EDUCBLOG

An interview on LitNet with Tessa Dowling on Professor Jonathan Jansen's plea for multilingualism during his inaugural speech as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State.

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2008 statistics from the Department of Education show that out of the 590 000 pupils writing matric that year, 113 902 wrote Afrikaans as an additional language, compared with only 12 723 who chose one of the nine African languages available in the school curriculum. Why do you think so few English- and Afrikaans-speaking students opt to study an African language up to matric level?

There are a number of reasons.   ....    We have to go back to the foundation phase and see how African languages are taught there - you will find that while Afrikaans teachers use a variety of effective methods, styles and textbooks, African language teachers at primary schools are not as well versed in the methodologies required for teaching additional languages and often struggle with these problems alone, in English- or Afrikaans-medium schools, afraid to ask for help or guidance. So you get the situation where for five years learners learn exactly the same thing - there seems to be no logical progression from one grade to the next and teachers are often unaware of the materials that are out there that could help them. This means that when students get to high school they are sorely lacking in the skills needed to cope with a rigorous First Additional syllabus. So in a nutshell, I would put it down to the fact that (a) African languages are not considered prestige languages, (b) teachers of African languages are not sufficiently trained in teaching their languages as additional languages, and (c) students subsequently fear "doing badly" and therefore opt for Afrikaans.

 

OnlineCollege has just published a list of 100 Open Access Journals for Educators.   Categories include Education Research, Practices and Approaches;  Education Policy and Issues;  Leadership ; Science and Maths;  Language Arts;  Technology;  Higher Education and Online Education and  Special Education, Early Education and Child Development.           

 

The Academy of Science of South Africa report, "Scholarly Books: their production, use and evaluation in South Africa today"  (released this month), argues that the Department of Higher Education and Training needs more urgently to encourage and support the writing and publishing of scholarly books, including how they are ‘weighted’ when the department calculates higher education institutions’ research output subsidies.

 

 (Thanks to Education Blog @ University of Pretoria)

 

 

Journal of Student Wellbeing is a peer reviewed e-journal which publishes applied and theoretical papers on students' social, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. It focuses on the promotion of child and adolescent wellbeing in educational settings.

The journal aims to cater for a wide audience with an interest in:

• child and adolescent resilience
• psycho-social development
• bullying
• child protection
• child and adolescent mental health
• peer relationships
• conflict resolution
• spirituality
• equity and social justice
• drug education strategies
• pre-service and in-service professional education

A list of Facebook Apps suitable for Education.   

The Parliamentary Monitoring Group reports on the briefing given by South African Council of Educators to the Committee for Basic Education.

The South African Council of Educators provided the Committee with an account of the activities that the Council undertook during the 2008/09 financial year. The Council had aimed to achieve two targets during this period, namely to register all qualifying teachers and to maintain a credible database of all registered teachers. The Council had exceeded these expectations and currently maintained a database with more than 500 000 teachers registered. A serious lack of accommodation continued to hamper the work of the Council. It was further impeded by the lack of sufficient funding for the Professional Teacher Development Programme. The Council could not reach out to all corners of the country due to lack human and capital resources.

Presentation to the Committee

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT

The Acting Warden of All Africa House, Mr. Patrick Rezandt, in collaboration with the Awake the African Spirit Society at UCT and Equal Education, cordially invites you  to a seminar and presentation of a paper by  Ahmed Mohamed (Researcher and Parliamentary Monitoring Officer, Equal Education)

“The Cost of School Libraries in South Africa”  

Date: Friday, 6th November 2009
Time: 17:30

Venue: All Africa House, Common Room, Middle Campus, next to Kramer Building, UCT

RSVP by 30th October. Please contact Cally De Waal on Tel (021) 650 4152 or e-mail:cally.dewaal at uct.ac.za
                           
 Refreshments will be served after the seminar.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (USA) has set up a webpage to encourage reading with the slogan "Explore New Worlds.  Read".     The site contains book-related info, interviews with authors, suggested reading lists and more.   Teaching resources can be found on the Educators and Parents link. 

 

From UNESCO

World Teachers’ Day 2009 puts the spotlight on the global teacher shortage and the challenges of being a teacher today. 

In our rapidly changing and interdependent world, teachers not only have to ensure that students acquire solid skills in basic subjects, but also that they become responsible local and global citizens, at ease with new technologies and able to make informed decisions about health, the environment and other challenges.

Sustained investment is required to develop a well-trained and motivated teaching force. A global total of 10.3 million teachers should be recruited between 2007 and 2015 just to meet the goal of universal primary education. At a time when the global economic slowdown risks putting tight constraints on education budgets, it is critical that governments support the recruitment, training and professional development of teachers.

 

 

see more Fail Blog

Here's a link to the fulltext of President Obama's speech given at the Back to School Event (8 September 2009).   The speech has attracted much attention both within the States and further afield.  

Spotted in the New York Times Book Supplement.

Instead of assigning a novel to her 7th and 8th graders,  this teacher allowed her class to choose their own books, discuss them individually with the teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading.

According to the story, this is "part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on."

 (This article is the 4th in a series called Future of Reading.  The links to the other three articles is found under the heading "Related" in the story) 

Spotted on UN Pulse 

All Children, Everywhere   (pdf, 4.31MB)  is the advocacy version of the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) education strategy through 2015. It provides an overview of UNICEF's work in basic education and gender equality outlines the organization's goals, guiding principles, main partners and key actions to deliver a quality education for all children.

As part of the public programme of events at the Cape Town Book Fair earlier this year,  teachers and teacher education was discussed by a panel of HSRC researchers.  The discussion was chaired by Prof Peter Kallaway. 

HSRC has now made a package of the podcasts available.    

*  Michael Cosser examining Grade 12 student attitudes towards teaching as viable career and then student plans for entering the teaching profession after graduation.   He is the author of  Studying Ambitions : Pathways from Grade 12  and  Ambitions revised: Grade 12 learner destinations one year on .

*  Fabian Arends, co -author of Teacher Graduate Production in South Africa and Beginner Teachers in South Africa: School Readiness, Knowledge and Skills, looks at the limatations in the planning of continuing professional development and the challenges of identifiying the shortages of subject teachers accurately.

*  Linda Chisholm looks at reopening teacher training colleges as an option of addressing the teacher shortage.   She is the author of An Overview of Research, Policy and Practice in Teacher Supply and Demand, 1994 - 2008. 

*  Glenda Kruss discusses the restructuring processes that have taken place in a diverse range of teacher education providers and the ways these can and are shaping future conditions.   She is the author of Teacher Education and Institutional Change in South Africa and Opportunities and Challenges for Teacher Education Curriculum in South Africa.

 

Who uses textbooks? Do students actually read the text? A study in Teaching Educational Psychology by Derryberry & Wininger looked at the relationship between student motivation and textbook selection and use.

The authors combine a group of measures to create a group of “internal motivation” measures, including need for cognition (enjoying effortful thinking), mastery goal orientation (focus on increasing competence), and intrinsic motivation. Similarly, a separate group of measures was combined to create a measure of “external motivation”: performance goal orientation (focus on judgments of others) and external regulation. Finally, they also had an “amotivation” scale measured level of motivation. Most previous research on motivation suggests that those with internal motivation are more likely to engage in deeper processing of materal and have higher degrees of self-regulation.

Derryberry, W. P., & Wininger, S. R. (2008). Relationships among textbook usage and cognitive-motivational constructs Teaching Educational Psychology, 3 (2), 1-11

(spotted on Researchblogging with links to the Connections Research Blog)