Low pass rates and lower rates of academic excellence are indicative of a faulty education system, said experts at the Inspired Teachers Conference in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
The US and SA education systems are based on forcing students from a wide variety of different backgrounds, and with different unique abilities, talents and struggles, to conform to a narrow set of standards for success that work to hinder the majority of students' education, said Dr Chris Emdin, associate professor in the department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Hip Hop archive fellow at Harvard University's WEB DuBois Institute.
"The nature of teaching and learning is so deeply personalised that it cannot be [successfully] hyperstandardised," said Emdin. "We rest our comfort on the fact that a minority of the population does well," when in fact this small group of students succeeds in spite of rather than because of the schooling they have received, he said.
"A normal university is what I call 'genius in, genius out.' It's not hard to work with a genius," said Dr Taddy Blecher, CEO at the Maharishi Institute.
The Maharishi Institute is a non-profit organisation which provides free tertiary education and professional training to learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Institute does not focus on the "geniuses," said Blecher, adding its students are mostly those who could not get into other universities, and yet find success at the Maharishi Institute, which boasts a 98% job placement rate in competitive industries such as business and finance.
Reality pedagogy
To address the personal and cultural exclusion a vast number of students find in the classroom, largely because of standardised methods of pedagogy and rules of engagement which are suited to only a minority of students, Emdin has formulated a "reality pedagogy" for making education more relevant and personally engaging. Emdin explains this pedagogy with eight "C's": cogens, coteaching, cosmopolitanism, context, content, competition, curation, and codeswitching.
Cogens, or cogenitive dialogues, replaces the traditional engagement model of the teacher standing at the front of the classroom, writing and verbally delivering the entire lesson, while the students passively sit and listen or copy notes, with a model of active participation in class.
Sitting still and passively absorbing information promotes distraction, boredom and frustration in most students, said Emdin. Inviting students to make their own contributions to the lesson fosters engagement, excitement and focus, he said. One of the ways Emdin invites class participation is through hip hop cyphers, whereby students rap to one another about the lesson content.
Emdin also uses co-teaching to further the cogenitive dialogue by assigning lesson plans and the task of teaching a lesson to students, which he says forces students to engage more fully and foster a more reliable understanding of the work than if they were simply filling out a traditional homework assignment. "There's no more powerful way to learn something than to teach it."
Cosmopolitanism demands that teachers think critically about how the prescribed curriculum and teaching methods could be adapted to better suit their own class, which may be very different from the norm these methods were designed for, Emdin explained.
It is important to know the socio-cultural context from which one's students approach the classroom, says Emdin, who believes it should be a requirement for teachers to live in the same community as their students in order to be able to relate to them, their struggles and concerns.
Teachers should use this knowledge of their students' context to make the classroom feel like a space where they are understood rather than alienated, he explained. "The heart of pedagogy is making the kids emotionally connected to the classroom space," he added, suggesting teachers assign students specific jobs in maintaining the classroom, such as sweeping the floors or handing out equipment, so that each student feels connected to the space by the role they play, however symbolic it may be.
Yet educational content "boils down to one simple thing: understand that you don't know all your content. No one knows all their content," asserted Emdin, citing stories of teachers he had seen make up answers on the spot to complex and brilliant questions. "If you don't know, say you don't know," he said, putting forward that a teacher not knowing an answer to a question could be used to inspire wonder and foster collective curiosity in a subject. Students should be congratulated for "stumping" the teacher, he added.
Competition is another effective way of engaging students, said Emdin. While professionals work for a salary, students work for grades, he noted, and teachers being reluctant to give out good grades when students have worked hard and demonstrated the necessary output is unfair and can serve to discourage them. Emdin also suggested setting up friendly competitions between students, which can foster community and camaraderie as well as fun if they are structured in a way that includes everybody, he said.
To find their flaws and keep track of their progress, it is important for educators to curate their practice, Emdin went on. Just as professional sports players watch videos of themselves to find faults and track improvement, teachers should regularly film their lessons and watch over the footage to be conscious of what their teaching looks like, he explained.
Yet perhaps the most important element of reality pedagogy is codeswitching, said Emdin. Codeswitching is engaging students in a lesson through their own rules, and then using this understanding to expose them to new rules of engagement, he elaborated.
For example, Emdin explained that in his own classroom students learn to clearly distinguish between scientific jargon, normative English and their own vernacular English, which they call "hood". Emdin's students will spend ten minutes speaking in "hood," in "English" and in scientific jargon in turn, thus building understanding of new discourses without being dropped into an alienating deep end. "Over the course of an academic year, you've allowed them to understand academic discourse while still validating who they are," says Emdin, adding this accessible introduction to new discourses can help them prepare mentally for new environments, such as university classrooms.
Better than machines
Traditional and essentially mechanised methods of education are not only ineffective, but do not adequately prepare learners for the increasingly digital economy they are moving into, said Blecher.
Computerised automation systems are rapidly rendering thousands of jobs obsolete, Blecher notes. "We're trying to produce people who are like machines," when machines can do their jobs instead, he said.
The economy now demands students who are more resilient and flexible and who can engage more creatively and critically with their work than before, said Blecher. Education needs to adjust to meet these requirements: to produce professionals who are better than machines, he said.
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