Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ways in which educational and curriculum reforms in post-apartheid South Africa have attempted to tackle the national problem of poor learner achievement in literacy and language through the development of school workbooks which provide one lesson per day to support teaching and learning. In addition to addressing the pedagogical and curricula challenges, the developers of the workbooks strove to extend the pedagogy by infusing it with ethical values of social and environmental justice so as to form a parallel curriculum. The chapter location considers the teaching of values from an Ubuntu perspective, which is predicated on communal relationships and extends to include relationships in the animal and eco-environment. The chapter includes various pictorial codes from the materials to illustrate the issues raised. The legacy of apartheid left severe backlogs in education in general, and specifically with regard to literacy and language - necessitating curriculum support for learners in all public schools. In addition to addressing the pedagogical and curricula challenges, the post-apartheid project of social integration made it imperative for the designers of the workbooks to extend the pedagogy so as to infuse ethical values of social and environmental justice. While the books aimed to teach the overt curriculum (language and literacy), they were designed in such a way to ensure that the covert curriculum supported the values of democracy, Ubuntu, inclusivity (race, class, gender, ability and both urban and rural identity). In addition, the overt and covert messages strove to explore the children’s relationship with the planet and the animal- and eco-environment—striving at all times to ensure these sophisticated concepts were accessible to a target population of children aged from 4–13 years.
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Notes
- 1.
Although it is recognised that the PIRLS and TIMMs are Northern oriented assessments, increasing the likelihood that South Africans would perform poorly, children also performed poorly on the continental SACMEQ and the South African National Annual Assessments.
- 2.
It is important to note that because of the large quantities of paper that would be used to print the books, it was decided to print on acid-free paper using vegetable-based ink which would not pollute the environment and which made recycling possible.
- 3.
I am writing this case study as the coordinator of the school workbook initiative, which I initiated while I was seconded from my university to the Ministry of Basic Education. I took on the task both as a sociologist and as an educator. The critical review process engendered much debate and decision-making around, for example, traditional and non-traditional gender roles, rural versus urban living, the importance of debunking racial and gender stereotypes, and ways of validating South Africa’s diverse cultures in order to develop a series of learner support materials by South Africans for South African learners across the country and across cultures. This form of participatory practice was made possible because this was a government project and we were therefore able to draw large samples of teachers, subject advisors and children into the consultative process. The process was essential in order to explore not only curriculum matters but also the way in which so-called Western and indigenous understandings of education would be dealt with. In the subsequent discussion, some of the issues of contention will be elaborated on to show how the process unfolded, resulting in a package of more than 400 titles of learner support materials delivered to approximately 9 million children each year. These materials constitute one of the few large-scale interventions by government, which arose from engagement with various stakeholders, the books having being improved over 5 editions, based on the reception of the materials by teachers and learners country-wide.
- 4.
During apartheid black South Africans were legally considered to be citizens of “homeland” reservations and were restricted to these areas. The apartheid legislation prohibited their migration to the rest of the country, under the pass law regulations.
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McKay, V. (2018). Introducing a Parallel Curriculum to Enhance Social and Environmental Awareness in South African School Workbooks. In: McIntyre-Mills, J., Romm, N., Corcoran-Nantes, Y. (eds) Balancing Individualism and Collectivism. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58014-2_5
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