Introducing a Parallel Curriculum to Enhance Social and Environmental Awareness in South African School Workbooks

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ways in which educational and curriculum reforms in post-apartheid South Africa have attempted to tackle the national problem of poor learner achievement in literacy and language through the development of school workbooks which provide one lesson per day to support teaching and learning. In addition to addressing the pedagogical and curricula challenges, the developers of the workbooks strove to extend the pedagogy by infusing it with ethical values of social and environmental justice so as to form a parallel curriculum. The chapter location considers the teaching of values from an Ubuntu perspective, which is predicated on communal relationships and extends to include relationships in the animal and eco-environment. The chapter includes various pictorial codes from the materials to illustrate the issues raised. The legacy of apartheid left severe backlogs in education in general, and specifically with regard to literacy and language - necessitating curriculum support for learners in all public schools. In addition to addressing the pedagogical and curricula challenges, the post-apartheid project of social integration made it imperative for the designers of the workbooks to extend the pedagogy so as to infuse ethical values of social and environmental justice. While the books aimed to teach the overt curriculum (language and literacy), they were designed in such a way to ensure that the covert curriculum supported the values of democracy, Ubuntu, inclusivity (race, class, gender, ability and both urban and rural identity). In addition, the overt and covert messages strove to explore the children’s relationship with the planet and the animal- and eco-environment—striving at all times to ensure these sophisticated concepts were accessible to a target population of children aged from 4–13 years.