JONATHAN JANSEN | Back to school for professors as they turn culture shock into teachable moments

Twelve professors of education are re-entering schools this year to teach the subject they taught one or more decades ago. Some are already teaching, while others will follow shortly. The professors come from universities across South Africa including Wits, UCT, Rhodes, Limpopo, Stellenbosch and the University of Zululand. Why are these eminent scholars and teachers going back to school?

Professors of education are charged with preparing the next generation of teachers. But most of us have not been teachers in schools for many years. For a long time, I suspected that professors designing and teaching preservice education might be hopelessly out of touch especially when it comes to teaching in challenging schools. That is, schools marked by organisational dysfunction, troubled young people and unstable communities from which many (not all) learners come and to which they return every day.

What is crystal clear to me is that the children are not the problem. Any school or teacher that defends their poor academic results with statements like ‘you don’t know the kinds of children we work with’ should step aside.

When I dived into such a school as both change facilitator and occasional teacher during 2024, I was embarrassed to find that I struggled in three areas:

• One, I could not start by teaching the assigned curriculum because of large gaps in the foundational concepts in my subject, natural and life sciences. In other words, for meaningful teaching to happen, I could not assume that the learners in my class had a firm grasp of the prior knowledge that should have been in place.
• Two, I struggled initially to manage the noise, disruption and sometimes outright hostility in some of the classes. My classroom management theory was up the pole, normed in accordance with middle-class values. I had to pivot quickly or lose all control.
• Three, my assumptions about parents were all wrong. Many learners had absentee parents, raised by grandmothers, guardians or other relatives. These children carried deep hurts inside of them, lacking the kind of emotional balance and social stability so essential to living and learning as an adolescent. Talking of which, I recognised many of my learners in the brilliant but troubling Netflix miniseries, Adolescence.

With this experience in mind, I invited top professors from around the country to test my observations by also going back to challenging schools in the different provinces. We spent some time designing and refining the research protocols and getting all the clearances necessary to start the study. This week the team reported on progress and those already teaching shared some stunning observations, many of which coincided with my 2024 observations. I will report back on the full study findings which will be represented in a book with the provisional title, Why working-class schools are still failing working-class kids.

This study has not been done anywhere in the world before. Its findings could revolutionise the way we think about solutions to the education crisis in South Africa, the continent and beyond. For too long education reforms have not taken account of school contexts, community cultures and the realities of the lives of struggling children. We insist on a standardised curriculum for children from vastly different socioeconomic circumstances and then marvel that the academic results reflect the deprivation of the underclasses, on the one hand, and the opulence of the middle and upper classes, on the other hand.

It is time to change those outcomes not based on spectacular policy ideals but on evidence from studies of how, where and whether children learn in dismal circumstances. What is crystal clear to me is that the children are not the problem. Any school or teacher that defends their poor academic results with statements like ‘you don’t know the kinds of children we work with’ should step aside. Every child can achieve under ideal circumstances: a stable home, a full stomach, an electronic device with downloadable texts, small classes and highly qualified teachers.

But what happens when those ‘ideal circumstances’ do not exist for the majority of our learners? You find ways of teaching, managing and supporting those children based on evidence of things that work. Those interventions are not only better teaching techniques but also management competences and what I elsewhere called a pedagogy of love marked by care, compassion and discipline (in that order).

It is too early to tell, but our research is likely to shed a bright, revealing light on the conditions under which poor and working class children still learn, or try to learn, after three decades of democracy — and the kinds of teacher interventions that make a difference. And importantly, we will then know as professors of education how to better prepare future teachers for real classrooms and not out-of-date assumptions about schools, children and their backgrounds.