April 22, 2004
Education goes both ways in new outreach program
When Ed Taylor, associate professor, Education Leadership and Policy Studies, began a new outreach effort to principals of schools in South African townships, he set out to help them fulfill their mission to educate their students and build a new nation. But the early results of that partnership have been surprising and much more complex than a rich community helping a poor one.
Rather than new understanding for one side or the other, the new understanding has been mutual, Taylor says, and that’s one of the reasons why this 5-year-old project is so compelling and continues to grow.
He first traveled to Port Elizabeth with Louis Fox, vice provost for educational partnerships, and faculty from across the University campus.
He remembers his first meeting, in 1999, with Rodney Stowman, principal of the Triomf Primary School, a so-called colored township school. “What I saw was this beautiful population of kids, this remarkable and dynamic and dedicated principal, who would be spending his life work stewarding this school,” Taylor said.
“I mentioned to him that I wanted to come back with colleagues and wanted to find a way to be significant in their struggle and to learn. There was no pretense at all about what we would be able to do; we wanted to make connections.”
This month, a third delegation from the UW (a group also went in 2000) is traveling to South Africa to continue research on how academics from the two countries can help each other. The deans of the College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences are joining this year’s delegation. Taylor says that’s a significant signal about how committed the University is to making this work successful and meaningful for all involved.
Taylor says University researchers will learn how schools in difficult circumstances can still be a place where hope for the future is built. The Seattle principals participating in the program may find some inspiration about how to think about issues in their own schools, particularly in historically segregated and marginalized communities.
The principals in South Africa will gain some professional training, some much-needed supplies, more experienced mentors and some positive reinforcement for the difficult work they do.
It is nearly impossible to maintain any semblance of a dispassionate approach to this project, Taylor says, especially after you’ve met the people whose lives are being affected or even seen the e-mails they send back expressing their appreciation. When a group of principals from South Africa visited Seattle last fall, both University students and local principals were so touched by their stories that there were several instances of spontaneous gifts to the visitors.
A group of students worked collected 35 boxes of school supplies to ship back to South Africa, without being asked or even encouraged to do so. At least one local principal gave a laptop computer to a principal whose school was just starting to enter the computer age.
“How can we start to introduce computer literacy when we do not have them? These are the challenges that I wish you to face with me and advise me what can I do,” wrote Sipho Macholo, the principal of Cebelihle Primary School to Jennifer Wiley, principal of Franklin High School. “I thank you very much for the laptop… this is a wonderful gift. I do not care even if I can get a laptop in the future, the first one that I have owned is the one from no one else except Jenny.”
In addition to thanking Wiley for her gift, Macholo began an e-mail conversation, which was made possible by the gift of the computer, to get some advice from her about running his school in a community that has little money to pay for teachers’ salaries, electricity and supplies.
“The Cebelihle school is a township school where you can literally stand in the heart of the school and see shanties and the deep poverty where these kids come from, but in the heart of the school, you feel the sense of hope, you feel the sense of optimism, a sense of commitment to a struggle and a sense of history, an absolute sense of urgency,” Taylor said.
The relationships between principals will be an important part of the program, both for the Americans and the South Africans. “The engine of this type of program is not service but reciprocity,” Taylor says.
For example, the principals from South Africa had some hard questions for educators here, such as why, with so much technology and so many resources, so many children don’t seen to be performing at high levels.
“That kind of question cut right to the point of our being together and our being in conversation together,” Taylor said. “It is not just to talk about how to design curriculum, although that’s a part of it, or about scheduling the school year, but it was about some much bigger and fundamental questions, about educating marginalized populations for full participation in a multiracial democracy and the role that schools have in creating communities of difference.”
One of the next steps in this program will involve building a relationship with the University of Port Elizabeth to help train future school principals and teachers, which could develop into a faculty exchange.
The University also will continue to build more sister-school relationships that could blossom into a sharing both of ideas and resources. And what happens after that will be whatever develops out of the conversations that are taking place between educators in South Africa and the United States.
“They know best what they need,” Taylor said.
