South African – Danish Environmental Co-operation
Learning for life
Teachers from two provinces were trained in environmental science and have been shown that there are other ways of education than learning by heart
A few weeks before Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president in 1994, Cliff Olivier got a visit in his office in the ministry of education in neighbouring Namibia.
The guests were leading politicians from Mandela’s African National Congress who were destined to become provincial ministers of education. They had been brought to Namibia by rumours of a tailor-made environmental subject called "Life Science", developed by Namibia in co-operation with a Danish development organization, Ibis.
In short, "Life Science" is a combination of Biology and Agriculture subjects which teaches the children how to survive in arid Namibia.
The South African politicians were interested in "Life Science" for two reasons. South Africa had had few experiences of environmental teaching which related directly to the reality of the students. And the experimental style of Life Science represented a clear break with the emphasis on learning by heart which was – and still is – widespread in South African schools.
Life Science has many of the values that South Africa planned to include in its new education vision, Curriculum 2005. And the study tour to Namibia resulted in one of Danced’s first projects, carried out by the provinces of Gauteng and Mpumalanga in co-operation with Ibis through Interfund, an umbrella body for a number of foreign NGOs in South Africa. Cliff Olivier was employed as a technical adviser.
Down to realities
The core of the project is environmental education for teachers. But for many of the participants, the course soon developed into a demanding and challenging interrogation of everything they were doing in the classroom.
In the old South Africa, teachers followed a rigid curriculum which was often out of sync with the life of the students. In Biology, children might spend long hours learning about pine trees or seals even when they lived 800 kilometres from the sea and had a blooming sub-tropical environment outside the windows of their classroom. It was all dictated by the curriculum.
The teaching method was more often than not learning by heart. It was more important to know the exact names for all the fins on a fish than understanding how it breathes through gills. Students were regarded as difficult if they asked too many questions or engaged critically with what they were supposed to just sit down and learn.
Post-apartheid South Africa attempted a large scale revision of these attitudes via Curriculum 2005. Where the old educational system had detailed reading plans, Curriculum 2005 would stipulate goals and leave it up to the teacher to decide on how to reach them. Curriculum 2005 also demanded that schools adapted the curriculum to the local context and encouraged debate, creativity and research.
This was often frightening for many teachers, who had themselves been educated under the old system. In many township schools, where there are often 50 students per classroom, Curriculum 2005 was simply too tall an order.
Tackling frustrations
The Danced-funded project, Learning for Sustainability, had two main aims. The teachers needed training to incorporate environmental learning into subjects like Biology and Geography. They were also desperately in need of teaching tools to help them reach the goals of Curriculum 2005.
A small exercise illustrates how the consultants responsible for Learning for Sustainability stimulated teachers with new methods while discussing the challenges of Curriculum 2005.
The teachers were asked to compare Curriculum 2005 to an animal of their choice. One chose the elephant, because it is "very big and feared", but also because "one gets valuable products from the elephant", and these "products" make for "a stronger education system".
Another teacher wrote that Curriculum 2005 makes "me feel like a monkey" because "it drives me crazy" and "makes me feel incompetent". "I have lost faith in myself and end up acting irresponsibly."
These participants in the Learning for Sustainability had an important advantage over thousands of other teachers: they had someone with whom to discuss their frustrations. In many instances, the consultants finally managed to convince the participants of the advantages of the new system.
"Curriculum 2005 stipulates outcomes, but hasn’t got much of a framework. Many people said this was a weakness. We saw it as a strength," says Olivier.
Into the wetland
In the industrial and mining town of Springs, east of Johannesburg, the Danish consultant Kith Bjerg Hansen, herself a teacher, used a local wetland to show teachers and students why environmental cases often develop into clashes between different interest groups.
The pupils were first asked to find out who was using the wetland. Afterwards they were divided into groups, each representing wetland users. The bird watchers demanded that the area be protected. The angler wanted free access with his fishing rod. The farmer wanted to drain the area and grow genetically modified maize. A foreign donor was ready to make a soccer field for children from the nearby township while the parents were more concerned about securing a safe route through the wetland to school.
After having presented their characters to the class, the pupils wrote letters to the "authorities", arguing their various standpoints. They also built models of possible solutions to the dilemma.
"The idea was to use the story and the characters to show the students how to negotiate solutions. Only then would they relate the discussion to their own local environment. The idea was not so much to get the students to make the ‘right’ decisions, but rather discuss possibilities, constraints and consequences," says Hansen.
Pictures of change
As another example of new teaching methods, the teachers were supplied with disposable cameras and asked to photograph their environment. They came back with pictures of waste dumps, open air butcheries, crocodile-infested rivers and people spraying pesticides.
The pictures were displayed on boards, and the teachers had to write a story, draw speech balloons and discuss the reasons for problems and possibilities reflected in the pictures.
These demands for creativity, innovation and reflection from students are far from what really happens in most South African schools. But the project went one step further and got the teachers to reflect on their own teaching as well.
In an evaluation of Learning for Sustainability, the teachers tell how they have become more confident at asking questions and that they, probably most important of all, are no longer scared to risk making mistakes on their route to change.
Towards a larger project
Learning for Sustainability has been carried out in a South African education system that is in deep crisis. The desire to cut down public spending resulted in the government dismissing thousands of teachers after 1994. Every year since the advent of democracy, the number of students leaving school with results qualifying them for university entrance has decreased. Only in 2000 did this trend show signs of improvement.
Learning for Sustainability has had its share of minor and major problems by introducing new programmes in a traditional and often conservative environment:
 | In one area the project was hampered by violence. A student was shot and for months the teachers felt unsafe in the school. |
| Some teachers in the project did what their students would often do if they didn’t understand their homework. They stayed away from the next meeting. |
| Week-end excursions would sometimes be hampered by jealous husbands demanding that the female teachers came home at night. |
The whole context of the project was changed in 2000 when a new minister of education put Curriculum 2005 on hold until the reasons for its many problems had been investigated.
Still, the sum of experiences in Learning for Sustainability have been so positive that in 2001 Danced donated R30 million to a new and much larger programme. It is a three year national project which will operate in all nine provinces, but work will be focussed in three.
The idea of tailor-made educational materials and the training of teachers in environmental science will be valuable no matter on which national education policy the department finally decides.