The following was submitted to South Africa: The Good News in September. The first published draft contained errors in the first two paragraphs, mostly relating to the number of students who took and passed the matriculation exams. The errors have since been corrected.
The numbers were staggering. Of the 43,953 learners who wrote the National Senior Certificate exams in the Western Cape province in 2008, only 3,801 passed both mathematics and science at the 50 percent-plus level. When John Gilmour, the LEAP Science & Maths School founder, listed this statistic my pen stopped moving.
Encouraging was the fact that 19 of those students came from LEAP. Since 2004, LEAP has served as a private school for black students from townships. It now has three campuses in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with more schools on the way. LEAP has graduated 142 students in the last 3 years—126 of whom are currently enrolled in university or other tertiary study programs.
The students, teachers, and administrators of the LEAP Schools have begun a movement, and their monumental efforts have produced impressive results, but the work that remains seems improbable. What difference can an outsider make when he is on the LEAP campus for only eight weeks? What could any outsider do to augment the work of locals? That I came from the United States with a nonprofit, Teach with Africa, both benefited and complicated my interactions with the people I met in Cape Town.
Teach with Africa is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that seeks to partner with schools in Africa by sending a team of teachers to those schools, and by bringing students and teachers from those schools to the United States. In addition to exchanging learning and teaching approaches at the schools, TWA fellows participate in outreach projects in the surrounding underserved communities. In its third year, TWA is working with three LEAP School campuses and intends on developing partnerships in other countries in Africa. I joined the 2010 TWA Team as a middle- and high-school English teacher from Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, California.
Aside from teaching, I also co-direct the U.S.-based nonprofit Omprakash, which connects education, health, and environmental projects in developing countries to volunteers and resources and then brings those connections into the classroom as curricular resources. In talking to many volunteers in the Omprakash network, I have learned that for Americans Africa holds a kind of power. “I just know that I have to go to Africa,” they would say. Many are naïve enough to think that all of Africa looks the same, perhaps misled by the satellite picture of the world at night showing Africa as a continent with the fewest lights. The “dark continent” stirs sympathy. Some feel compelled by guilt associated with America’s history of slavery, for which they feel that serving the less fortunate in Africa would give relief. Others recognize Africa’s abject poverty and know that a found solution there could solve problems elsewhere. Still others see Africa’s poverty as an incubator of terrorism in which young men without jobs and money turn to religious zealousness for pay and pride.
Whatever the reason, Americans seek passage to Africa. I did. I can’t say that my reasons for going were original or exceptional. In reflection, my reasons were murkier than all of the above. I have seen that satellite map, but I also figured that some cultures value darkness just as much as electrical lighting. I share no guilty feelings, as I was born in developing-world Vietnam, yet I do think that poverty and a lack of government infrastructure can lead to the last resort of a violent way of life. For example, reports have indicated that many coastal dwellers in Somalia picked up arms and became pirates because they had no other way of earning an income.
But I went not to resolve any of these issues. After all, I was going to the Republic of South Africa, a first-world nation by many measurements and one that has seen unprecedented development in a short amount of time. I also went as an educator, not a policy maker or diplomat.
I came to build relationships with other human beings, hoping that I could bring those back to my own classrooms and share them with students and teachers in my own community. Reading about the South African government’s identifying education as one of the top three priorities for policy reform fueled my interest. After a few weeks at LEAP and learning from John Gilmour’s Bridge Social Network, which seeks to create a virtual global community of change-makers, I felt with shivers that South Africa’s education system will change significantly in the next ten years. LEAP and similar efforts, and the conversations about them, will lead to permanent and systemic change. The relationships that I sought to form will allow me to learn about and from these developments, and maybe to experience them by returning to visit my friends and colleagues.
Teach with Africa places the most value in the least important word in its name. The word “with” signifies that we, the American visitors, were not simply “in” Africa or teaching “for” Africans; and, ideally, we were not there to “teach Africans.” We were collaborators. We were mutual learners and, therefore, mutual teachers.
TWA was careful to build into the fellowship a two-week home-stay in the township for its teachers. To understand the students we met each day in the classroom, we needed to gain a sense of how they lived, ate, slept, and came and went to school. We got to ride the school bus, help cook meals at home, and meet curious family and neighbors in Langa. That I am a southeast Asian provided learning opportunities for both sides, once the disbelieving stares turned into questions about why I was walking with students.
Now that a new academic year has started back in the United States, I am introducing some of the people I met over the summer to my students and larger school community. My students are eager to begin conversations with their peers about their course readings on post-apartheid South Africa. They get to augment their book reading with personal narratives and insights.
I hope to work with TWA and my school to bring teachers and student-teachers from LEAP Schools to my own, so that they can sit in our active classrooms during their summer holiday. Then, I hope to take students from my class to Cape Town at the end of our academic year, so that my students may complete the circle and begin their own.
