Teaching Grade 7 Life Orientation in South African schools through the story reading technique: an African centred perspective.

Abstract

The emergence of post-Apartheid South Africa in the year 1994 called for an urgent shift in the national education provision that would help to give birth to a new generation of South Africans who could see themselves as members of one nation. The Department of Basic Education (DBE) took this matter seriously and responded by introducing the Life Skills curriculum that was intended to guide and prepare learners for life challenges and possibilities to become independent individuals who can play an active role in the Rainbow Nation. This process required that in grade 7, learners should transition from Life Skills to Life Orientation (LO), where they are expected to engage with more complex value-based content (DBE, 2011). Unfortunately, despite the effort of the DBE to promote a viable LO curriculum, it has been discovered that the LO curriculum has, since inception, never fared well in its implementation stage. The challenge was the lack of appropriate resources for its effective implementation. The need for a new teaching approach that can make the delivery of the LO curriculum to inspire, motivate and encourage active participation from learners is germane. Hence, the need for this study. The study derives its importance from the story reading technique, for delivering the topics pertaining to social issues in the LO curriculum that is needed to inspire the educators’ confidence towards its successful implementation. To achieve this aim, the researcher developed an educator’s guide consisting of didactic stories to accompany the social issues component of the LO curriculum. Using a qualitative research approach, the study involved subjecting the proposed educator’s guide and the teaching stories it encompassed to a critical review and evaluation by five LO facilitators consisting of two educators, a subject advisor, and two lecturers. The participants were purposively drawn into the study sample. The phenomenographic method was used to analyze the data generated from in-depth interviews with the participants. The findings show that the proposed educator's guide was unanimously endorsed by all five participants as an effective additional teaching tool. Implications of these findings were drawn, and recommendations for relevant policy and practice shifts were made.