African school curriculum as a front on which to widen access to education

A decade after the introduction of the topic into the South African public school curriculum, the theory of evolution by natural selection is poorly understood among those who teach it, and that flawed understanding is transferred to those attempting to learn it. The curricula, support material and textbooks designed to underpin teaching and learning of evolution are often inaccurate. Deeply held religious views in the country, especially Christianity, remain a stumbling block towards understanding and accepting evolution. The lack of scientific literacy allows for the continuation of Social Darwinism and racial stereotypes and deprives the victims of those ills of the knowledge and mechanisms of thought to counter these ideas. This review explores the relatively sparse but nevertheless well-conducted research into evolution education in South Africa. We conclude that an understanding of human evolution is essential to the country’s growing democracy because it provides a framework within which South Africans can understand and appreciate the diversity and heterogeneous nature of our society.
 Significance:
 
 Various obstacles in the teaching and learning of evolution are identified, and generalisable recommendations are provided to improve evolution education on a practical level.
 Evolution education is important for the South African public: to take pride in our rich fossil resources; to understand and appreciate human diversity; to dispel the racist myths of Social Darwinism; and to ensure the success of our education system by teaching the consilience of induction and logical reasoning.
 This synthesis of the research provides a starting point for anyone wanting to conduct evolution education research in South Africa in the future, specifically those in the fields of curriculum reform, life sciences or biological anthropology.

The indigenous knowledge system that informs the content of African performance practices derives from the distinctive history, philosophy, creative theory, geographical location, cross-cultural influences, and such of particular African communities. The transfer of these indigenous knowledge systems to students in a classroom situation has been a challenge in African school curriculum. There are music cultures that have been able to appropriate their indigenous music cultures for classroom education at the third level of education. This paper, therefore, is an investigation into one of such institutions that have incorporated its traditional music into the music curriculum and the contextual implications of achieving this feat.

Mainstreaming Sustainable Development in African School Curricula: Issues for Nigeria

Objectives: The South African food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) were developed and implemented to promote healthy lifestyles in the population along with preventing non-communicable diseases and other forms of diet-related illness. The FBDG were recommended for implementation within the national school curriculum. The objective of this study was to explore perceived challenges to successful implementation of these guidelines in the primary school curriculum.Design: This qualitative study gathered data via semi-structured individual interviews. Data were transcribed and analysed with ATLAS.ti software, using a thematic approach.Setting: Public primary schools located in three education districts in the Western Cape, South Africa.Subjects: Principals at twelve schools from communities with different socioeconomic statuses, and five curriculum advisors of relevant subjects from provincial and district levels.Outcomes measures: Perceived barriers to implementing FBDG in the primary school curriculum.Results: A lack of knowledge and/or expertise related to the FBDG by educators, time constraints within the teaching programme and lifestyle related factors of educators, parents and learners emerged as the three main challenge themes from the interviews. A lack of resources was identified as an additional theme.Conclusions: The principals and curriculum advisors anticipated many barriers to the success of implementing nutrition education using the FBDG in the primary school curriculum. Adequately addressing such barriers through improved awareness and knowledge of the FBDG by school staff could improve the potential of using the FBDG as a nutrition education tool in primary schools in South Africa.

Stimulating interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) among learners in developing countries remains a challenge, as schools often do not have the specialised skills or funds required to develop exciting STEM-related programmes like robotics. The RobotScienceproject at University of Johannesburg (UJ) TechnoLab aims to support South African schools with a cost effective, open source robotics platform that can be programmed from a computer, smartphone or tablet. All secondary schools in South Africa, including private schools, can offer robotics as a regular subject using the website and online videos TechnoLab produced to support its programmes in underprivileged communities. St David's Marist Brothers, a privately-funded South African secondary school, implemented robotics as an in-curriculum non-elective subject for Grade 8 and Grade 9 learners using the RobotScience project's website and videos. This paper presents early results of the implementation of robotics into a private secondary school, including a discussion on the novel approaches taken by teachers in the first season of the implementation.

The valuing of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) is one of the principles on which the South African school curriculum is supposed to be based. The purpose of this paper is to critique the treatment of indigenous knowledge in the South African secondary Physical Sciences curriculum against a backdrop of international debates on the relationship between IKS and science. Such debates usually take either an Inclusive perspective, where IKS are regarded as part of science, or an Exclusive perspective, where IKS and science are regarded as separate domains of knowledge. We identify a third perspective where IKS and science are viewed as intersecting domains. A document analysis of all national post-apartheid curriculum documents relevant to secondary Physical Sciences identifies only nine examples of IKS related to Physical Sciences in the latest curriculum documents (CAPS), although this is an improvement on the previous curricula. The curriculum documents reflect some confusion about the relationship between IKS and science, both in the wording and in the positioning of examples in relation to science content. Physical sciences curriculum development in South Africa appears to have gone through the stages of colonisation, decolonisation and neo-colonisation. We recommend the development of theory that addresses the role of valuing IKS in science classrooms. The Intersecting perspective offers promise as an approach to use in science classrooms, allowing the distinction to be made between pieces of indigenous knowledge that intersect with modern science knowledge and IKS as whole systems of thinking with distinctive worldviews.

Child labour has been of national and international concern since as early as the 1860s. In 2019 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted the resolution that 2021 would be the year by which child labour would be eliminated. However, much must still be done to effect this. By studying legislation and literature, I identified different forms of child labour that I go on to discuss in this article. When I explored the notion of child labour from three perspectives on childhood, namely the romanticised view of childhood, the view that children must participate in child labour, and the belief that children need to be protected from the abuse and exploitation seen to be inherent in their working, I came to understand the tensions in conceptualising this concept. I further problematise child labour as an educational issue. One of the purposes of the South African compulsory school curriculum as articulated in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) is to facilitate the transition of learners from education institutions to their future workplaces. I argue that CAPS should provide in-depth knowledge on the meaning of child labour in its different forms. For the purposes of this research, I analysed all the compulsory school curricula documents for Grades 1 to 9 by means of document analysis. My main finding is that CAPS does address some forms of child labour, but it does not address those forms (child work and illegal labour) with which most children would likely be confronted. Also, it does not address hazardous forms of child labour nor trafficking in child labour. More research is needed to determine if there are correlations between the results of this explorative document analysis and the received curriculum so that a curriculum response to address child labour can be articulated.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) was added to the South African Geography school curriculum when the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) was implemented from 2012. Many in-service teachers who qualified prior to 2014 did not cover this concept during their initial teacher education qualification because it was not part of the curriculum at that time. To address this deficiency, a teacher professional development (TPD) module was developed by the Fundisa for Change programme and offered to a selection of in-service high school Geography teachers. Transformative learning theory helped to understand the pedagogical practices used by teachers after attending the Fundisa for Change teacher professional development programme, in particular the use of a learner-centred approach. Using a small-scale, qualitative and interpretive case study method, the influence of this short TPD course on the teaching of climate change in the Geography CAPS curriculum on teachers’ pedagogical practices was investigated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, document analysis and lesson observations. Data were analysed using both inductive thematic and deductive analysis. Findings from this small sample of five teachers and their practices suggest that despite attending the programme, most of the participating teachers did not sufficientlyintegrate climate change education in their Geography classroom practices. The majority of the research participants did not implement the learner-centred teaching methods covered in the course. It is therefore recommended that a teacher professional development programme should be incorporated into longer-term and preferably ongoing professional development programmes so as to adequately foster climate change education in classroom practices. Keywords: Geography, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), climate change education, teacher professional development, learner-centred pedagogies

Much innovation has taken place in the development of medical schools and licensure exam processes across the African continent. Still, little attention has been paid to education that enables the multidisciplinary, critical thinking needed to understand and help shape the larger social systems in which health care is delivered. Although more than half of medical schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States offer at least one medical humanities course, this is less common in Africa. We report on the “liberal arts approach” to medical curricula undertaken by the University of Global Health Equity beginning in 2019. The first six-month semester of the curriculum, called Foundations in Social Medicine, includes courses in critical thinking and communication, African history and global political economy, medical anthropology and social medicine, psychology and health, gender and social justice, information technology and health, and community-based training. Additionally, an inquiry-based pedagogy with relatively small classes is featured within an overall institutional culture that emphasizes health equity. We identify key competencies for physicians interested in pursuing global health equity and how such competencies relate to liberal arts integration into the African medical school curriculum and pedagogical approach. We conclude with a call for a research agenda that can better evaluate the impact of such innovations on physicians’ education and subsequent practices.

This paper explores the question of what is powerful knowledge in school history, drawing on an analysis of secondary school history curriculum documents from South Africa and Rwanda. The paper engages with how these official curricula make selections regarding history topics, and how conceptual relationships are structured, and then interrogates to what extent the curricula might give learners access to powerful historical knowledge. The post‐apartheid South African history curriculum chose a disciplinary focus, which aims for learners to develop the skills to analyse historical sources and evidence and to recognise that there are different interpretations of particular events. In contrast, the Rwandan history curriculum takes a collective, memory‐history approach which does not focus on historical enquiry and has a strong focus on nation‐building and citizenship. I engage with the implications of what this means for the idea of powerful knowledge in school history and argue that the socialisation aspect of school history cannot be ignored.

Background: The South African national school curriculum for the foundation phase (6- to 9-year-olds) does not have a unique subject called ‘science’, but ‘hidden’ away in the subject ‘life skills’, one detects a great deal of science, but not all of it overtly presented. This presents a challenge to teachers who might be limited in their science content knowledge and lack understanding of the processes of science, both of which might contribute to low levels of science teaching self-efficacy.Aim: This article explores an evolutionary module development process designed to promote science teaching self-efficacy.Setting: Pre-service foundation phase student teachers taking a single method module in science.Methods: The study is anchored within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). On completion of the module, student teachers complete anonymous module-evaluation questionnaires. An interpretive, qualitative approach is used to support discussion of the module’s principles, content and delivery within the context of module development.Results: Data originate from two cohorts of student teachers (2011 and 2014). These data inform lecturers’ decisions on the re-development of the module for the following year. The intervening years (2012–2013) saw the module being firmly anchored on three pillars, namely teacher identity, science teaching self-efficacy and the nature of science.Conclusion: This article outlines the evolution of a pre-service foundation phase science module, from a science-content-only module (2006) through to a module whose underpinning principles and content attempt to address the hopes, fears and challenges faced by prospective foundation phase teachers.

The South African secondary school curriculum emphasises the importance of science process skills in its respective natural sciences curricula. The purpose of this study was to explore the views of student teachers with regard to the importance they attach to these skills. A 14-item questionnaire was administered to 75 third- and fourth-year student teachers registered for a Bachelor of Education degree. A small qualitative component was included with a view to identifying selected skills embedded in practical activities the students found interesting. Statistical analysis of the students’ responses to the questionnaire items revealed that they rated most skills as important for student teachers to acquire in their teacher education programmes. When asked to identify most important and least important skills for them to acquire personally, the findings were slightly different. With regard to analysis of the students’ responses to practical activities, student teachers found interesting, observing and interpreting emerged as key skills. These findings point to indirect influence of their teacher educators’ praxis, hence the recommendation to explicitly state the skills included in practical activities offered along with an explanation of how particular skills may be acquired. Keywords: initial teacher education programmes; practical activities; science process skills; student teachers

There is an interest in having the school history curriculum cover pressing and inter-related social issues: rising inequalities, even where there is a democracy, and the need to reduce poverty and confront climate change. These focus areas align with another interest among many history teachers: using statistics and data better to understand the past. Since around 1980 income inequalities have worsened after a couple of centuries of decline. This is a key reason why the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations prioritise greater equality. While measures of inequality warrant attention, quantitative and qualitative knowledge about the more normative concept of poverty is arguably easier for secondary school history students to grasp. Remarkable declines in poverty since the Industrial Revolution should be understood against the enormous environmental cost of industrialisation. Moreover, in terms of the increasingly used concept of "atmospheric colonisation", colonising countries have been inordinately large contributors to changes in the earth's atmosphere, changes that drive climate change and are likely to worsen poverty. Students need to understand these complexities, in part so they can form opinions around a fair sharing of the burdens of emissions reduction and adaptation to a changing climate. Such matters will become increasingly important when voters must choose between parties in national elections. There are clear implications for history curricula, which are only beginning to receive attention. While the article should be of interest to history teachers anywhere, specific content recommendations are made in terms of the South African secondary school curriculum.

Feasibility of introducing digital music skills into South African primary school curriculum

During the 1930s there was a significant shift in the debate about African colonial education. Above all, somewhat discreetly hidden behind the formal language of the educational documents, is the question of the challenge presented to the traditional literary/religious missionary curriculum, or even to the adaptationist debate about African education, by the emergence of public polemic relating to the relevance of secular science education which explored issues of economic development, social welfare and social hygiene. This took place in the context of new understandings of issues like population growth, human heredity, evolution, health, eugenics and the challenges presented by the race doctrines of the fascist powers in Europe. Such issues were often hidden behind the rhetoric of “relevance” to family and community health and welfare, ecological best practices, and economic prosperity. This paper seeks to explore the first major initiative by the British Colonial Office relating to the reshaping of the African colonial school curriculum between 1929 and 1933. This attempted to extend developments relating to the extension of science education in general, and “a biological approach to education” in particular, to an educational context that had been dominated by Christian missionary education. It examines the processes by which such policy came to be initiated. It also raises obliquely broader questions relating to the linkages between social reform, eugenics, ideology and colonialism and in doing so attempts to add to the existing historiography on colonial education by referring to aspects of educational reform which seem to have been previously neglected.