Advancing Assessment Thinking in Education for Sustainable Development with a Focus on Significant Learning Processes
- Authors: Shumba, Overson , Mandikonza, Caleb , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/435209 , vital:73138 , ISBN 9781928502241 , https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/64082
- Description: This position paper is developed in the context of the Fundisa [Teaching] for Change teacher education programme (www.fundisaforchange.co.za), as well as the Sustainability Starts with Teachers programmes for teacher education (www. sustainabilityteachers.org/course). Fundisa for Change is a South African programme while Sustainability Starts with Teachers is a Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) programme for teacher educators. Both these programmes seek to enhance transformative environments and sustainability education processes in teacher education. They have a strategic focus on situated and transformative learning approaches for learners to learn to ‘know the world’ and practice ‘being in the world’. The real world provides the context for learning and assessment for learning, but not enough is known about assessment of such learning.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Making sense of climate change in a national curriculum
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Mandikonza, Caleb , Misser, Shanu , Thomas, Kgomotso
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/435193 , vital:73137 , ISBN 9781928502241 , https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/64082
- Description: This chapter draws on three recent South African reviews of climate change education that have been undertaken by the authors: one in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) in 2016 which produced a national case study on Climate Change Education in South Africa (Lotz-Sisitka and Mandikonza 2016); another that was undertaken for the Department of Environmental Affairs in 2018 for the Third National Communication on Climate Change for the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2018); 1 and a more recent review undertaken in the context of a research seminar series hosted by Rhodes University focusing on climate change education in South Africa (Lotz-Sisitka 2021). The chapter also draws on perspectives being developed in the Fundisa for Change Keep it Cool Project (VVOB/GreenMatter 2021) and from wider studies being undertaken for the international Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education programme (McKenzie 2020).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Enhancing agency and action in teacher education in Zimbabwe
- Authors: Mandikonza, Caleb , Mukundu, Cecilia
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/436235 , vital:73251 , ISBN 978-3-319-45989-9 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45989-9_18
- Description: In this chapter we use a case study of teacher education in Zimbabwe to review a professional development model for mainstreaming environment and sustainability education (ESE). The process is driven by a collaborative and practice-based course design where participants work towards a change project in their professional work context. An institu-tional change project approach was developed within a work-together/work-away process in a Rhodes University teacher education course undertaken in partnership with the Southern African Development Community Regional Environmental Ed-ucation Programme (SADC REEP).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Exploring change-oriented learning, competencies and agency in a regional teacher professional development programme's change projects
- Authors: Mandikonza, Caleb
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: SADC Regional Environmental Education Programme Environmental education -- Africa, Southern Education -- Africa, Southern , International Certificate in Environmental Education , Environmental education -- Africa, Southern , Teachers, Training of -- Africa, Southern , Education -- Philosophy , Mediated learning experience , Vygotskiĭ, L. S. (Lev Semenovich), 1896-1934
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/4410 , vital:20660
- Description: This aim of this study was to explore the mediatory role of the Rhodes University (RU) / Southern African Development Community (SADC) International Certificate in Environmental Education course in developing capacity for reflexive mainstreaming of environment and sustainability education in teacher education in southern Africa. This course was a change-oriented intervention to support capacity and agency for mainstreaming environmental education across many sectors of education. The discourse of the course included environmental education and education for sustainable development and for this study this was referred to as environment and sustainability education (ESE). Environment and sustainability education is a developing notion in southern Africa and the SADC Regional Environmental Education Programme (REEP) was set up to support capacity for mainstreaming ESE. ESE was one of the responses taken by the SADC region to respond to prevalent environment and sustainability issues across the region. This study focused, in general, on establishing the mediatory roles of the reflexive mediatory tool, the change project in the course. More specifically, the research explores the mediatory role of course interventions and activities that were used to develop understanding of and to frame the change project in fostering agentially motivated changed practice in the teacher education sector. Drawing on realist social theory, which is a form of critical realism, especially the work of Margaret Archer, the study used the principle of emergence to interpret changes in the course participants' practices. The study was framed using the research question: How do mediated actions in a regional professional development programme and the workplace influence Environment and Sustainability (ESE) competencies, practice, learning and agency in Teacher Education for Sustainable Development (TESD) change projects? The following sub-questions refined the study: • What mediated actions on the course influence ESE competences, practice, learning and agency on the professional development programme? • How do these identified mediated actions influence ESE competences, practice and learning on the professional development programme? • What mediated actions in workplaces influence ESE competences, practice, learning and agency in the change projects in teacher education institutions? • How do these identified mediated actions in workplaces influence ESE competences, practices and mediated actions in the workplace? Notions of practice, agency, reflexivity, competences and capabilities were used to sensitise explanations of features emergent from course interactions; the process of analysis was under-laboured by the theoretical lens of critical realism and realist social theory. Mediation theory was used to explain the role of interventions across the course. The study used a case study approach with three cases of teacher educators from two institutions in two southern African countries. Data were generated through document analysis of course portfolios, semi-structured interviews with research participants, observations of participants during their teaching and through group discussions in a change management workshop to establish features that emerged from the course and change project interactions. The principle of emergence recognises that any interactions result in new features of characteristics that are different from the original. In this case, the study investigated those features shown by participants after being exposed to the course's mediatory tools. In order to describe the cases, a narrative approach was used. The study was conducted at the interface of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) and the Global Action Plan for Education for Sustainable Development, therefore the outcomes have implications for capacity development for ESE during and beyond the Global Action Plan for Education for Sustainable Development. The key finding is that capacity development for ESE needs to foreground reflexive engagement with one's own practice for it to be meaningful and relevant. The change project provided course participants with the opportunity to engage with their own practice and particularly their competences and capabilities through its mediatory tools. Course participants showed emergent properties that were evidence of expanded zones of proximal development (ZPD) in competences, capabilities and agency. The study illustrates that meaningful learning happens when immersed in context and when learners are able to make connections between concepts, practices and experiences (their praxis). The study also illustrates that capacity building creates opportunities for practitioners to expand their repertoire through the course activities. Some of the course activities stimulated, enhanced and gave impetus to their agency or double morphogenesis for them to continue to expand that repertoire by trying and retrying changes in practice that they value on their own and in communities of practice. Capacity development courses need to be structured to involve a variety of mediatory activities as some of these are relevant and are valued for different teacher education contexts. The study also shows how knowledge and understanding of classical Vygotskian mediation can be used to frame and structure courses for developing the ZPD retrospectively and how the repertoire which forms the ZPD has potential to be expanded and to keep expanding, whether at individual level or in community with others, as an object in the post-Vygotskian mediation process. The change project provides the starting point, the vehicle and momentum to teacher educators to critique and to reflexively transform competences or aspects of their practice that they value. The study showed that capacity development through the change project generated momentum for potentially morphogenetic changes in teacher education practice. The course initiated interactions at the phase T2-T3 that disrupted teacher educators' habitus. On-course phase activities such as assignments, lectures, discussions, practical tasks, excursions and regional knowledge exchange groups contributed smaller morphogenetic cycles to the main cycle. Reflexive engagement with one's own practice becomes a useful tool for building capacity for scaling capacity for mainstreaming ESE during and after the Global Action programme for ESD. Contributions of the study therefore go beyond the SADC region to contribute insights into capacity development for ESD in similar conditions of teacher education across the world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Emergence of Environment and Sustainability Education (ESE) in teacher education contexts in Southern Africa : a common good concern
- Authors: Mandikonza, Caleb , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: Sustainable development -- Study and teaching -- South Africa , Environmental education -- South Africa , SADC Regional Environmental Education Programme
- Language: English
- Type: article , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59624 , vital:27632 , http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2221-4070/2016/v5i1a7
- Description: Environmental and sustainability issues prevail in modern society. Southern Africa, where this study is based, is one of the regions most at risk from intersecting issues of climate health risk, and poverty-related ills. Education has the potential to facilitate catalytic transformation of society through development of understandings of these intersecting environment and sustainability concerns, and to support engagements in more sustainable social practices oriented towards the common good. This requires a rethinking of education within a wider common good frame. It also has implications for how quality education is considered. However, little is said of how this could be done, especially in teacher education. The paper shares two cases of teacher educators’ change project experiences, as they emerged via professional development support and the mediatory processes applied in courses conducted by the Southern African Development Community Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC REEP) aimed at enhancing professional capacity of teacher educators and other environmental educators for mainstreaming environment and sustainability education (ESE)1. These courses are framed using a change project approach, and involve teacher educators as main participants. In-depth data were generated from interviews with two teacher educators, their assignment write-ups, and observations of their teacher education practice. Realist social theory, particularly the principle of emergence, was used to trace the emergence of change in teacher education practice. Sociocultural learning theory was used to explain mediation of learning-oriented changes in teacher education practice. We illustrate how the change project model and approach contributed to mediating change in practice, showing emergent attributes of capacity for mainstreaming ESE and elements of a concept of quality education among course participants oriented towards the common good. In conclusion, we argue that ESE seems to be a sensitising construct for initiating and sustaining change for ESE in teacher education. In addition, the change project has proved to be a potential vehicle for mainstreaming the notion and practice of ESE into social systems and teacher education practices. We argue that reflexive ESE praxis provides a sensitising focus, initiating quality education with humanising properties necessary for the common good.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
Climate Change and Environmental Challenges in Southern African Development Community (SADC): Responses in the Age of Globalisation
- Authors: Chikunda, Charles , Mandikonza, Caleb
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437249 , vital:73363 , ISBN 9789462098367 , https://brill.com/display/book/9789462098367/BP000009.xml
- Description: There is evidence that one of the greatest controversies facing Africa today is how to make sense of the two leading global intentions of the 21st century: sustainable development and globalisation. These two paradigms appear to have some op-posing tendencies within them, some of which are contestable. Globalisation advocates for liberalisation; reduction or elimina-tion of state regulations on the market, free reign, and a high degree of rights to the large corporations that dominate the market. Globalisation also entails the cross flow of knowledge and knowledge forms.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Relating indigenous knowledge practices and science concepts : an exploratory case study in a secondary school teacher-training programme
- Authors: Mandikonza, Caleb
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: Ethnoscience -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- Zimbabwe Science -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- Zimbabwe Teachers -- Training of -- Zimbabwe
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1918 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007321
- Description: This study reports research on how student teachers in Science at Mutare Teachers' College in Zimbabwe worked with indigenous knowledge practices in relation to science concepts in the secondary school syllabus. The study was conducted among first-year science students and involved them in developing science learning activities for a peer-teaching process that was part of their course. The research was undertaken during a review ofthe college syllabus and as a study to inform the Secondary Teacher Training Environmental Education Programme (ST²EEP). The research design involved the researcher in participant observations and interviews with rural people to document indigenous knowledge practices and to develop materials for the students to work with in the lessons design part of the study. The student teachers used the documented practices to generate learning activities and lesson plans to teach the science concepts they had identified. A peer review session and focus group interviews followed the lesson presentations. Findings from the research point to the rural community being a repository of diverse indigenous knowledge practices. Student teachers showed that they had prior knowledge of both indigenous knowledge practices and science concepts when they come to class. Student teachers were able to relate indigenous knowledge practices and science concepts in ways that have the potential to enhance the learning of science in rural school contexts that lack laboratories and science equipment. The scope of the study does not allow for anything beyond tentative conclusions that point to the need for further work to be undertaken with student teachers and for the research to be extended to teaching and learning interactions in schools. Recommendations are also made for further resource-based work to be undertaken within the forthcoming St²eep implementation phase in 2007.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007