For four years Equal Education has been campaigning for Norms and Standards for school infrastructure. EE holds the view that educational inequality would decrease if all learners had access to water, electricity, security, transport, sufficient textbooks, laboratories, libraries, sanitation and all the other things that make a school a well-functioning school. This is what EE has campaigned around since its formation.
However, another very robust discussion has been going on within the organisation since 2010. It concerns teachers, the teaching profession and taking the campaigning “into the classroom”. EE has published a book – Taking Equal Education into the Classroom – in an attempt to intervene in the discussion on teaching and learning – what many consider “the heart of education”. While EE believes that improving the quality of teaching is essential to improving the state of the education, it also takes an empathetic view to teachers, acknowledging that many teachers face massive, systemic obstacles which prevent them from performing optimally.
The classroom is a space that often deepens inequality on the basis of class, race and language. The pedagogic encounter – the learner and teacher in the presence of content – is a facet of education that Equal Education wishes to deepen its knowledge of, and contribute to improving.
This book is a collection of thoughts by people who have worked and collaborated with EE in the area of teaching and learning over the last five years. They have acted as a resource to EE and continue to be valuable voices in the education space.
This book has two parts. The first section holds several research papers commissioned by EE, starting in 2010, concerning the teaching profession in South Africa. The second section contains the presentations from a roundtable discussion EE hosted in September 2014. Activists, academics and education union members attended. These presentations hold a huge amount of knowledge and point us to some of the major issues around teaching and learning.
The book is available as a pdf: https://equaleducation.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/EE-in-the-classroom_EBook.pdf
For further information contact:
Joshua Maserow 083 650 0741
Doron Isaacs 082 850 2111
