EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS: FORGING A NEW DESTINY FOR SUPPLEMENTAL INSTRUCTION

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Supplemental Instruction National
Office Empowerment for tomorrow
EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS FORGING A NEW DESTINY
FOR SUPPLEMENTAL INSTRUCTION
C.M. Unite and L. Smith
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"Man is effective in the world not only through
what he does, but above all through what he is"
(Rudolf Steiner, 1996 vii).
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Ubuntu

• Encapsulates the values of compassion and
  humanity, whilst aspiring towards a new vision of
  change to empower for tomorrow.
• Humaneness, caring and compassion
• A way of life that positively contributes to the
  sustenance of the well-being of a
  people/community society.

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Quantum Thinking

• An insightful, body/mind approach, attempting to
  connect our classical world where objects or
  things have definite identities with our new
  quantum world, where things take on multiple
  realities simultaneously.

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Change in Higher Education

• Within the new institutional landscape brought
  about by the merger of South African Higher
  Education Institutions, SI has become a
  celebration of that which brought people together
• The building of caring, empowered learning
  communities

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Why is change necessary?

• 21st Century large institutions, especially
  global corporations which propagate a global
  culture of instant communication, individualism,
  and material acquisition, that threatens
  traditional family, religious, and social
  structures (Senge, 2004)
• Education runs like an assembly line on a
  predetermined plan with bells and rules

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Why is change necessary?

• There is a need to encourage thoughtful,
  knowledgeable, compassionate global citizens
• However, the industrial age school continues to
  expand, largely unaffected by the realities of
  children growing up.

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Why is change necessary?

• Disparities between and within nations
• Most advanced civilization and technology in
  human history
• One fifth of worlds population live in absolute
  poverty and are marginalised from the mainstream
  of society

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Global Reflections on Change

• Examine our human purpose to have the ability to
  see, sense and realise our possibilities (Senge,
  2004)
• Access a deeper level of learning to create
  change that serves the whole
• Move away from Reactive Learning to Deeper Levels
  of Learning

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Reactive Learning

• In reactive learning, thinking is governed by
  established habits of action and thereby actions
  will be reactions.

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Deeper Levels of Learning

• The key to acquiring deeper levels of learning is
  to understand that the larger living wholes of
  which we are an active part, are not inherently
  static (Senge, 2004)
• Need for developing new ways of teaching and
  learning a commitment to multiple realities,
  infinite choice and possibility Quantum
  Thinking (Gilliand, 2004)

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Deeper Levels of Learning
Doing
Increasing awareness of the whole
Action that increasingly serves the whole
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Ubuntu and SA Change

• Society inherited from apartheid was eurocentric,
  capitalist, technicist, rigidly
  institutionalised, with deep socio-economic
  divisions and inequities (Blunt, 2006)
• Contrasts strongly with the social solidarity
  reflected in African value of ubuntu universal
  brotherhood, sharing and respecting other people
  as human beings

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Ubuntu and SA Change

• Disdain for morality and spirituality, with an
  over emphasis on the individual above the
  community
• Central to ubuntu is looking after the vulnerable
  within society
• The community is the context and focus of all
  human activity (Mbiti, 1973)

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Ubuntu and SA Change

• Individuals are born out of and into the
  community, through which they are socialised into
  becoming responsible human beings (abantu),
  endowed with humaneness (ubuntu) which exists
  prior to the individual.
• Absence of ubuntu leads to tension, conflict,
  frustration and disintegration of basic human
  relationships and community

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The Myth of Ubuntu

• The spirit of ubuntu and its practice have
  disappeared (Ntuli, 1999)
• Ubuntu has the same ideals a liberalism and
  social justice (Fowley, 1996)
• Ubuntu represents as culture suited to the
  survival of the extended family group, but its
  strengths become weaknesses in complex and
  competitive societies.

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Ubuntu and SI

• SI model is based on a developmental perspective
  which incorporates the theoretical principles of
  social constructivism and collaborative learning.
• One of key features of SI is to encourage peer
  collaborative learning and instructing students
  in the techniques which make that study method
  more effective (Martin et al, 1994)

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Ubuntu Social Constructivism

• Marrying Vygotskys social constructivist
  theories of learning in social context, with the
  age-old ubuntu wisdom of learning and living
  together in a supportive, congenial group
  relationship is a strong possibility.
• Jean Piaget suggests learners must construct
  their own knowledge in order to be able to
  understand and use it. (Arendale,
  2000)

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Ubuntu Social Constructivism

• Vygotsky says that knowledge is socially
  constructed and learning develops as a result of
  dialogical and dialectical interactions between
  educators and learners and between two or more
  learners. (Vorster, 1994)
• Proximal Development
  Inter-mental plane and Intra-mental plane
  (Vygotsky, 1978)

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Ubuntu Collaborative Learning

• Based on the idea that learning is a naturally
  social act in which the participants talk among
  themselves.
• It is through talk that learning occurs (Gerlach,
  1994)
• Types of collaborative learning include, amongst
  others, cooperative learning, problem-centred
  learning, writing groups, peer learning,
  discussion groups and seminars.

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Ubuntu Collaborative Learning

• Cooperative learning is more structured
  (mechanistic) and task orientated, while
  Collaborative learning is more loosely structured
  (organic) and student driven (Bitzer, 1999).
• Bitzer (2001), relates the concept of ubuntu with
  to two essential components of cooperative
  learning, namely positive interdependence and
  promotive interaction

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Ubuntu Collaborative Learning

• Once positive interdependence is established and
  internalized to the groups functioning, the
  ubuntu concept has a second dimension, namely the
  opportunity for learners to promote and celebrate
  each others successes by assisting, encouraging,
  supporting and praising each others efforts to
  learn.

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Ubuntu Collaborative Learning

• Individual accountability ensures that the
  performance of each individual learner is
  assessed and the results given back to the group
  and the individual group members know who needs
  more assistance in completing assignments.
• They realize that they cannot hitch-hike on the
  work of others (Johnson, 1991).

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Ubuntu and NMMU SI

• The consolidation of the South African higher
  education system has led to a new landscape and
  has established a new institutional form, namely
  the comprehensive institution.
• The NMMU is a comprehensive institution offering
  both university and technical type programmes.

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Ubuntu and NMMU SI

• Blunt (2006), in the interest of learners, urges
  comprehensive institutions, to take seriously the
  issues of marginalisation, cultural imperialism
  and other socio-economic factors that the
  majority of learners face while gaining access to
  higher education.
• The question is how to facilitate their
  education, and the answers cannot he claims be,
  limited to conventional First World
  models.

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The African Renaissance

• Enabling the African continent to be reborn in
  the same way that Europe awoke after the dark
  Middle Ages (Bitzer, 2001)
• Requires a fusion of Africa and the West for the
  spirit of ubuntu to be embraced.

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The African Renaissance
Do not behold my son, in a grey business suit
and tie, waltzing through the traffic in the
metropolis, nor my daughter, mini-skirted in the
latest Dior fashion, flaunting a western hat with
a brim as wide as the wheel of the latest Merc,
a video cassette hanging down one shoulder, a
leather handbag from another and a cellphone
piece clapped to the ear, and think they have
lost their AfricannessDeep down and
unconsciously, they are still African, harbouring
the values and norms passed on in their
childhood (Setiloane, 19964)
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The African Renaissance

• The fusion of intellectual abstraction with
  emotive sensibility (Senghor, 1996)

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The African Renaissance HE

• Vale and Maseko (19986), suggest that
  educationalists can play a pivotal role in future
  schooling, training and higher education in
  realizing the values espoused by the African
  Renaissance.

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The African Renaissance HE

• Learners in all teaching-learning situations
  should be introduced to an ethos of the mutual
  appreciation of one anothers cultural habits,
  literature, and folk-lore, while at the same time
  discovering the value of shared experiences,
  common values and interests, and the wealth of
  companionship and camaraderie among people.

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The African Renaissance HE

• This is where the application of ubuntu in
  combination with social constructivism offers the
  richest possibilities for raising a nation in the
  best of a number of traditions, all operative on
  African soil (Bitzer, 2001)

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The African Renaissance HE

• SI espouses the ethos of the African Renaissance
  and has become a celebration of successes that
  has brought people together.
• It is building collectively towards a better and
  empowered tomorrow giving back and making a
  difference in the spirit of ubuntu.

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Areas of Engagement

• Broadening, deepening and sustenance of democracy
• Encouragement of cultural exchange
• Mobilisation of the youth
• Initiation of sustainable economic development
• The emancipation of women from patriarchy

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SI and Democratisation

• Democracy should be a process of decision-making
  that involves the people that are affected by
  those decisions

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SI and Democratisation

• So far the SI session has helped me a great deal
  to bridge the gap between the school and the
  university. Particularly to those of us who are
  coming from a disadvantaged educational system.
  This system had killed and doomed our minds until
  I attended the SI sessions. I was really lost
  then, but now I am coping just like all the other
  students. This is all because of the encouraging
  SI session. I kindly support it, it must go
  on.

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SI and Cultural Exchange

• In the South African context cultural exchange
  has been achieved in the following ways
• - Developing a flagship programme
• - Regional SI training and forums
• - Advanced Supervisor training
• - Inter-institutional collaboration

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The Flagship SI Programme

• Contextualisation
• Diversity management
• Multi-culturalism

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Regional SI Training
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SI Mobilising the Youth

• Education is more than skilling and equipping
  people to cope with the economic and social
  demands of a society it is also about instilling
  values and norms to enhance the functioning
  within the society.
• Future leaders are developed within the tertiary
  educational system

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SI Mobilising the Youth

• Reinforcing their knowledge base
• Facilitation and interpersonal skills
• Boosting self esteem and confidence
• Increase career opportunities
• Giving something back

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SI Mobilising the Youth

• SI has given me the greatest gift, it has given
  me the opportunity to prove to myself that I can
  do a good job, that I can fill a leadership
  position, that I can take on the responsibility
  and make a difference to the students. It has
  given me the opportunity to give something back
  of what I got out of SI.

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SI Sustainable Economic Development

• SI helps to facilitate and develop an
  organisational culture that values diversity.
• One of the challenges for SI is to promote and
  facilitate diversity management as South African
  organisations increasingly move from monolithic
  to multicultural organisations (Cox, 1993)

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SI Sustainable Economic Development

• Another critical challenge relating to
  productivity in the workplace is HIV/ Aids
• At NMMU students affected by the HIV / Aids
  virus, predominantly range between 20 and 25
  years in age.
• Central funding is another important
  sustainability factor.
• SI prepares learners for the world of
  work and citizenship

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SI The Emancipation of Women

• Democracy will not be achieved unless we see in
  visible and practical terms that the condition of
  women in the country has radically changed for
  the better and that they have been empowered to
  intervene in all spheres of life as equal with
  any member of society (Nelson Mandela, inaugural
  speech, April 1994)

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SI The Emancipation of Women

• Violence against women in South Africa runs in
  tandem with the spread of HIV/AIDS
• Researchers are beginning to suspect that it is
  not a coincidence that South Africa has amongst
  the worst HIV rates and the highest rates of rape
  and domestic violence in the world.

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SI The Emancipation of Women

• The acceptance of equal and inalienable rights of
  all men and women is a fundamental tenet under
  the Bill of Rights of The Constitution of the
  Republic of South Africa, 1996

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SI The Emancipation of Women

• A case that best illustrates institutional
  patriarchy is that of the deputy-president, Jacob
  Zuma who has been defending charges brought
  against him of rape.

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SI The Emancipation of Women

• SI has an important role to play in improving
  interpersonal relations and gender equality,
  impacting positively on a patriarchal society.
• The program also offers the opportunity for equal
  skills development and training. There are
  currently 26 (55.4) female SI Leaders and
  21(44.6 ) male SI Leaders as opposed to
  31(56.4) male and 24 (43.6) female leaders in
  1994.

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SI The Emancipation of Women
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Conclusion

• Promoting inter-institutional collaboration in
  terms of Supervisor and Advanced Supervisor
  training research and future planned regional
  training and forums
• Enabling learners to embrace the concept of the
  learning community by taking responsibility for
  their own learning and developing the attitude of
  life long learning and citizenship

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Conclusion

• Encouraging peer collaborative learning and
  cultural exchange through SI facilitated
  sessions
• Offering an empowering space for learning and
  skills acquisition to take place
• Building democratic practice, by incorporating
  the values of mutual respect and trust and
  freedom of speech

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Conclusion

• Unlocking social capital through leadership
  development and developing synergy in teamwork
• Providing employment opportunities for learners
  entering the world of work.

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Conclusion
Let me plead with you, lovers of my Africa, to
carry with you into the world the vision of a new
Africa, an Africa reborn, an Africa rejuvenated,
an Africa recreated, young Africa. We are the
first glimmers of a new dawn. (Robert Sobukwe,
Fort Hare University, 1996)