Through the Lens of Teachers: The Use of Geography CAPS Textbooks, Concomitant Challenges and a Reimagining of the Textbook
... They wrote the notes and then questioning the learners on the notes they had written. What was apparent from the teachers where there were no resources at the school, they had no option but to use a textbook they had access to, and the learners had access to and to use a chalk board which is a resource which is available in his class to teach GIS theoretical [3,60,61,62]. This finding confirms that resources were one of the barriers to technology integration [15]. ...
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an exciting development in Geography education locally and internationally. GIS has been part of the senior high school Geography curriculum for over a decade in South Africa. However, matric pass rates in the GIS section of Geography, which is examined in paper 2 of the national examinations, are low. This research was conducted to investigate the teaching methods used by teachers to teach GIS in high schools in the Frances Baard district, Northern Cape Province. The mixed method approach and the multiple-case study design were used for the study. Data from teachers were gathered using a questionnaire, interviews, and lesson observations. The questionnaire was completed by 50 teachers, and 10 teachers were interviewed and observed while teaching GIS topics. Results showed that most teachers used multiple teaching approaches, which were mainly teacher-centred. These included lecturing, explanation, questioning at the expense of learner-centred approaches that were fundamental for GIS instruction. These methods were used due to challenges that teachers faced in GIS teaching including a lack of physical resources to teach GIS, large classes, a lack of proper training, and time constraints. The question of how GIS should be taught in high schools has been a source of consternation among geography educators, more especially in developing countries such as South Africa, where some schools lack resources such as computers, GIS software, internet connectivity, and electricity connection. The utility and value of having GIS in the curriculum, such as promoting e-education generally, cannot be achieved if there is no systemic initiative to create appropriate environments and skills for teachers entrusted with teaching GIS. The current teaching approaches used fail to propel GIS to better learning and understanding by the learners. This is reflected by the ongoing low pass rate in the GIS section nationally. The study proposes a paradigm shift in the way GIS is being taught in high schools. Teachers should use teaching methods that are learner-centred. Students would then actively create knowledge through their own GIS experiences as a result of the learner-centred teaching methods. We argue that GIS topics should be taught in GIS laboratories, where learners are taught both theory and its practical application.
This article is a reflection on the choice to apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in a large scale study in which South African history textbooks were analysed for their construction of African consciousness. The article begins with an evaluation of history textbooks analysis as a field of study. It then explains my rationale for adopting CDA in afield where most studies are qualitative content analyses. This is followed by the explanation of my practical adaptation and application of Norman Fairclough's version of CDA mixed with functional linguistics and visual semiotics. Only a few examples of the findings in the larger scale study are given to elaborate on this application. The article ends with a reflective evaluation of my application of CDA. I conclude that, though fraught with challenges, the application of CDA offers a worthwhile alternative methodology in the analysis of history textbooks.
This article addresses the state of school geography in South Africa as the country celebrates 20 years of democracy. It builds on and expands the narrative contained in two articles (Nel and Binns, 1999; Le Grange and Beets, 2005) published in Geography, which described National Curriculum development at different times during a period of education transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Our main contention is that while there has been an upward trend in enrolment and learner performance in the Grade 12 exit examination, there are pertinent issues in school geography that still need to be resolved, some of which will be recognised and familiar to an international readership. Significantly, this article addresses a perceived shortcoming in the aforementioned articles, namely a lack of empirical evidence of teachers' experiences of school geography in a period of transformation. Drawing on the findings of a qualitative study, we provide evidence of the difficulties teachers are experiencing and conclude by making some propositions for a way forward.
Integration of environmental issues in education is one approach to achieving sustainable development in Malawi and perhaps other countries. This paper analyses the integration initiatives in formal education including primary, secondary and university levels. The analysis is conducted with a view of identifying the successes and challenges. The ‘intended’ and the ‘experienced’ curriculum formed the unit of analysis. While the ‘intended’ curriculum was represented by the written syllabi, the general conditions of the school environment and evidence of teaching approaches used by teachers as found by previous studies, were used as a proxy for the ‘experienced’ curriculum. In general, the analysis has shown that initiatives of integrating environmental issues in the ‘intended’ curriculum have been achieved with considerable success although student drop out and the designation of core and elective subjects pose some challenges in this respect. The ‘experienced’ curriculum tends to face more challenges arising largely from the resource constraints of the schools. It is recommended that resource provision in the schools should be improved significantly if integration of environmental issues is to yield the desired results. In addition, teachers should be trained to use culturally responsive pedagogy in order to tap from the IKS of the learners.
This study investigated the perspectives of seven English authors, on aspects of their geography textbook writing for schools in England, through a questionnaire-based enquiry. This investigation asked about the features that geography textbook authors consider to be the most important when designing student activities, and which criteria they used to select and develop case studies for their textbooks. The authors emphasized the geographical content and key concepts for developing pupils’ knowledge base, rather than the learning processes. The key criteria identified by the majority of the authors were the geographical relevance of the case studies, coverage of the national curriculum requirements, and geographical balance.
There is a distinct atempt on the part of the state to reposition the textbook as a key teaching and learning resource in South African schools. While the textbook industry has responded to the growing demand for beter quality textbooks and attempted to embrace the tenets of the country's Constitution, especially as it relates to the issue of gender discrimination, there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to the extent to which attempts at gender equality have moved beyond technical cleansing in South African school textbooks. This article reports on a qualitative study that engaged the tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis as the key analytical frame. The Huckin's (1997) framework for Critical Discourse Analysis was used to analyse data from the selected textbooks. A purposive sample of two contemporary South African Business Studies textbooks was selected to investigate the phenomenon of gender representation. The findings of this study revealed that stereotypes of women and men are both implicitly and overtly reinforced in the selected textbooks. Women were shown more frequently in home setings than were men. Men were shown in a wider variety of occupational roles than were women. In both texts, more males were represented in leadership positions in government, economic and corporate institutions. Finally, the portrayal of firstness presented the male pronoun first in sentences and conversation as opposed to the female pronoun. The findings have implications for several stakeholders, as it reveals the subtext of Business Studies textbook content that appears normal and natural.
This paper reports the findings of a study that explored the level of knowledge integration in secondary school geography content at the micro-level of classroom practice with a view to identifying any possible change in the subject following an environmental education project-oriented curriculum reform in Lesotho. The study adopted a case study approach involving 11 teachers, teaching geography in five secondary/high schools located in different parts of the country. The analysis focused on integration of environmental issues, interdisciplinary relations and inter-discursive relations as analytical categories derived from Bernstein's theoretical concept of classification. The findings illustrate that while there is a high level of knowledge integration with respect to environmental issues, the power of geography disciplinary knowledge undermined the idea of integrating relevant content from other school subjects and everyday knowledge of the learners. It is argued that unless there is change in structures influencing teachers' work, little will be achieved in school subjects such as geography in terms of making them more contextually relevant.