Our visionThe overarching perspective informing the vision of Ukuqonda is that learning should provide for sense making, promotion of conceptual understanding and the development of valuable knowhow and strategic skills.This “formative education” vision is in stark contrast with the prevailing view of schooling as an industry to produce marks that can be used as evidence of achievement by learners, teachers, schools, education departments and government. Apart from the unfortunate situation that children are not adequately taught to read and write (primary school) and to articulate and read critically and extract information from text (high school), a major constraining factor in our education system (and hence the greatest factor inhibiting socio-economic development and movement towards equity) is the general belief among teachers, which they transfer to learners, that learners can only do what they are shown. We observe many Mathematics teachers propagate this belief by never asking learners to perform any actions which they have not demonstrated, and by assessing learners mainly in terms of whether they did it as they were shown to do it. Unless different beliefs are promoted, interventions may worsen things by strengthening the above. |
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Ukuqonda InstituteDedicated to the promotion of excellence in mathematics and physical science education.