Siyavula

We hosted the Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) Teachers’ Workshop at the Protea Hotel Karridene on the 4th and 5th of September. The meeting was attended by 58 participants and we had a team of 10 running the workshop.

The meeting was a great success with some of the Siyavula team’s highlights being:

• 7 workgroups being formed on the site after discussion around the workgroup’s objectives
• teachers creating their own lenses spontaneously
• teachers importing Word documents into their workgroups
• teachers actually being happy with the full XML editing
• a workgroup editing a document collaboratively in real-time
• teachers supporting the group to allow facilitators to deal with problems
• teachers talking about the possibility of them writing something which could eventually be used by the whole country
• enough pressure for the creation of a school management lens
• and quite a bit more ….

This workshop was slightly different to the one we held in Cape Town. Many of the teachers knew each other beforehand as the schools in Tongaat, from which the majority of the participants came, had already been working together. It was their previous collaboration, under Selvan Chetty, to manage the transition between junior and high schools, presented at a conference in Limpopo in 2008, that made an impression on Palesa Tyobeka, Deputy Director General for General Education. Palesa asked us to include them in our roll-out of Siyavula.

The fact that we were dealing with an already established community that was expecting us to help them coordinate and collaborate more effectively, necessitated a modification of our agenda from allowing the gradual formation of voluntary groups and the discussion around roles in groups to the nomination of group focus areas and the discussions of how to create the right environment to benefit from the creativity and knowledge of the entire group and then the actual formation of an initial group.

We had allocated an extra hour of technical training on the second day. Forming groups in the community session before that and allowing the group to write a manifesto meant that the final technical session could be used to actually set the workgroups up on Connexions. This worked well but would not have been possible with a random selection of teachers that had never worked together.

We are busy finalising our training manual and plans for support in KZN and are looking forward to some great work coming out the Tongaat area which will help teachers all over South Africa.