WENDY MOTHATA

THE Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training, Umalusi, has given the green light for the writing of the end-of-year exams for 2022.

Currently, 923 460 students have registered with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) to take the National Senior Certificate exams.

This figure includes both full-time and part-time students.

Umalusi announced at a press conference on Friday that it had finished its task of observing and confirming that the public and commercial assessment organizations were prepared to oversee and run the 2022 end-of-year national exams.

The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the Independent Examinations Board (IEB), the South African Comprehensive Assessment Institute, and the DBE are the assessment bodies (SACAI).

As part of its quality assurance mandate, Umalusi is required to assess the levels of readiness of the public and private assessment bodies to conduct, administer and manage the examinations prior to their commencement.

Umalusi CEO, Dr Mafu Rakometsi, said that the identified shortcomings are not of such a magnitude that they have the potential to put the credibility of the examinations at risk.

Rakometsi said that Umalusi appreciates the effort made by all assessment bodies in putting systems in place to ensure that the integrity of the 2022 national examinations is not compromised.

“Similar to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic in the past, the education sector, like other sectors, continues to experience challenges related to load shedding.”

“Umalusi calls upon the assessment bodies to make alternative arrangements for the supply of power during the writing of the examinations to mitigate the risk of load-shedding.”

Rakometsi issued a stern warning to all stakeholders regarding incidents of cheating.

“Once again, as we have done in the past, we would like to issue a stern warning to all learners and teachers to refrain from all forms of cheating, including group copying, where teachers are sometimes implicated.”

“We berate and condemn this criminal practice with the contempt it deserves. Cheating compromises the integrity of our national examination system, which we are mandated to jealously protect as a quality council,” Rakometsi said.

He said Umalusi discourages communities from using national examinations as leverage for their protest actions.

“This is unacceptable, as it jeopardises the future of our children. The education of our children is something that each South African should protect jealously,” he said.

The DBE’s candidature has increased to 923 460 in 2022 from 897 786 in 2021.

The candidates will sit for the examinations at 6 885 exam centres across the country.
Umalusi said that marking will be conducted at 186 marking centres by 53 926 markers.

The IEB has 13 875 (12 857 in 2021) candidates will write the examinations at 232 examination centres for full-time candidates and six centres for part-time candidates.

These numbers include 15 new IEB schools.

Overall, approximately 942 000 candidates distributed across the three assessment bodies are registered to write the NSC in 2022.

INSIDE EDUCATION

IT has been seven years since students in South Africa began protesting in a bid to “Africanise” the country’s university curricula. They viewed what they were learning as too neoliberal – characterised by Western values pushing the marketisation of education. They wanted universities to become more relevant to students in an African country and more connected to their own lives.

The students’ calls propelled “decolonisation” to the forefront of national (and even international) debate. Decolonisation in the university context involves dismantling the institutional practices and policies that uphold white supremacist, Western values. Since then there have been various initiatives at most of the country’s 26 public universities designed to change what students learn and how.

Every academic has their own opinion and their own approach. Mine, as a university educator who lectures future teachers, has been to adopt a teaching-learning approach called defamiliarisation.

The idea of defamiliarisation was coined by Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky. It is a process of looking at things differently through art, poetry, or film so that you don’t see them automatically; Shklovsky said that you could look at something you know several times without really analysing it.

I have researched and used defamiliarisation in my teaching since 2015, finding it a good place to contribute towards disrupting the sort of neoliberal curriculum student protesters opposed. If a curriculum doesn’t consider the humanistic side of learning, the system and institution can treat students as a form of human capital. That ultimately changes education from a public good to a commodity.

By approaching my classes using defamiliarisation, I have been able to help students think beyond the usual stories about history. Crucially, they have been put in charge of their learning. In this way, education is shored up as a public good.

A space to speak openly

So, what does defamiliarisation look like in practise? One example is an activity a colleague and I designed: we asked a group of students, as part of a lesson, to draw how they saw themselves and how they felt about being taught in English at the university. While English is widely spoken in South Africa, most of our students speak isiXhosa as their first language.

Even though the question was about the university, many of the students’ drawn answers were about society and their communities in reference to the university. These examples showed that, for these students, the community and the university are not separate. The question seemed to bring up deeper issues that neither the students nor I were aware of at the time.

For example, one of the students I talked to about her drawing creatively explained how her feelings were connected to her beliefs, culture, and context pertaining to the dominant and gendered power relations in her community, and at the school she had attended.

She drew two portraits of herself: on the left, a false representation at the school she attended, depicting the aesthetic beauty and success that came with being able to speak English fluently and with excellent grades; on the right, a portrait of her dormant natural beauty that held on to her culture and true identity.

Her drawing showed how she saw herself and how she thought the rest of society saw her. Her drawing showed her race, language, culture, gender, and a false representation of who she was in her school environment.

The student said that in her community, people often asked her about her race because she spoke in a dialect that she may have picked up at a former Model C (whites only during apartheid) school, and that was often associated with “white culture” in her community.

The defamiliarisation approach allowed this student to make her peers and me aware of her socio-cultural context and, more importantly, the challenges and subtleties of her identity and how she felt about them. By doing this activity, she, like many of her peers, could talk about herself creatively and effectively.

This approach developed students’ openness, compassion, sympathy and responsibility.

You could say that defamiliarisation gave the students the freedom to become their own narrators. It also allowed them to understand what their peers were going through and show compassion for them around instances of marginalisation in society. This, in my opinion, is crucial for aspiring educators to fully comprehend the range of experiences and viewpoints held by learners from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Educators benefit, too

I believe this kind of teaching was valuable and essential to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours needed for critical global citizenship. It allowed them to communicate openly about victimisation and unjust treatment in South Africa.

Even though in some instances it made them feel uncomfortable, defamiliarisation was met with mostly favourable reactions from students. It helped them to open up about the challenges in their own lives. And I still use the approach today, mostly through the medium of film. For instance, I showed the movie Krotoa to a different class. It examines the impact of Dutch colonisation on the culture and identity of the indigenous Khoi people of the Cape in the 17th century.

Defamiliarisation helps educators, too. I have reflected on my role as a university lecturer and, frankly, to question aspects of my teaching that seem dominant and obvious to my students but are just habitual to me. Learning about my students’ real-life experiences and sentiments helped me empathise with them and value their individuality. It helped us to connect in a meaningful way as equals.

Using this approach is a way for academics to return to the basics. That’s crucial if universities are to offer a curriculum that centres students’ needs as the primary focus of learning.

THE CONVERSATION

HIGHER Education, Science and Innovation Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande, has disputed a Sunday newspaper report claiming he requested Parliament keep a Forensic Investigation Report on the National Skills Fund’s (NSF) under wraps.

“I never wanted to keep this report under wraps, but all that I requested was for the Standing Committee on Public Account (SCOPA) to treat this report in terms of rule 189 of the National Assembly, especially sub-rule (1) (c) read with sub rule (4) (a) until all processes before the law enforcement agencies and internal departmental disciplinary processes are concluded,” Nzimande said.

He had appointed a forensic investigation company to conduct a full-scale forensic investigation into the financial affairs of the NSF after amounts of just under R5 billion could not be properly accounted for over two financial years.

The Minister also appointed a Ministerial Task Team (MTT) to conduct a strategic review of the NSF, its general operations and its efficiency and relevance with regards to the national skills priorities of the country.

Nzimande said both these appointments were meant to ensure the NSF accounts for the resources allocated to it and deal with instances of maladministration and corruption at the NSF.

“Both the reports were submitted to me, and we have begun in earnest the process of implementing the recommendations of both these reports,” the Minister said.

The Department of Higher Education and Training also opened a case at the Pretoria Central Police Station on 3 October 2022.

“Now that a police case has been opened and legal processes are underway, all the implicated individuals inside and outside the department, including companies who might have benefited irregularly on the resources of the National Skills Funding, will face the full might of the law,” Nzimande said.

He added that the department has already commenced engaging the Hawks and other law enforcement agencies, including initiating internal departmental disciplinary processes to ensure that this process in concluded speedily.

“This is the reason we requested SCOPA to treat this report as confidential until these processes are finalised and the relevant people informed, in terms of due process. I however must indicate that as a department we respect the SCOPA decision not to accede to our request.

“I have nothing to hide, but I have a duty, on my part, to follow due process in implementing the recommendations of the forensic investigation. We will implement these recommendations to the letter,” Nzimande said.
SA NEWS

HIGHER Education, Science and Innovation Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande, has disputed a Sunday newspaper report claiming he requested Parliament keep a Forensic Investigation Report on the National Skills Fund’s (NSF) under wraps.

“I never wanted to keep this report under wraps, but all that I requested was for the Standing Committee on Public Account (SCOPA) to treat this report in terms of rule 189 of the National Assembly, especially sub-rule (1) (c) read with sub rule (4) (a) until all processes before the law enforcement agencies and internal departmental disciplinary processes are concluded,” Nzimande said.

He had appointed a forensic investigation company to conduct a full-scale forensic investigation into the financial affairs of the NSF after amounts of just under R5 billion could not be properly accounted for over two financial years.

The Minister also appointed a Ministerial Task Team (MTT) to conduct a strategic review of the NSF, its general operations and its efficiency and relevance with regards to the national skills priorities of the country.

Nzimande said both these appointments were meant to ensure the NSF accounts for the resources allocated to it and deal with instances of maladministration and corruption at the NSF.

“Both the reports were submitted to me, and we have begun in earnest the process of implementing the recommendations of both these reports,” the Minister said.

The Department of Higher Education and Training also opened a case at the Pretoria Central Police Station on 3 October 2022.

“Now that a police case has been opened and legal processes are underway, all the implicated individuals inside and outside the department, including companies who might have benefited irregularly on the resources of the National Skills Funding, will face the full might of the law,” Nzimande said.

He added that the department has already commenced engaging the Hawks and other law enforcement agencies, including initiating internal departmental disciplinary processes to ensure that this process in concluded speedily.

“This is the reason we requested SCOPA to treat this report as confidential until these processes are finalised and the relevant people informed, in terms of due process. I however must indicate that as a department we respect the SCOPA decision not to accede to our request.

“I have nothing to hide, but I have a duty, on my part, to follow due process in implementing the recommendations of the forensic investigation. We will implement these recommendations to the letter,” Nzimande said.
SA NEWS

HIGHER Education, Science and Innovation Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande, has disputed a Sunday newspaper report claiming he requested Parliament keep a Forensic Investigation Report on the National Skills Fund’s (NSF) under wraps.

“I never wanted to keep this report under wraps, but all that I requested was for the Standing Committee on Public Account (SCOPA) to treat this report in terms of rule 189 of the National Assembly, especially sub-rule (1) (c) read with sub rule (4) (a) until all processes before the law enforcement agencies and internal departmental disciplinary processes are concluded,” Nzimande said.

He had appointed a forensic investigation company to conduct a full-scale forensic investigation into the financial affairs of the NSF after amounts of just under R5 billion could not be properly accounted for over two financial years.

The Minister also appointed a Ministerial Task Team (MTT) to conduct a strategic review of the NSF, its general operations and its efficiency and relevance with regards to the national skills priorities of the country.

Nzimande said both these appointments were meant to ensure the NSF accounts for the resources allocated to it and deal with instances of maladministration and corruption at the NSF.

“Both the reports were submitted to me, and we have begun in earnest the process of implementing the recommendations of both these reports,” the Minister said.

The Department of Higher Education and Training also opened a case at the Pretoria Central Police Station on 3 October 2022.

“Now that a police case has been opened and legal processes are underway, all the implicated individuals inside and outside the department, including companies who might have benefited irregularly on the resources of the National Skills Funding, will face the full might of the law,” Nzimande said.

He added that the department has already commenced engaging the Hawks and other law enforcement agencies, including initiating internal departmental disciplinary processes to ensure that this process in concluded speedily.

“This is the reason we requested SCOPA to treat this report as confidential until these processes are finalised and the relevant people informed, in terms of due process. I however must indicate that as a department we respect the SCOPA decision not to accede to our request.

“I have nothing to hide, but I have a duty, on my part, to follow due process in implementing the recommendations of the forensic investigation. We will implement these recommendations to the letter,” Nzimande said.

SA NEWS

IN many high schools, sports are an integral part of life, sometimes even prioritized above academics. Like every aspect of education, there is a cost to the services that schools provide.

In this article, I’ll specifically examine my hometown, Wolcott, CT, and see how its football budget in terms of coaches’ salaries compares to the amount paid for other services to students. What I have found is that while high school sports, including football, certainly have benefits, these benefits can in no way justify the disproportionate amount of money given to them. 

To start I’d like to recognize the undeniable benefits that high school sports provide children. Some of the pros of high school sports cited are higher grade point averages, an increase in college attendance and even higher test scores.

There are also obvious physical benefits including a lower chance of obesity and reduced healthcare costs. The list of benefits that sports bring to students socially, physically and academically goes on and on. 

And while there are certainly advantages to high school sports, we must also look at the cost — and by cost, I mean the actual dollar amount. As a case study, I specifically examine my hometown’s school budget. Wolcott is a small town in Connecticut located near Waterbury. In its 2018 to 2022 Union Contract, the total combined salary paid to all high school football coaches was $23,358.

Keep in mind that this statistic only includes coaches and doesn’t begin to consider the cost of having an athletic director, a trainer, equipment and so on. If you then look at the stipends given to teachers who run other clubs at the high school, you’d find that if you combine the stipends for the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), Community Service Club, Skills USA, Jazz Band, National Honor Society, Yearbook, Drama, Parliamentarian and Robotics Advisors you’d get a sum of $22,400.

These clubs are a combination of community service, academics and various other groups, all of which combined are seemingly less valuable than the football program, based on the money allotted for coaches/stipends.  

Looking at this from an academic standpoint, there are nine science teachers at Wolcott High School. If each makes the median Connecticut public school teacher salary, roughly $60,000, and considering there were 688 Wolcott High School students in the 2020-2021 school year then roughly $785 is spent per student in science teacher’s salaries.

Considering that 55 players are listed on the Wolcott High School Football Team roster, this means that roughly $425 is spent per football player on coaches’ salaries. This figure is unreasonably close to that of science teachers, especially given one is an important, core academic subject and the other is an extracurricular activity where high school students chase a ball and tackle each other.

It’s important to note that many of these figures are rough considering the data may be projections, national averages, state averages, or not from the exact same year and therefore the reality in Wolcott may differ from the one depicted here. Regardless, this information is enough to paint a clear picture: Football funding is very high compared to a plethora of other meaningful extracurricular activities and compares very closely to that of a core academic subject. 

Clearly looking at the statistics regarding funding for Wolcott High School football’s team, we get a glimpse of society’s priorities based simply on school budgets. Academics and other substantial extracurricular activities are certainly not given the prominence that they should, while football programs are overfunded, even considering the benefits they may provide. High school sports may have value, but they are overly focused on. Yet despite that fact, Wolcott still managed to end their season 3-7 last year. 

Dailycampus

UCT council chairperson Babalwa Ngonyama has called for an independent investigation into the governance crisis at the university.

This comes after a meeting of the University Senate in late September, a Special Council meeting on Thursday and a statement issued on Friday by concerned members of the UCT Council.

In their statement, the 13 members of council said they were distancing themselves from a “flawed” and irregular process at a special meeting where a motion into an independent investigation by a retired judge was blocked.

However, in a meda statement released on Saturday evening, Ngonyama said she would ask the council to reconsider its decision.

The university has been in the spotlight over the past two weeks over claims that Ngonyama and the campus’ vice-chancellor professor Mamokgethi Phakeng misrepresented the reasons why UCT’s deputy vice-chancellor professor Lis Lang left the institution.

Lang departed from the university in March.

Lange has been described by academic commentator Jonathan Jansen as “one of the best deputy vice-chancellors this country has ever had”.

Her departure was widely felt to be a major loss to UCT.

Earlier this month, the council resolved to launch an internal probe into the matter. However, Ngonyama has since called for an external investigation led by a retired judge.

UCT spokesperson Elijah Moholola said: “There will be an ordinary sitting of council on Saturday (15 October) that has always been scheduled as a normal meeting. In that meeting, we expect the chair council will officially table this call, then council will deliberate on it and apply their minds and decide whether they want to resolve [and] adopt that as a formal resolution of council.”

Moholola said the investigating panel’s terms of reference must still be formulated.

“First, we have to go through the council meeting and council agreeing to head this call by the chair to go the independent route,” said Moholola.

INSDE EDUCATION

WENDY MOTHATA

THE South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) has indicated that it’s willing to accept the government’s offer of a 3% wage increase in the public service wage talks. Sadtu said it will not join the public servants’ strike action and it will make an announcement on Monday on the matter when it concludes its national council meeting.

This despite a deadlock with other unions over wage negotiations with the government.

Last week, Sadtu president Magope Maphila said most members were in support of the revised offer of 3% tabled recently at the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) by the department of public service and administration.
Sadtu has a membership of about 260,000.

Despite the prevailing difficult fiscal position, the government believes the 3% salary increase offer to
public servants is ‘generous’.

This is the view of the Acting Minister of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), Thulas Nxesi, and Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana.

The unions demanded a 10% wage increase when negotiations began in May but trimmed the figure down to 6.5% to match the headline inflation rate the Reserve Bank has forecast for 2022.

The government presented a revised and improved offer on the baseline of 2% plus the non-pensionable cash gratuity, amounting to an average of 4.5% of the R20.5 billion that is on the budget.

“The 2% amounted to an additional R8.9 billion over and above the budgeted of R20.5 billion, costing the government a total of R29.5 billion. Labour revised their demand to 6.5% across-the-board baseline increase, plus the non-pensionable cash gratuity,” Godongwana said.

“The employer further indicated that any further increase, above the 2% on the baseline, would require additional funding to be sourced from the Compensation of Employees’ budget and would require the introduction of cost containment measures in the Public Service,” said the Ministers.

While Sadtu has indicated that it may accept the offer, the same proposal has been rejected by other unions, including Nehawu, Denosa, Popcru, and the Public Servants Association.

The unions have since announced their plans to embark on industrial action unless the employer comes up with an improved offer.
Speaking on POWER Perspective on Wednesday, Sadtu spokesperson, Nomusa Cembi, said the majority of their members have accepted the government’s offer.

“Our members have decided to accept with reservation, the deal is nowhere near what we want. It is with heavy hearts that they accepted. Out of nine provinces, there are seven who have accepted and two did not accept. We operate on the process of democratic centralism, so we are going to accept. However, we have not signed.”

Some public service unions are on the verge of calling a national strike amid a wage dispute with the government.

Denosa has advised the members and structures of the union that the negotiations have reached the
dispute level.

“DENOSA and other COSATU unions filed for the joint dispute referral at the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC). This application will invoke the conciliation process in PSCBC. This happened after COSATU unions in the public sector reported in a joint meeting held on October 6, 2022, that their members were rejecting the final offer of the employer,” Denosa said.

In the meantime, Denosa indicated that it will embark on a consultation process through its constitutional structures to unpack the current processes taking place at PSCBC and the possible end results.

INSIDE EDUCATION

THE Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) awarded 71 study bursaries to Grade 10 and 11 learners while prize money to schools around South Africa as part of the departments Water and Sanitation Education Programme (WSEP).

Bursaries were awarded to learners to study fields rated in the water and sanitation-related sector, while the prize money will be used by schools to procure water and sanitation related needs for the sustainability of their projects.

“The learners get to study at the university of their choice in the country, in a field of study related to our sector. The comprehensive bursary programme covers full tuition fees, accommodation & food as per university guidance, books and stationery allowance & a monthly stipend” revealed the DWS.

The WSEP initiative aims to address the skills and knowledge shortage in the DWS by challenging Grade 10 to Grade 12 learners to compete and innovative solutions to support the department.

A total of 800 learners have been awarded bursaries to pursue careers in the water and sanitation sector while 3,500 schools have been supported through the programme since its inception.

One competition under the WSEP, the Aqua Enduro action project seeks to identify learners who are passionate and have the determination to pursue careers in the water and sanitation sector.

Nearly 500 schools participated in the programme. Competing schools demonstrated innovative ways to save water and develop sanitation infrastructure.

A further 27 bursaries were awarded for a public speaking competition hosted by the department. Learners debated topics around the state of water and sanitation in the country.

KUDZAI MASHININGA

CAMEROON national Loic Elnathan Tiokou Fangang concluded his master’s degree in mathematical sciences at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) earlier in 2022 and, as he awaits an opportunity to pursue a PhD in machine learning, he believes the dream of the institute’s founders – of producing the next Einstein – has already been accomplished.

AIMS is a network of six centres of excellence, which are based in South Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania and Rwanda. Students who join the institute get to work on driving the continent’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) agenda.

The founder of AIMS, South African physicist Neil Turok, in 2008 gave a speech in which he declared his wish that the next Einstein would be from Africa.

In an interview with University World News, Fangang said that, each year, AIMS is producing African Einsteins as it invests in its students – and not just by equipping them with mathematical skills.

“Being Einstein is more like a concept [and] values, and that is who we, who attend AIMS, are. ‘Being Einstein’ entails using critical thinking skills, and any other skills, hard and soft ones, to effectively solve real-life problems.”

“We all have different backgrounds and, therefore, different ways to impact. On my own, my challenge is to change the narrative of Africa around technology and go beyond our limitations,” he said.

His studies at AIMS have cleared the path for him to be involved with organisations that work voluntarily to spread machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa.

For example, he is an ambassador for Zindi, which hosts the largest community of African data scientists and is working to solve the world’s most pressing challenges using machine learning and AI.

It connects data scientists with organisations.

“I am involved with several organisations across Africa such as AMLD Africa and Zindi, as their ambassador. I’m working in the core team of KmerAI, an association aiming at decentralising machine learning and AI in Cameroon. I’m working towards opening a start-up in order to sensitise and educate people and companies around the fields of AI and data science.”
Fangang said that, for a livelihood, he is providing services to companies through his marketing agency and is actively looking for a PhD opportunity in the scope of machine learning.

And why does he want to do a machine learning PhD?

“I believe that AI and machine learning are going to solve big challenges we have in Africa such as traffic, climate change, and so forth … It’s a must for Africans to be part of the revolution. Having a PhD will give me access to certain opportunities for a bigger impact in Africa,” he added.

Nurturing independent thinkers

Another AIMS alumna, Daphne Machangara, a Zimbabwean, was admitted to AIMS to study for a masters in industrial mathematics from 2017 to 2019.

In an interview with University World News, she said that, at the African institute, professors from across the continent promote independent thinkers and allow students to engage and solve real-world problems, by offering theory and application.

Machangara said everyone is offered a scholarship and there’s diversity of Africa’s best students chosen to represent different countries. When they meet, it’s all about sharing ideas, teamwork and problem-solving.

“Students per centre per intake are manageable numbers; [there are] not very big classes, funded by such foundations as [the] Mastercard [Foundation].

“AIMS is vital because it brings together talented African students who, together, try to tackle problems existing in Africa through the obtained skills from the programme. I think the next Einstein could be from Africa, because of the efforts and projects which students from the programme have engaged in or are engaging in after the programme has ended,” she said.

In terms of her contributions on the continent, Machangara said she is a central committee member of the Deep Learning Indaba and also of its local chapter in Zimbabwe.

The Deep Learning Indaba is an organisation with a mission to strengthen machine learning and AI in Africa towards the goal of ensuring that Africans are not only observers and receivers of ongoing advances in AI, but active shapers and owners of these technological advances.

Annually, the organisation holds a conference it calls The Deep Learning Indaba and, this year, it was held in Tunisia, bringing together more than 300 members of Africa’s artificial intelligence community for a week-long event of teaching, research, exchange and debate around the state of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Machangara said AIMS scholars are taught to give back to the community in terms of STEM.

“Firstly it’s about giving back to community … by trying to spread data science and strengthen machine learning in Africa. Attending AIMS prepared me so well in this direction, the reasons being that I got to know of the Deep Learning Indaba during AIMS.”

“Additionally, as AIMS scholars, we used to give back to the community weekly, through various activities at schools, hospitals and so on that prepared me well to do voluntary activities like the one I am doing now,” she said.

Machangara said, under the Zimbabwe chapter, they are bringing about networking among individuals and identification of mentors, as well as collaborations through their programmes.

“We have had chats with Data Science Zimbabwe and appreciate the work they also do in the community,” she said.

UNIVERSITY WORLD NEWS

CYRIL RAMAPHOSA

THERE are few presidential activities more fulfilling than spending a morning in the company of small children. Last week, I attended the opening of the Little Flower early childhood development (ECD) centre in Bizana in the Eastern Cape, where I got to spend time with some of the future leaders of our country, reading to them and listening to them.

The centre was recently built by the development organisation Impande South Africa through the support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

I was deeply touched by the dedication of the centre’s staff to supporting the community and its children. They told me how in the centre’s earliest days, staff struggled to get paid and yet still came to work. They also told me that even if families are not able to pay the R20 fee for their child, the children are not turned away.

The commitment of the ECD centre staff is so important because early childhood development centres play a pivotal role in our nation’s development.
These centres can be found in every village, town and city in the country. Most were started by women in the community to support parents who need their children to be cared for when they are at work. Many of these centres began as creches and day-care facilities. Many have subsequently grown and expanded to incorporate a basic learning curriculum into their services.

As government, we have taken up the task to improve the standards of care and make resources available for ECD centres to run suitable activities for young children to prepare them for formal education.

In April this year, we completed the move of the ECD function from the Department of Social Development to the Department of Basic Education.

This is to link early childhood development to the formal school curriculum and to provide training, education and development to staff in ECD centres around the country.

Because this foundational learning is key to a child’s success in later years, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill that is currently before Parliament proposes that it be compulsory for all children to receive two years of ECD before they enter Grade 1. It is at this stage that children should be taught, learn through play and receive at least one meal a day.

Early childhood development centres don’t just prepare our country’s youngest citizens to succeed in school; they are also an important source of entrepreneurship and job creation. These centres are an important part of the care economy. They sustain livelihoods, especially for women, which contributes to job creation in many communities.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, ECD centres were hard hit. Facilities that rely on school fees to keep running were unable to pay their staff and many parents who lost their jobs were unable to keep their children enrolled.

In response, government established the ECD Employment Stimulus Relief Fund to help ECD centres that had lost income as a result of the pandemic and to enable them to recover.

Preparing our youngest citizens with the tools they need to succeed in life is a responsibility we must collectively shoulder. We must continue to do all we can, as government, the private sector and development organisations, to support early childhood development.

With the many valuable services it provides, whether it is educating our children, providing childcare for working parents or creating opportunities for entrepreneurs, ECD makes a huge contribution to the achievement of many of our developmental goals.

Since the care economy is mainly driven by women, such support goes a long way towards helping women, especially in disadvantaged communities, to become financially secure and independent.

The young children in these centres are the next generation of South Africans who must be able to live up to their full potential as responsible, capable and outstanding citizens.

They must be able to pursue their dreams so that we all may achieve our shared dream of a free, prosperous and happy nation.

From the desk of the President

AS researchers with combined expertise in teaching computer programming and curriculum development, it’s clear to us that this curriculum is about computer programming, despite the fact that the province only uses the term “coding.” Coding is a most basic aspect of learning programming.

Ontario’s decision is in line with those taken by Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which were the first and only Canadian provinces to make learning computer programming compulsory at the primary and secondary levels in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

In the rest of the world, many governments have also made this change, such as Estonia as early as 2012, the United Kingdom in 2014, and South Korea in 2017.

But what are the arguments put forward to motivate the integration of computer science, and more specifically computer programming, into the school curriculum of students? Research highlights three main arguments on this subject that will be discussed in this article.

The lead author of this story, Hugo, is a researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Curriculum Development and a lecturer in the Department of Didactics in Educational Technology. His thesis project in educational sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal focuses on the impact of learning computer programming on young learners.

Meeting the growing needs of the job market

The evolution of the global job market represents one of the motivations at the heart of the integration of programming in school curricula. This motivation, widely promoted by policy-makers, is essentially linked to the need to train more people with programming skills. Indeed, technological knowledge, particularly in the high-tech sector, has been driving economic growth in North America and elsewhere in the world for over 20 years.

A growing number of jobs require a deep understanding of technology. This number of jobs is actually expected to increase in the coming years considering that data science, artificial intelligence and decentralization technologies (such as blockchain technology, on which cryptocurrencies are based) are becoming increasingly dominant areas of the economic sector.

Teaching coding from an early age could thus be a way to facilitate countries’ immersion and performance in the digital economy.
Some studies also argue that exposing students to computer programming early in the school curriculum could have a positive impact on the identity they develop with respect to this field, considering that there are many stereotypes associated with it (mainly that “computer science is only for boys”). In this respect, arguments that go beyond the economic benefits can be evoked.

Promoting social equity

According to several authors, greater exposure to computer science by teaching young people how to program could also help promote greater social equity in terms of representation and access to technological professions.

On the one hand, computer science skills can indeed provide access to well-paying jobs, which could help provide greater financial stability for marginalized groups who have not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth in recent generations. On the other hand, the increased participation of people from under-represented groups in computing (women, Indigenous people, Black people) could also promote diversity in the field, and ultimately result in an increase in the total number of workers.

In addition, there is a related argument that greater diversity within the workforce would lead to better products, accessible to a greater portion of consumers in the marketplace. Too much homogeneity among workers leads to the design of products and services that cater to a relatively narrow spectrum of individuals and problems, which may reinforce some inequalities.

Researchers advancing this equity argument argue that if early and intentional steps are not taken to foster greater diversity, this could result in a “digital gap” or an opportunity difference between dominant and marginalized groups, much more pronounced in the coming years. All youth learning to program could in this sense represent a measure to decrease this gap and promote greater social equity, which is in line with United Nations’ Goal 4 about inclusivity and equality in education.

Developing learners’ cognitive skills

Finally, the most commonly mentioned argument concerns the role programming would play in developing computational thinking in learners. Defined and popularized in 2006, the concept of computational thinking refers to the skills of “problem solving, system design, and understanding human behaviour based on the fundamental concepts of computer science.”

Several authors argue that the development of such computational thinking would be beneficial for the learners, as it would allow them to develop high-level reasoning skills that can be transferred to other learning, such as problem solving, creativity and abstraction.

For these reasons, computational thinking is often embedded within new programming curricula, such as in England’s curriculum, where it is stated that “high quality computer science education equips students to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world.”

The introduction of programming into the school curriculum could therefore have a benefit for all students, even those who are not destined for a technological career, as they could benefit from computational thinking in their daily lives in a more cross-curricular way.

It is important to note, however, that these beneficial effects for the learner, although widely discussed and increasingly documented, still need to be shown through more research involving comparative and longitudinal aspects. Hugo’s thesis project examines this perspective.

In sum, it appears that Ontario’s decision-makers have seen the potential triple benefit of youth learning computer coding for the future. However, the major challenge now facing the Ontario government is the lack of sufficiently qualified teachers to adequately introduce this complex discipline to students.

Adequate staff training will be a key requirement for successful integration, as demonstrated by a 2014 report about computer programming integration in the U.K. One potential solution could be to integrate programming into the initial university training of future teachers.

THE CONVERSATION