The Challenge

It’s always a big transition to leave home and arrive in Southern Africa. The Catlin Gabel school year wrapped up in a hectic flurry, I left Portland way before I felt prepared to start this work, sat on a few planes for a few hours, and before I knew it, I had met the rest of the TABSA team in Joburg and we’d traveled to Mpumalanga. I walked into this plain room with my modest box of supplies, assessed the number of window panes and tables that were broken, and imagined the person who usually taught in this space. I wondered how he or she might go about teaching science. I wondered whether I could positively impact education in this community. This is Kamhlushwa Primary School, where we spent a week working with 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grade science teachers.

The Participants

The degree to which these teachers trust us is enormous. They arrive at our workshops on their winter holiday, willing to work with us during their vacation time because of their dedication to their job, to their students, to improving their own education. They let themselves be vulnerable with us. They laugh and ask questions and work hard and laugh some more. They don’t know each other, but are willing to collaborate. Fifteen minutes after everyone met at Kamhlushwa Primary School, these gentlemen are indulging me in an icebreaker. The card on the left says Beyonce and the one on the right says Thabo Mbeke, an interesting cultural snapshot of who’s considered a notable person around here. 

Dedication

This middle school science teacher, standing outside Kamhlushwa Primary School, is so dedicated to her job that she not only wears a labcoat to school every day, she also proudly donned it to attend our workshops. Never mind that she doesn’t have a lab at her school, she feels it’s important to dress the part in order to inspire her pupils. She became the de facto leader among her science teacher cohort, modeling confidence, curiosity, and risk taking in equal parts. It was great to have a strong female voice in group discussions. Her positive spirit was an inspiration to our other attendees and to myself.

Flexibility

Carl and Paul were with me when TABSA first visited Lobombo National High School during the 2012 teacher strike. Some of the teachers and students were at the school, but things were definitely out of sorts and not running as usual. Then, I was impressed with how well Carl and Paul rolled with the umpteen changes to our plans and made the best of whatever ended up happening. They fully expected the unexpected. Despite the disruptions in 2012, we ended up having a great visit, marveling at the school’s huge garden and successful agricultural curriculum. This year, the start of our workshops in Swaziland got delayed, and these unexpected changes in our plans brought us back to Lobombo for another visit. Despite not knowing what to do or what to expect when we arrived, we ended up having a busy and worthwhile day working with science and math teachers and students, who were marvelously attentive and fascinated by us. The Form 5 Biology teacher dropped me in a crowded classroom, told me to talk about science to the kids for 10 minutes, and came back a little over an hour later. I was impressed by how well the pupils had learned their lessons, and at their willingness to embrace my leadership of their class for a while. We managed to do a lot of learning and playing in that time, and I learned a lot about being flexible. 

Improvisation

At Uniswa, the high school teachers in charge of facilitating the photosynthesis experiment came to me, concerned, the day before their lesson was scheduled. We’d planned for them to use sunlight in their experiment, but they saw that the next day would likely be cloudy and wanted to know how we could still proceed with the lesson. We were fortunate to have electricity – which wasn’t the case at Kamhlushwa Primary – and a bulb, so the lesson proceeded. I was impressed that the teacher leaders were planning ahead and considering the forecast, and this improvisation turned into a worthwhile discussion about the similarities and differences between the sun and indoor electric light. Since these teachers were trained as biologists, they had lots of basic questions about the electromagnetic spectrum. Getting to see science happening right in front of their eyes was a revelation for this group. They’d studied the concept of photosynthesis and memorized the reaction (which is written incorrectly, missing water as a reactant, in the national Swazi curriculum document), but never had quantifiable evidence for the reaction. A lively discussion sprung up and no one wanted to go to lunch when our session was over.

The People

Maria’s a primary school teacher. Her grandfather, who was active in the ANC, had four wives. Her grandmother was the youngest wife, and the only one who left Kwazulu Natal with her grandfather during apartheid. She explained how they had to go into hiding and eventually resettled in Swaziland, where Maria was born and still lives. She still identifies not as South African or Swazi, but as Zulu. Identified by the Ministry of Education as a “trainer of teachers,” she led the human body systems lesson for her fellow workshop participants on our last day at Uniswa. The amount of preparation she put in before the lesson, her careful collaboration with her fellow presenters, and her instant requests for constructive feedback afterward served as examples to me and all the other workshop attendees of how to approach our craft.   She had a fierce belief in the importance of believing in her children and using positive encouragement to motivate them.

Resourcefulness

This primary school teacher has figured out how to make two lungs in his respiratory system mode, improving on my design, which only had one lung. He’s using simple materials, but has seen possibility in how to implement his idea. When we were working at Uniswa, the science rooms had glass beakers and other science equipment, but we left it on the shelf and still used our plastic cut off water bottle “beakers” for our activities, wanting to demonstrate to the teachers that one could do science without fancy materials. As we traveled around South Africa and Swaziland, we were constantly saving bottles, plastic bags, cans, and other seemingly worthless odds and ends for our workshops. Being able to use these things in our workshops was a nice antidote to the alternative of throwing recyclable materials in the trash, eventually to be burned with the rest of the garbage. Looking around at the lack of basic infrastructure, it’s difficult to imagine what would be necessary in order to implement a recycling system here. Traveling around the countryside, we see so many examples of ingenuity with simple materials. When people don’t have a lot, they figure out how to make do in all sorts of creative ways. We hope to encourage that resourcefulness in the classroom, too.   

The Colleagues

We refer to the workshop participants as colleagues, and they refer to their pupils as learners. Participating in TABSA, I am very much a learner myself. My Hawaiian science teacher colleagues, Paul and Andy, are trying to warm up in the morning sun after being in the chilly classrooms at Uniswa. Between the two of them, they easily have more teaching experience than I have years on this planet. Around them, I am a learner. I get ideas for how to creatively do science with the most modest of equipment and I pick up tricks that are useful in my classroom back in Portland. They are wise and kindhearted mentors to me. From them and the whole TABSA team, I gain an appreciation for the resilience and patience that any teaching endeavor requires.

The Joy of Discovery

Fifteen minutes after the last workshop session at Uniswa on the last day in Swaziland was supposed to have ended, these participants are still working, and have just gotten their bulb to light. Watching them discover science in a hands-on fashion is an incredible reward for all we’ve invested in this endeavor. The sense of possibility at the end of each week is palpable. As hard as it is to say goodbye to everyone, the prevailing mood is extremely positive, and there is great potential for what these enthusiastic, confident teachers might accomplish with their learners when they return to their schools.