Lessons: South African Education through Comparative Education Curriculum Design

• In Event: Teaching, teacher training and teachers' as educators

Proposal

In September 2018 a nearly decade-long partnership came to an end when two of my South African colleagues opted to discontinue it. While that rejection was painful and while I continue to work with partners at two other South African universities, the point of this paper is not to defend ‘my side’, but rather to use the breach as an occasion for reflection about what I have learned about South African education.

The 2018 break finished a partnership that began in 2010 with a conference invitation to come to South Africa and that included reciprocal visits by my inviter to my campus (in the US) and mine to hers (in South Africa) in 2011. That was followed by a scouting visit in 2012 that translated, as intended, into a visit with graduate students in 2013. That 2013 visit included the signing of an MOU between our universities that described a plan for an enduring pattern of faculty-led ‘travel study’ visits as well as research collaboration. No visit to my university was forthcoming, however—because of budget limitations, an absence of faculty to lead such a trip, the unorthodoxy of South African faculty doing something like that, and/or some other explanation. So in 2016 I returned to South Africa for another ‘scouting visit’ for a 2017 return again with graduate students. The 2017 trip included a dozen students, all of them at the doctoral level and all of them full-time educators in American K-12 or higher education systems. In 2018, I returned again to plan a 2019 trip. Even as that visit ended with the decision of my original collaborators to drop out of the partnership, it also allowed me to connect with partners at two other universities in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

So, in net, this paper is informed by six visits to South Africa. All but the first visit were informed explicitly by the idea or practice of bringing graduate students to South Africa and thus revolved, in part, around questions about what kind of student learning can and should be realized through travel-study. To answer these questions, I have needed to consider what do I need to know/understand about South African education to create maximum opportunity for my students. This grounds my assertion that curriculum design was my research methodology. For purposes of developing coursework in “Comparative Education,” “Language Planning/Language Policy,” “Mixed Methods Research in Education,” and “Technology Education: Special Topics” that has been tied to these trips, I have had to gather and analyze information about schooling and heritage education in South Africa. In my full paper that learning is summarized as ‘lessons’.

The lens of course design is a little bit different than the calculations one might use for a more traditional research article. For example, I have needed to more overtly anticipate trip participants’ 24/7 experience while in country and their prior knowledge and understandings of Africa than would an author of a regular research chapter. I have had to consider what understandings I need to help them build through advance readings or heritage-related site visits, so that they can understand the debates and routine commentary that they are witness to in South African educational settings. I also have had to ask what are the appropriate learning goals for coursework with the titles named in the previous paragraph. A class about Comparative Education can be about a lot of things, but it cannot be about just anything.

Yet the task of course design is not wholly different from the task of engaging in and writing up more traditional research. A researcher wants to build a reader’s understanding, wants to change, complicate, or enhance a viewpoint, and that task is realized through conveying gathered data and using it to set up certain arguments and questions. So too with the task of course design. A researcher may anticipate that their readers are likely to bring specialized knowledge and previously cultivated analytic capabilities to the task of reading what the researcher generates, but those expectations only hold to a certain level. A reader attracted to an article by its keywords (e.g., South Africa or decolonizing education) or by the moniker of a journal (e.g., Comparative Education Review) may need scaffolding akin to that needed by advanced students to learn from travel study.

Just as research is informed by theory, so too is curriculum design. In this case, Freire’s (1970) notion of adults as concurrently teachers and learners and Dewey’s (1938) notion of the power of direct experience both inform how I have endeavored to design and implement coursework in/about South Africa. Regarding the former, as a relatively new ‘student’ of South Africa, it is hazardous for me to assume that I know enough to be didactic in a ‘here’s what you need to know’ kind of way, because in addition to there being a lot that I don’t know, there is even more I suspect that I don’t even know that I don’t know. My posture to students has had to be ‘I’m a learner too’ and part of my task has been to model on what basis I make the tentative claims that I make based on what I have learned so far.

Yet if I need to be cautious with claims, I don’t need to feign being a beginner forever. By virtue of visiting four universities, ten high schools, and six primary schools in three different provinces in South Africa over seven years, I can describe stark differences in apparent resources, teacher-student ratios, and enrollment demographics. I can describe lecture-style pedagogy from the front of the room and debates ridiculing externally-suggested disciplinary policies like ‘time out’. I can compare the various heritage education messages that are commemorated/ generated by sites as different as the District 6 Museum, Apartheid Museum, Robben Island, the Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park, and even Maropeng and the Pretoria Zoo. And I can say why I think it is worthwhile for American graduate students to note and consider these things.

Author

• Edmund Hamann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln