3-way partnerships

Benta A. Abuya

Eight years of research in low-income neighbourhoods of Nairobi have opened my eyes to the significant role of school, family and community partnerships. Not only are they crucial for student achievement, they can narrow the performance gap between children in high and low income settings.

My work in Nairobi confirms findings from research that stretches back over two decades in different contexts. For instance, renowned Harvard social analyst Lisbeth Schorr observed in her book that social programmes taken to scale resulted in the transformation of poor neighbourhoods and communities.

The positive results suggest that a host of positive outcomes can be achieved when communities partner with schools.

My research showed that forging a partnership between family, community and school enables parents to take part in the academic success of their children. Parents acquire knowledge, skills and confidence for better parenting. This in turn enables them to improve their economic lot and become better citizens.

The three-way partnerships also contribute to social capital. Social capital refers to relationships among and between different actors for the purpose of achieving a common good. Therefore, the partnership between family, community and schools improves the interconnections between the institutions. This in turn enriches the relationships between parents and their children for academic success.

Schools can also draw on resources external to them – the families and the community – to bridge any challenges they may face in the way of the children’s education.

As a result, parents are thrust to the centre of this relationship as a resource for the improvement of their children and the schools. Parents cease to be distant observers who are far removed from the education of their children. Families can draw from these new networks to enable their children to succeed in school.

My work over the past three years revolved around the practical application of this paradigm shift in two informal settlements in Nairobi under the “Improving Learning Outcomes” project. The two relatively poor urban settlements of Korogocho and Viwandani had poor learning outcomes at primary school level and low transition to secondary school.

A 2010 study in Nairobi put the transition rate from primary to secondary school in slum schools at 46%. The primary school completion among slum children stood at 76%. The transition rate compared poorly to the non-slum at an average of 72% transition and while 92% had completed primary school. Despite the introduction of free day secondary education in 2008 which was supposed to reduce the cost of schooling for low income groups, 27% of pupils still don’t make the transition to secondary school.

Understanding the reasons for this and designing interventions was a major part of our project.

Parental involvement

The positive association between the involvement of parents and student achievement has consistently been documented by scholars for some time now. Parental involvement includes communication with teachers and others working in a school, helping with school work at home and volunteering at school. Attending school events, such as parent-teacher meetings and conferences is also important.

Children of actively involved parents perform better in school, learn better and have stronger problem solving skills. They also attend school regularly, enjoy their schooling, and have fewer behavioural problems.

The main interventions during our research in Nairobi included:

  • after school support with homework and mentoring in life skills,
  • counselling for parents on active involvement in their children’s schooling, including support with homework. They were encouraged to limit household chores and educated on child labour,
  • secondary school transition subsidies. This was a transition from primary to secondary school, and
  • mentoring of students in leadership, a component that we added in the expansion phase.

We worked with community leaders to encourage a closer working relationship between the community, parents and the school. For instance, the community leaders encouraged parents to support their children’s education, particularly girls. This included encouraging a working relationship between girls their parents and teachers.

Parents believed that interacting with teachers was important because it helped reduce the probability of children becoming truant. They also counted on interaction with teachers to reduce instances of peer pressure.

The community leaders support for girls’ education persisted over the course of our three year work. This was particularly evident in their support to the parental component of the intervention. The community, built a supportive relationship on education and understanding the social change and peer pressure faced by the youth.

The result was improved learning outcomes, particularly in numeracy where girls recorded a 20 percentage point improvement in scores. There is also evidence that girls who participated in the programme had higher educational aspirations, with a substantial proportion of girls whose highest education aspiration was completing secondary school aspiring to acquire university education.

Transition to secondary school rates in Korogocho and Viwandani among the 2013 cohort of girls who participated in the project stood at 68%. This was a 22% improvement over the 2010 statistic of 46% (both girls and boys). Although the rate was still lower than the national average in 2010 by 9 percentage points, it represented a much reduced gap between urban slum children and the national average.

Among those girls who made a transition to secondary school in 2014, three girls joined prestigious girls’ national schools. National schools are the best-resourced and admit the highest performing students from across all counties in Kenya.

In 2015, three girls from Korogocho who qualified for the subsidy to join secondary also went on to qualify for a prestigious scholarship programme which targets gifted but economically and socially marginalised students.

Our findings show that the education outcomes of young people can be improved with targeted interventions. At the centre lies the participation of partners – community, family and schools.

Benta A. Abuya is a Research Scientist at the African Population and Health Research Center

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