Key Issues for ASP from the South African Basic Education Conference

Tessa Welch reports.

As the Conference Chairs (Mary Metcalfe and Gail Campbell) made clear, the aim of this conference was to provide a platform for dialogue between researchers and practitioners in the education sector and thereby help improve education through stakeholder collaboration.

A key quote from the conference is captured in this Tweet:

Interestingly, from the point of view of the African Storybook Project, was the debate about the best ways of taking initiatives to scale. Paul Hobden in discussing Characteristics of Successful Project Interventions, emphasised ‘organic slow replication’, whereas Brahm Fleisch, talking about the Gauteng Primary Literacy and Mathematics Strategy (GPLMS), spoke of the MEC’s weariness with endless pilots, and the importance of implementing to scale with monitoring and evaluation to learn from the experiences. The African Storybook Project tends more towards Paul Hobden’s view. We are building our website in an organic developmental process with the pilot sites which represent our target audience – continually testing and refining. However, unless there is systemic implementation, the concept will remain simply a concept.

There was general agreement that systemic change needs to focus on instruction and instructional leadership (Fleisch), with attention to close support and monitoring of teachers in classrooms. Ursula Hoadley in her presentation on Monitoring, Support and the Role of HODs, spoke about the unique role of good Heads of Departments in schools – to identify good practice, support, and share good practice with teachers of all subjects and phases. Perhaps in the African Storybook Project, the central team and the in-country coordinators need to do this in the pilot sites. We need to find ways of identifying good practice in our target communities, and of sharing that practice more widely.

Tessa Welch in the session on Multilingualism and Schooling talked about Digital Storytelling for Multilingual Literacy Development: Implications for Teachers, providing a rationale for the African Storybook Project in terms of what is needed for children to learn to read – particularly if they happen to be part of the 80% marginalised majority on the African continent. As Allison Rouse pointed out in his review of the South African system, two main findings emerge: teachers are struggling to teach African languages well, and the South African system focuses on passing (with very low pass marks), rather than mastery. Our argument from the point of view of the African Storybook Project  is that more lively and contextually relevant stories in African languages will assist teachers not only to teach African languages better, but also to lay the foundation for mastery of English and other subjects as well. Mastery of subjects at school is dependent on mastery of reading.