Bev Kutsunai – Teachers Across Borders Southern Africa

Beverly Kutsunai – August, 2010

Kamehameha School – Parrent Fund – Follow-Up and Evaluation Report

Science Team Member on Teachers Without Borders in South Africa

From: June 15 To: July 15

Byparticipating in this activity, you expected to acquire certain knowledge, skills, and experiences that would benefit you, your students and Kamehameha. Please describe how your expectations were or were not met by this activity. Add attached statement as needed.

Please describe how well your expectations to benefit yourself were met.

By joining this team, I was challenged to translate key elements of my perspectives in Science education to Middle school teachers in South Africa. I highlighted developmental learning strategies and science notebooks as well as the content areas of Biology, Ecology and Earth Sciences. I was able to share work we completed in Science Kumu to Kumu activities for critical thinking skills K-12 at Kapalama. I was also able to share how I integrate Hawaiian culture with science activities. Participants were intrigued as to how they could integrate their own cultural elements in ways they hadn’t considered. There were some great conversations about undiscovered options. We helped each other see new ways and new ideas. It was very successful for both of us.

Please describe how well your expectations to benefit your students were met.

Exploring key elements with the teachers helped me to re-define what elements are the most important for my students in my own teaching. Working with basic materials and maximizing opportunities for learning science by making it visible and documenting learning was a valuable process to revisit. It has helped me to develop a new organizational strategy for my own science program in K-3 that realistically reflects the current resources available to me. The great resiliency of the teachers in South Africa helped me to focus my priorities on my students and their learning.

Please describe how you plan to use the knowledge, skills, and experiences acquired through this staff development activity to further the accomplishments of Kamehameha’s mission.

I had never heard of Xhosa people of the Western Cape. Theses were the teachers our program focused upon to help them and their students. A good number of them had never heard of Hawaii! But we both had meeting our students’ needs in common. They were very enthused about integrating cultural practices, wise sayings and including observation of nature and the world around their students as a credible means for demonstrating science beyond what the text books describe. They saw how this process approach could help every student succeed, as they level their own work and help each other collaboratively. Students create their own documentation and use their work in Language Arts to help them share their ideas in purposeful learning. They saw how important direct experience is to building concepts. I plan to re-focus my efforts in this area and collaborate more with others to plan activities that link student learning across our disciplines.

Local Teacher Feedback from Workshops:

Cooperative group work in collaboration with the use of process skills used in science
Research based learning
Active and well prepared
Great skills, presentations approaches, handling resources and
knowledge of science themes
Attitudes and values respect and acknowledge ideas and nature
Time managed effectively
Questioning discovery investigation and practical
Using available resources
Eye opening experience, participation, sharing all learning in fun
Methodology
Use of readily available material
Facilitation skills
Content knowledge
Improvising resources
Cooperative learning and teaching
Practical work
Empowered me in a lot of ways—content wise as well as pedagogically
Learned how to organize an effective workshop
Relevant to my needs
Powerful workshop