TABSA 2016 – Reflection
This, my third summer of working with the TABSA team, was another rewarding, meaningful experience that has enriched me both emotionally and professionally. Yunus Peer again worked his magic: doing the prep work with administrators in South Africa and Swaziland to plan and schedule the workshops, collecting a truly outstanding team of volunteers, and taking care of the innumerable administrative details that came his way daily while we were on the ground.
The team this year was especially dedicated and energetic. New, young faces added spark, creativity, and refreshing perspectives to our group: Katie Jackson, Krystle Richman, Grant Sugimura and Yaseen Bhaijee. New but more experienced members offered depth and intuition to the mix: Natasha Crawford, and Melissa Goo. Those of us returning to this work were energized and engaged by the innovative ideas and refreshing outlooks of these colleagues: Veronica Ledoux, Laurie Lee, Brad Uy, and Aviva Halani joining me in that group. And the “true” veterans provided grounding stability and institutional memory to keep us focused on priorities and to remind us to be flexible in the face of unexpected change: Jim Metz and Carl Wheeler. And of course, Yunus’s right-hand man and the one to whom we all were indebted, Thokozani Mteshane, completed the team.
Looking back, it is amazing what we accomplished in four weeks of workshops. Our first week was spent in the southern city of Port Elizabeth. As most workshops in the past have been held for teachers of middle-school-aged students, these workshops offered my first opportunity of working with teachers of high-school-aged students. This truly challenged my creativity in wonderful ways, as I worked with these South African colleagues to discover ways to engage students in highly quantitative topics using the simplest of materials. Being a high-school teacher myself, I felt an even deeper connection to these SA colleagues than I had in the past.
Our second week of workshops was spent in Nelspruit, a city in Mpumalanga province. TABSA has provided a number of workshops in this province over the years and thus has created a fantastic reputation. In an effort to provide these workshops to as many teachers as possible, the week was split in two, with workshops from M-W and then from W-F. The venue was not ideal, the workshop rooms filled to capacity – yet the energy and excitement felt by the teachers attending was substantial. Exhausting but exhilarating, it was truly amazing to receive enthusiastically positive feedback from the teachers who attended.
The final two weeks of workshops were held in Swaziland. With a more comfortable venue in a classroom setting and numbers of attendees that allowed for more one-on-one interactions, I was again excited not only to work with teachers of both middle- and high-school students, but to interact in a way that allowed for more collaboration and resulted in a greater degree of connection for the teachers both with me and with each other.
The highlight of our work this year occurred during the third week of workshops. Again the attending teachers were in high-school settings, teaching two of four disciplines: mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology. These teachers were commonly more confident with their knowledge of science than those teaching younger students, but struggled tremendously with engaging their students in the classroom. Thus they were especially eager to be introduced to innovative ways of using everyday materials to add energy and connection to their presentation of content to their students.
What set this week apart from the other weeks was its explicit intent as a training workshop for these teachers, who were expected to subsequently go out and train other science teachers in their surrounding schools. Thus the week was split into two parts. The first two days were spent with our traditional workshop format, providing and sharing ideas for creating more interactive activities to support the standard content of the curriculum. But in the second half of the week, the attendees worked in pairs to present workshops to their colleagues from other disciplines. They thus had the opportunity to practice running a complete workshop, both the preparation required and the presentation of the ideas and activities. It was rewarding to see how empowered these teachers were, how they took on the mantle of leadership with confidence, and how they supported and provided constructive feedback to each other. I finished the week knowing that these leaders would go on to not only present workshops similar to the ones we had provided them early in the week, but knowing also that the confidence gained would allow them to develop workshops in content areas that we did not have time to cover in our short time together. The impact these teachers are now having on their school communities is exponentially greater than the work we could provide in our limited week-long workshops.
As has been true every year, what I value most from my time working with TABSA is the relationships I made with my South African and Swazi colleagues. These are the true heroes of their countries. They work in classrooms with as many as 75 students without a single piece of laboratory equipment, no running water, and sometimes not even electricity. Yet they are changing their countries for the better, working tirelessly to offer opportunities to the students they teach. I feel honored to have been able to make their challenging journey just a little bit easier. And knowing that I have colleagues whom I now consider as friends in that corner of the world, whose professional lives are both so very similar to and very different from my own, gives me strength, new conviction, and inspiration to be the best I can be in my own classroom every day.
Alison Hobbie