My Utopia Classroom!

As "teachers-in the making", we have been warned against the bureaucracy that exist in the school environment.  This includes school hierarchies, exclusive school cultures, lack of time and the prescriptive CAPS-document that needs to be implemented.  I won’t have control over the aforementioned.  Still amidst all of this, I have a very real opportunity of teaching a hidden curriculum in what would be my classroom.  A hidden curriculum that refers to implicit aspects a teacher would like to teach learners and in a classroom where I would facilitate a learning process.  Both of which I have control over.  I realise that careful strategic planning is required for this implementation.  However, this blog entry allows me to pause for a brief moment, dream and thereby commence this strategic planning.        

 

The pastoral role of teachers asks of teachers to recognize and meet the holistic needs of learners.  Having mentioned this, it is not the sole responsibility of the teacher and for this reason I do think it is important to form partnerships with governmental departments, non-governmental organizations and community members.

 

My first objective would be to establish rapport with learners in my class.  Learners would experience this when the teacher model and behave in a manner that promotes a trusting relationship.  The teacher would be able to address some of these holistic needs but not all.  The teacher should refer appropriately to partners when requires.  For this reason, a teacher’s most important partnership is with the learners‘ parents.  Therefore, I would like to implement home visits to the learners’ parents.  Having trusting relationships with learners would assist me with identifying learning triggers and addressing learning needs.  I would like to make use of creative thinking and activities to engage learners.

 

I would be pro-active in creating a safe learning environment in order for learners to participate actively, be empowered and have agency.  The classroom culture will be characterised by fairness and equal opportunities.  In addition to this equitable practices will be implemented by attempting to “level the playing field” since learners have different contexts and capabilities.

 

All the aforementioned are noble ideas and requires a diligent teacher.  I don’t mind hard work but I do suspect that time would be my enemy since there are only a certain amount of hours in a school day and within these school hours CAPS would take preference.  Therefore, the question remains how will I merge these noble ideas with the realities in schools?  Time will tell and strategic planning will help…