Teaching together

Every morning for the past 27 years, Ms Norman has picked up pupils on a dusty road and then, in the afternoons, dropped them off again near their homes. Here, in Uniondale – a village high up in the mountains in the southern part of the Western Cape, South Africa – there is incredible natural beauty and a tranquil way of life.

Yet few people come to the area – the road is too bad and the distances too great. Loneliness and isolation settle among the inhabitants. There are few opportunities for work and many residents leave to work in towns and cities. Few ever return – it’s only offspring who visit now and again to make a financial contribution. Under such circumstances poverty is rife – so bad that Nelson Mandela once remarked that one can “smell” the poverty.

If you drive into the mountains here you’ll eventually see a sign post – ‘Stop – De Hoop (there is hope)’. This is the road that you must follow to reach Ms Norman’s daily destination. Her little school bears the results of poverty and isolation – it is dilapidated and dirty. There are about 19 pupils in this school. They do not attend every day because they have older people or younger kids who have to be cared for.

Ms Norman obtained a two-year teacher’s diploma after completing her own schooling. She knows nothing about formal multi-grade education and no subject advisers ever visit her school – they just sympathise with her. It is very far to drive to reach her and the roads are not very good and they don’t quite know how to help her with multi-grade classes.

In schools across the world in places as diverse as Finland, Samoa and Guyana, there are schools like this, where children in different year groups are being taught together by teachers like Ms Norman. Sometimes this is by design. In other cases, it happens anyway, out of necessity. This can either be due to a shortage of teachers or where the logistics of schooling can prove a geographical and financial challenge, such as in scattered rural or nomadic communities.

Virgilio Juvane, Education Advisor at the Commonwealth Secretariat who works in multi-grade teaching, believes that if implemented correctly, this method could have huge advantages for a range of education systems – particularly in developing countries.

“With five years to go, we are struggling to meet the Millennium Development Goals in Education. The proportion of children out of school is almost the same as it was in 2000. The policies that are being adopted to reach marginalised groups are proving to be inadequate. Global policies for ‘normal’ schooling are neglecting those children who require special attention,” he says.

Normal or monograde teaching assumes that all children share the same knowledge and abilities. Multi-grade teaching focuses on the diversified needs of the learner. In such an environment, a teacher will be in charge of up to two or three grades or year groups at once in a single classroom. The teacher will prepare different tasks for different grades and within their respective groups, students help each other.

But this only works if multi-grade teaching is integrated as an essential component of teacher training programmes and not marginalised as a teaching method. It requires that teachers are properly trained and well-supported, including with teaching and learning materials says Mr Juvane. “It’s not a new idea and in a sense, the practice came before the ideology.” But he stresses that it should not be a regarded as a low-cost solution. “In fact it can be chaotic if not properly done.”

Teacher shortages are a major concern and in many countries this has been compounded by the tragic impact of HIV/AIDS on the profession. Globally, 1.9 million new teacher posts need to be created if Universal Primary Education is to be achieved by 2015. And 8.4 million teachers will have to be recruited and trained to replace existing teachers who leave their posts or retire by 2015. The total need for 10.3 million teachers is a staggering statistic.

“Multi-grade teaching can be a massive advantage. I see it as a model system that is very much part of the solution to get children into education,” says Mr Juvane.

In Cape Town, South Africa, the Centre for Multi-grade Education (CME) was set up in 2009 to support rural schools and is part of the Cape Peninsular University of Technology. It is estimated that around 50 per cent of primary learners in the developing world are being educated in rural schools.

Dr Jurie Joubert, Director of the Centre says that the biggest challenge to multi-grade teaching is that it is not formally recognised as a proven method: “Developing countries in general do not know how many rural and multi-grade schools they have and prefer to ignore the issue because bigger monograde schools are more ‘visible’ to policy makers in bigger centres. “The developing world has not adapted to the reality that millions of children are hidden in rural schools, compounded by a lack of educators,” he explains.

In South Africa, one quarter of the children attending primary school are taking their lessons in multi-grade classrooms.

The first international conference on multi-grade teaching takes place from 22-24 March 2010 in Wellington, Cape Town. Hosted by CME, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, the meeting will seek to develop an integrated policy strategy on multi-grade education for use in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Rim and South America.

Dr Joubert says the benefit of empowering the rural school teacher with multi-grade learning methods will greatly enhance numeracy and literacy skills. “In addition, it will support the moral fibre of families in towns and villages, preventing the need to send young children away from their families to bigger towns.”

Jolene, who is only four years old attends Ms Norman’s school. In South Africa, she is too young to attend formal schooling but has to go because there is nobody to look after her at home. Chris is already 18 years old – but there is no work for him – all that remains is to go to school. Ms Norman knows each learner’s situation. She has devoted her life to looking after this community. Her complex and challenging job left her feeling unsupported and stressed.

Then the CME stepped in with multi-grade intervention. It was like a gift from heaven to her, she said. Suddenly there were people who listened to her, who shared the same problems. They gave advice about how to organise her class, how to teach learners the basic skills and she was allocated a tutor to help her in her classroom.

Ms Norman also received materials for use in the classroom – including a telephone and a computer with training in how to use it. The gratitude in her heart was so great especially because someone had visited her little school for the first time and had understood her and listened to her.

In Finland, which regularly tops the Pisa table, a measure for educational attainment in developed countries, multi-grade teaching is used in a significant number of schools. It is a sparsely-populated country and one in which multi-grade teaching has been used effectively for a number of years and has allowed small communities to stay together. What hampers progress in other countries, particularly in the developing world is the lack of learning materials and teacher training, says Dr Joubert.

“It is hoped that delegates at the conference will benefit from information sharing from representatives of countries were multi-grade education is successfully practised as well as from accounts of the centre’s successful intervention in local rural schools.”

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