Teaching and learning high school science in unequal, unstable, and divided communities

• In Event: Thirty years later: Education in a (still) Divided South Africa

Proposal

For 18 months (January 2024-June 2025) I was immersed in leading the turnaround of a struggling school in a working class community that delivered the worst academic results (2023) in the Western Cape province of South Africa. What were the underlying factors that explained these dismal learning outcomes and what could this mean for a theory of teaching in working class schools? One way to find out was to immerse myself in the teaching of science to a teacher-identified sample of highly disruptive classrooms across grades: chemical equations (grade 8), the periodic table (grade 9), microorganisms (grade 11), evolution (grade 12). Working within traditions of ‘ethnographies of science education’ (Brandt and Carlone, 2018), this research links data drawn from participant observation in school and classrooms (teaching, learning, assessing, curriculating) to broader social and political determinants of what is possible inside working class classrooms. Three main findings emerged from this immersion research experience. One, that living (outside the school) and learning (inside the classroom) produced high levels of anxiety and unsettlement that hampered teaching and learning. Two, that it was impossible to teach effectively without recognizing the absence (or very low levels) of prior knowledge in severely disadvantaged communities an assumption that is so critical to the constructivist paradigm that frames teaching in South Africa. And three, that the limited theory and literature---from Willis’ (1977) working class lads to Naicker’s (2024) education and the working classes---have not adequately accounted for teaching in unequal, unstable and divided communities as in post-apartheid South Africa, such as the inseparability of living and learning in the teaching of science [253]

Author

• Jonathan david Jansen, Stellenbosch University