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An all-round approach to achieve real education
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An all-round approach to achieve real education
<B>How did you start working with the Bureau of Catholic Education (BCE)?</B>
I was working at the national level in Australia as a coordinator in child literacy. I also did some research with universities and schools in that perspective. When I retired in 1996, I met someone involved in education in Mauritius who asked me to join the BCE. This is how I became a literacy consultant there. When I first came, I was asked to find out why children failed their exams. After a one-year study, we implemented a pilot-project in ten schools to see how we could help children. As the programme was successful, we realised that “inclusive pedagogy” could be the solution for these children…
What is “inclusive pedagogy”?</B>
It is looking at the child in his/her environment, his/her learning style and intelligences to be able to match the child with the teacher. To understand the child fully, we believe there are four pillars, the “4 Cs”. Culture, taking into account the child’s identity and ways of doing things; collaboration between family, community and school; creativity – the programme should match the child’s talents and skills; and celebration - teachers should celebrate every sign of progress, every step of the child instead of waiting for the end of the term or year to give him/her the desire to keep going.
<B>How could these 4Cs help the children succeed at school? </B>
Thanks to these pillars, educators make sure they are teaching things that are relevant to the child, his/her environment and experiences. If a teacher doesn’t know a child, how can he/she make sure knowledge is being passed on to the child? A very good piece of research by Pogro says that, when children fail, it is not because they do not know; it is because they can’t link with what there is in the teacher’s head.
So shouldn’t teachers be given special training to ensure they help students in the best possible way?</B>
The “inclusive pedagogy” includes professional development and in-service training for teachers. Of course, teachers need to be trained accordingly. Once teachers come from training college, they meet children they have never seen before. What they see is far different from their own experience and reality is far different from what they have learned at college. Teachers have to adapt what they know to be able to make the curriculum accessible to the child.
<B>What is the main problem in the education sector, according to you?</B>
National exams start as from Standard IV in Mauritius. All research shows that, when you have exams, teachers teach with the exam in mind and that is normal. They are worried about how the children will perform if they are taught all the lessons in the book. This is the stumbling block in education. In fact, there seems to be a complete misunderstanding of what learning is all about.
What is learning all about, then?</B>
It is about applying what I have learned in everyday life and not about regurgitating what there is in books. It seems we have missed that line in Mauritius. Education is to be able to become an autonomous person who can live in a family, in a community while going to school and accessing the curriculum. Of course, students should study academic subjects but they first need to feel comfortable. School must prepare the child to live in the real world. Schooling is different from education. And we must achieve high-level education.
How do you think Mauritius could achieve this?</B>
A lot of groups and non-governmental organisations have been working on improving education. There have been commissions and studies since the sixties and there is still a problem. I believe the time has come for all stakeholders (schools, government, parents) to work together to achieve good results. The ministry of Education is talking about curriculum renewal; that’s fine as renewal is necessary but only after making sure it is linked with the child’s experiences. Before knowing what children should learn, the ministry should give teachers the tools to understand the child, his/her environment and experiences fully; teaching methods should be reviewed; we have to be creative. A couple of schools have started to apply the method and it is successful but everyone should reflect on a new education system and the results should be implemented quickly.
What would you advocate as a teaching method?</B>
The first important thing to remember is that no one can operate from a ‘deficit model’. Professor Levine says that “we, educators, have to meet the child where he/she is and then walk the path with him.” The child should not be the one to jump to where educators are. On the contrary, we should look at children and build on their strengths; I mean every child has got something and we need to look at this little something. Positive attitude is the secret of success. Then, all subjects have to be linked with real life; school has to prepare students to become adults. The approach should be like the enquiry model; they should see how to relate with other people, find out things for themselves and develop their critical minds. The integrated curriculum can also help students; when a student is supposed to be learning geography, the teacher can add some notion of mathematics. When subjects are inter-related for children to learn, then they can make an association of ideas; that’s the easiest way of learning actually. The world is changing everyday and children have to be taught how to learn quickly and look for information by themselves to prepare their minds for the world of work. We have to develop flexibility in the individual. We can’t wait for the person to start working to start learning such things.
<B>Some people believe that the infrastructure is not conducive to good education… Overcrowded classrooms are only one example of this…</B>
Of course, there are such problems but this is where creativity, which I mentioned earlier, can be important. Let’s take your example of overcrowded classrooms. School staff would only need to be a bit more creative to partly solve the problem. We could for instance be creative about timetabling to reduce the number of students in class. Half the class would go to the computer room or library doing research or preparing an oral presentation while the other half would remain in class with the teacher and then swap. The children would then be forced to do some personal work in the library and the teacher would have more time for each of them when they are in class. This is not difficult to implement as we are already doing this in Grand-Gaube and it is a success! We have organised different “clubs” (in hotels, a tree nursery, a library, with the community etc…) in which children participate. Children show a lot of interest and it really works!
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