Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress International Special Education Conference Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity? 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland

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Reflecting on teaching and learning: action research in Mpika, Zambia

Mr Paul Mumba
Kabale Basic School, PO Box T144, Mpika, Zambia
chitimumba@yahoo.co.uk

This paper will reflect on some of the activities, discussions and processes in which teachers in Mpika have engaged as part of an international collaborative action research project, entitled, “ Understanding Community Initiatives to Improve Access to Education” (Miles et al. 2003).   I will also reflect on the role I have played as Research Facilitator in Zambia and on my own ‘research journey’ since the project began in 2001. In particular I will provide some examples of the way the action research process has impacted upon teaching and learning in Mpika schools.

Introduction

Schools in the Mpika area have benefited over many years from links with the Child-to-Child Trust, based in the UK. Mpika is a small rural town in Northern Zambia 600 kilometres from the capital city. A strong tradition has developed over the years of promoting children’s rights and democratic practices in the classroom (Mumba, 2000), and in particular, of recognising the influence which older children have over their younger siblings in Zambian society where children take on a considerable amount of responsibility for domestic work from a very young age, including childcare. Our Child-to-Child work emphasised health education and ensured that important messages about clean water, diarrhoea prevention and safety in the home were delivered to older children.

In the late 1990s it was decided to adapt this approach to support disabled children attending Mpika schools. Children had proved themselves to be responsible and committed young citizens and it was agreed that they could play a lead role in befriending and supporting children with disabilities and those identified as having special educational needs, both in and out of school. The first step was to help the children design and carry out a community survey to identify disabled children who were not attending school. Teachers were able to use the survey information in their maths, English, geography and social studies lessons, and so gain additional benefit from the experience while at the same time providing an opportunity to confront any negative attitudes towards the inclusion of disabled children in school. These activities developed into the Mpika Inclusive Education Programme which was supported by the Child-to-Child Trust and Comic Relief and worked intensively with 17 schools over a three year period.

Evolution of an action research approach in Mpika

The central focus of the action research project has been to support the d evelopment of analytical and writing skills within our school communities. It has also been my role as a Government ‘In-Service Provider’ to lead teacher development activities for seven schools, in addition to my regular job as a teacher of an inclusive classroom. The long term goal of both the research project and my teacher development work, has been to support teachers to become reflective practitioners and to promote more inclusive practices in education.

Since the project began in 2001 it has been my responsibility to lead the research process and manage the activities in the Mpika schools, in close collaboration with colleagues involved in the Mpika Inclusive Education Programme (Child-to-Child, 200?). It was also my responsibility to keep in close contact with EENET.

The research questions which guided our work were as follows:

• How can people with very different types of knowledge, skills and perspectives be helped to think about, document and learn from their own experience to improve access to learning for all?
• What needs to happen to make this process empowering, particularly for practitioners and people from marginalised groups?
• How can the particular experiences of one community speak to a wider audience and at the same time remain authentic?
• How can outsiders and insiders best work together to improve practice?

Some of the tensions and challenges have included: the relevance of learning across cultures; bridging oral and literacy-based cultures; collaboration and power issues between South and North.

The first meeting of the whole action research team from UK, Zambia and Tanzania, took place in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in July 2001. In this initial visit and the subsequent one which took place in Zambia in July 2002 (EENET – Mpika report, 2002?), the aims were to:

• research the research process — by listening, observing and documenting activities in schools, and school and community meetings, through field notes, photography and research diaries
• give feedback on the researcher’s work in documenting and negotiating accounts of the research process
• document and analyse the tools and processes used
• discuss the progress of the research with the research committee
• develop a set of draft guidelines for the running of participatory writing workshops

On both visits the Zambian and Tanzanian researcher facilitators were able to discuss the particular challenges we each faced while having the opportunity to have a close look at the way inclusive education was being implemented in the other country. Although there are many similarities between the two contexts, there are also many differences. Visiting schools in Tanzania made me appreciate the work we have done over many years in Mpika to develop team work and the practice of sharing the difficulties we face from day to day in regular meetings.

Activities and processes

Inclusion is a very complex issue, and it is very difficult for outsiders to see inclusion in action on a short visit. School visits can be misleading, but they provide ‘outsiders’ with a great deal of valuable information and insights which can be drawn upon later in meetings and workshops. Teachers were able to identify and discuss some of the practical lessons they have learnt through the inclusive education programme:

• twinning
• partnership with parents
• using groups
• identifying the ‘slow learners’
• preparing lessons for individual needs and separate groups (this is difficult and takes a lot of time).

They also identified the most vulnerable children in their schools as being “special needs” (disabled) children; orphans (who have lost one or both parents); and girls, or any combination of all three.

We have come to see ‘girls’ education’ as an intrinsic part of the inclusive education programme, since early marriage is the key reason for girls’ non-attendance at school. Teachers try to discourage parents from marrying their daughters at a young age in order to get a dowry. Some of the gender-based initiatives adopted in the Mpika schools include:

• gender across the curriculum — integrated into every subject
• advocacy/sensitisation — community awareness of the importance of having girls in school
• affirmative action — role models of women who have done well in society
• single sex classes — experiment to find out if girls can perform better when educated separately
• HIV/AIDS — brought into all lessons in a cross-cutting way.

Many of the difficulties the Mpika teachers had in implementing inclusive education were related to the idea that it was the responsibility of specialist teachers who worked with disabled children When the UK-based research team introduced the idea of ‘Presence, Participation and Achievement’ as a way of understanding the different elements of inclusive education, we began to make more progress. All the teachers were concerned about many different groups of children who were frequently absent from school, or who simply chose not to attend. Absenteeism is a big problem in many Zambian schools. By thinking about who was present, who was not and why not, we began to think more inclusively about the task. It also helped us to make important links with other national education initiatives, such as girls’ education and HIV/AIDS awareness.

Disabled children

Previously all disabled children had to go to special schools far away from home, at very high cost. However inclusive learning has led to the inclusion of children with hearing impairments, learning difficulties and physical impairments in all three schools. Many teachers still don’t feel confident about teaching children with visual impairments, so these children still have to travel miles to a special school, if their parents can afford it.

One of the schools has a special unit for deaf children. Inclusion in the practical lessons in the main school has been introduced twice a week. Most of the deaf pupils are boarders who live a long way away and have had difficulty making friends.   We have used the Child-to-Child principle of twinning — both in and out of school — to encourage the development of friendships between the deaf and hearing children. This has helped to reduce some of the negative behaviour and attitudes that had developed between the two groups of children, and friendships have developed.

There is quite a lot of confusion surrounding the issue of including deaf children in mainstream schools because teachers regard sign language as slow and they worry about the strange noises some children make in class. Many hearing pupils in the school have been learning sign language in an after school club, and the teachers regard sign language and deaf pupils as their responsibility, despite the fact that there is a specialist teacher of the deaf.

The twinning principle has been used to place an academically able child   with one who needs help (“fast and slow learners”). Children have played a role in identifying who needs help.

Here are some of the teachers’ comments about inclusion:

“Disabled children are ‘fused’ in class”.

“They aren’t noticed because they feel included”.

“They feel ‘free’ and perform like non-disabled pupils”.

“He’s part of us   - [he’s] not indulged”.

Yet many teachers have reported problems with parents being over protective and removing disabled children from school (mainly the boarders) for fear of bullying, or their child getting lost on the long journey to school.

Some teachers have identified their lack of special training as a barrier to progress and have requested practical in-school help with dealing with certain impairments and situations.   In our in-service teacher development programme we have been able to respond to this by adopting a problem-based approach. Teachers have the opportunity to observe each other teaching and to discuss their observations. Video and audio taped discussions and lessons have been used to enable teachers to study different approaches to teaching and learning.

“I tape recorded some of their conversation and, when played back, a number of ideas arose. Interviews were held to discuss some of the best practices identified among them. The video documentation was another excitement, as this was revealing the uniqueness of individual teachers as they tried to demonstrate the best practice in their classes, and often this sparked debates to discuss further practice and alternatives.’

(Email communication, 8 February 2002)

In the following quotations teachers involved in the action research programme reflect upon the teacher development processes we have used.

“At our school, teacher group meetings play an essential role. In these groups, teachers discuss matters affecting their work. Topics or areas of discussion are not dictated to the groups. Groups brainstorm and thereafter classify and prioritise their topics…

Lesson demonstrations are also carried out in teacher groups... Pupils have also been involved in these teacher groups especially in lesson demonstrations.

All the strategies that have been put into place in improving our schools are as a result of co-operation among teachers and the co-operation between teachers and the school administration. All in all the school sums up its strategies as centring on the school, that is teachers and pupils and the community. Lack of community involvement in school activities means a negative attitude toward the school, which is full of their children and their teachers. The school has therefore brought the three parts together through the PTA [parent-teacher association] and the introduction of Family Pac which incorporates parents into helping their children with the schoolwork.”

Teachers in Mpika schools

In particular we found the ‘Look, think, act’ formula helpful in gaining a better understanding of action research.

Personal reflections on the research journey

Attending the ISEC Congress in Manchester in 2000 was both an opportunity to become involved with EENET and to share my experience of developing more inclusive teaching and learning practices through the Child-to-Child work in Mpika. It was at the ISEC Congress that I was invited by EENET to become a Research Facilitator in the collaborative action research project. It was in late 2000 that I first acquired an email address, and, although, it has been very expensive and sometimes difficult to maintain, email communication has made it possible to collaborate across continents for so many years. Telephone communication has never been very satisfactory and the postal service is very slow between the UK and Zambia, so email was our main method of communication and joint reflection.

Involvement in the action research project has given me a clearer understanding of how to conduct a community based research project and also of the meaning of the term ‘inclusive education’ in our context. It has also given me greater confidence in the group processes we have been using in Mpika for many years. For us, it made sense to adopt a problem-based approach to teacher development and to improving teaching and learning. I hadn’t realised that for many teachers this is not a familiar concept. The focus on ‘action research on inclusion’ has, however, helped all those teachers and students involved to develop common understandings of difficult concepts, such as ‘inclusive education’, and to work collaboratively on improving the standard of teaching and learning in our schools – with a particular focus on marginalised groups of learners.

References

Child-to-Child Trust (2003) Learning Together in the Mpika Iinclusive Education Programme. London: Child-to-Child Trust.

EENET (2002) Writing Workshops: An EENET action research project. Manchester: EENET

Miles, S., Ainscow, A., Kangwa, P., Kisanji, JN., Lewis, I., Mmbaga, DN & Mumba, P. (2003) Learning from Difference.   Final project report to DFID.

Mumba, P. (2000) Democratisation of Primary Classrooms in Zambia: A case study of its implementation in a rural primary school in Mpika. Paper presented at ISEC 2000, Manchester, 24-28 July 2000.

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