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In journal entry 2 she writes, “….teachers are required to examine the syllabus with the subject committees and work out ways of designing lesson plans in a smart and meaningful way.” This indicates that Nandini feels teachers should work collaboratively or in a team.
She doesn’t however, say why working in this way is useful, but it is evident that she is comfortable working with others. She makes constant reference to working with others in order to prepare for the lesson. She speaks frequently of accessing different methodologies to improve her effectiveness in the classroom. In journal entry 1 she wrote, “I was able to communicate with teachers from other schools in regard to preparation, methods of
teaching, testing and remediation.” Then in journal entry 6 she said, “I had to communicate with colleagues on teaching methods.” She also gets ideas about what methods to use from her learners. She said in the interview, “I asked them, ‘how you would prefer to learn?’ and they said, ‘try this method’.” By consulting teachers outside school she is extending her learning outside the confines of her school. Thus her learning is situated both in and out of school.
Further evidence of her reliance on planning and working in a community appears in journal entry 2 when she wrote that clusters help teachers to “fine tune their teaching plan which reduces their workload with regard to preparation and setting of exam papers.” The cluster is made up of Afrikaans teachers within the area and these meetings allow them to bring their concerns and seek assistance from each other, while they map their way forward for the academic year. These cluster meetings are planned meetings that offer teachers a support mechanism to deal with the challenges that they are encountering during the course of the year. It also demonstrates how teachers in a community exemplify teachers learning socially.
She is very mindful of her purpose and intention in the classroom. She feels that the purpose of her learning is to get “fresh ideas, interesting methods, smart testing so that teachers and learners can work towards a common goal, that is, the learner reaching his full potential.” Thus she seeks both content and pedagogic knowledge in her development. Her pursuit of this knowledge sees her engage in both individual and social learning.
In journal entry 2 Nandini reveals how communities of teachers have been a source of support for her. She speaks of teacher forums and orientation courses where teachers
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gather. She sees such gatherings as an opportunity to seek solutions to problems. She elaborated that teachers share problems, talk about them and thus learn from others.
Further in journal entry 5, she said that working in a community and collaboratively helps her with different ideas in interpreting the syllabus and getting smarter methods of teaching and assessment.
Speaking of her collegial relationship with her peers on site, Nandini describes them as very helpful indeed:
They wouldn’t just talk to you, they will give you information – example, if you made a mistake with a certain language structure, then they would give you a good few examples to reinforce it (Photo voice interview)
In this way she felt encouraged and supported.
She sees her colleagues on site as her “immediate source of learning because we exchange ideas (Interview). Nandini explained that she finds the experience of working in this way
“extremely enriching.” It seems that the immediacy of such contact makes help and support easily accessible to teachers on site. As Nandini says, all it entails is “a little message across – either verbal or a little note …there’s constant communication.”
Some of the things that Nandini lists as having learnt from collaborating with other teachers are: “different ideas in interpreting the syllabus, smarter methods of teaching and
assessment strategies” (Journal entry 5). In journal entry 6 she also describes how she learnt how to administer a listening comprehension test by observing other teachers.
The idea of learning from and alongside other teachers, started early in Nandini’s career.
Faced with teaching a second language and its negative political connotations, Nandini admits that accessing suitable content for their learners was priority. In journal entry 1 she makes reference to how after qualifying as a teacher she found it necessary to work with
“seasoned teachers.” She wrote, “I found that constant communication with seasoned teachers on vocabulary building and the mastery of sentence construction absolutely essential.” She explained that such communication helped her with “preparation, methods of teaching, testing and remediation.” Currently she still finds it very useful to keep in touch
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with other educators both in her school at in other schools to exchange views and thoughts on how they teach particular sections of the syllabus.
This example illustrates her learning with the support of experienced teachers. Teachers working together in this way, that is collaboratively, form a community where they can share ideas, information and problems and in this way learn from each other.
With regard to networking, apart from the teachers in her immediate context, she also used other opportunities to extend her liaison with teachers. Some of these opportunities include cluster meetings, orientation courses, and co curricular activities. These are examples of planned learning opportunities. In journal entry 1 Nandini said that by teachers
collaborating in this way they were “able to improve on the following skills: research techniques, interpretation skills and how to encourage critical thinking.”
Another example of learning in a community is addressed in her journal when she wrote, “In order to make the best of a bad situation teachers across the country had to unite in their endeavour to get learners to make progress in this language.” (Journal entry 1) She
discussed in her journal how they worked together by sharing their ideas to advance toward a common goal i.e. “Improve learner performance” , rather than sit back and accept that apartheid was denying their learners the opportunity to learn.
The fact that she says that they had to “unite” emphasises the sense of camaraderie these teachers felt and the value of this community to their development as Afrikaans teachers in
“Indian schools.”
Because of the open door policy she feels with her colleagues she can even share with them on a personal level. For personal piece of advice, “I know I can go to anyone from staff, be it man or woman, - and it’s comfortable for me – it’s easy for me and I don’t have any kind of reservation” (Photo voice interview).
Apart from planning in meetings with colleagues she does her own planning starting with the syllabus set out by the Department of Education. She explains that her guidance regarding objectives, content, assessment criteria and assessment tasks come from the syllabus (Journal entry 2).
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It was also evident in the data that Nandini spends a lot of time seeking content that is suitable for her particular learners but not available from the DoE. In the interview she discussed the value of resources depicted in the photographs to her development.
This quest to use material that is current and relevant has seen this teacher transform quite easily into a teacher of the twenty first century. This draws my attention to the emphasis she places on accessing content for her subject. She is not reliant on textbooks. In fact she speaks passionately of using as many resources as are at her disposal to get relevant and suitable material to use in her classroom. This is an example of individual learning where Nandini tries to find resourceful ways of bringing the language to her learners.
This is not a new attitude that she has adopted. She mentions how in the 70’s despite the political turmoil, she was able to use the medium of television to gather useful material. She makes reference to the “news, actuality programmes, lifestyle programmes, advertisements and sport programmes” to help second language learners improve their “pronunciation and vocabulary.” Nandini was also able to extend her own knowledge incidentally by picking up vocabulary that she was not familiar with. She used this knowledge to teach her learners writing and oral skills.