During lockdown, South African students wrote a book about ‘a world gone mad’

South African student voices have largely remained unheard in formal discussions around COVID-19. A pandemic that should not be put to waste, COVID-19, on some podiums, is seen as laying the groundwork for germination of seeds of change.

The students in this collection of stories by the Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN, a project within the Academy for Multilingualism at the University of the Free State in South Africa) have refused to be silenced amid this pandemic.

A World Gone Mad is a collection of 15 stories written by the students. All come from rural villages or low income, highly populated settlements on the edge of metropolitan areas (also known as “townships”). Some of them wrote their stories on their cell phones.

In March 2020, when South African president Cyril Ramaphosa announced the country’s first lockdown, students had to evacuate campus and return to their homes. During this lockdown, citizens were not allowed to travel, shops had to close and people had to remain indoors.

The strict rules created fear in people from densely populated areas such as townships, and within the first week the country saw a 30% increase in gender-based violence compared to the previous year.

The students reflecting on the experiences of this life in lockdown are predominantly undergraduate students from all disciplines at the University of the Free State. The project is a decolonisation initiative by the university that motivates students to write short stories that can be published and then used in a transformed curriculum.

The iCAN, now in its fourth year, has published five anthologies. The majority of texts are based on real life experiences, but many students submit purely fictional stories. We decided to include the COVID-19 stories in a separate collection.

Writing can be used as a coping mechanism, a way to digest the world around us. We found that the stories have drawn attention to the experiences of students during the COVID moment.

The stories

In one story, My COVID-19 Nightmare, the writer illustrates the anxieties and prejudice encountered in a small village. When the main character experiences strange behaviour from her neighbours, she learns why on Facebook:

One of the Maswanganyi daughters has Corona. She was seen a few days back in hospital coughing to death and she was admitted by the doctor. Now she is back and has infected her whole family. Be careful around them, guys. #staysafe #covid19 #stayathome.

The writer was shocked. She had gone to hospital due to a cough she developed the night before when she wanted to clear her room from mosquitoes with pesticide.

Internet connection and device access has highlighted the gap between the rich and the poor students in South Africa. In the story The COVID-19 Stumbling Block the protagonist is forced to return to the densely populated township of Diepsloot, Gauteng.

She thought she saw her future jumping out of the window when the university introduced an online learning system. She saw it as a waste of time; she had no electronic device other than her cell phone.

Other themes include greeting a loved one at a rushed funeral (The 60 Minute Farewell), one’s belief in God being challenged (Faith is Not Under Lockdown) and having to abandon campus life (A Story of House Akasia).

One student relied on his imagination, painting a bleak picture of a post-COVID world where virtual reality has become safer than real life (Death of the Human Race).

The students also addressed the pandemic within the pandemic: gender-based violence. In Ngenxa Kamama the story is about a mother and daughter trapped inside their house during lockdown with a violent father.

Hope

In A World Gone Mad, the students speak for themselves, presenting the world with an authentic expression of the lived experience. It’s one that negates a Western, canonised form of thinking that views the philosophies and literatures of the global North as the only intellectual authority.

It is our aim to ensure these stories make a considerable contribution to the curriculum and the ongoing efforts to reconstruct knowledge and a sense of being in an effort to decolonise higher education in South Africa.

Some of the texts will form part of the extensive reading component of the English Academic Literacy courses at the university, where students will do online quizzes on the stories. The idea is that students will learn about each other and from each other.

The stories are also a contribution to decolonising languages. In the English language written stories, students have tamed the language to their advantage; they have used it to carry the weight of their experiences. The one written in isiZulu also tells us that these indigenous languages, which are often marginalised and tokenised, are equally valid in carrying lived experiences and have space in higher education.

Lastly, the stories give hope in surviving the pandemics and gesture towards a post-COVID future that is socially and cognitively just.

Peet van Aardt, Coordinator: Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN) & Lecturer: Academic Literacy, University of the Free State and Brian Sibanda, Lecturer/Researcher: Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of the Free State, University of the Free State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How to encourage literacy in young children (and beyond)

How can parents best help their children with their schooling without actually doing it for them? This article is part of our series on Parents’ Role in Education, focusing on how best to support learning from early childhood to Year 12.

Literacy involves meaning-making with materials that humans use to communicate – be they visual, written, spoken, sung, and/or drawn. Definitions vary according to culture, personal values and theories.

We look to a broad definition of literacy as guided by UNESCO to be inclusive for all families. Children learn to be literate in a variety of ways in their homes, communities and places of formal education.

What research tells us

New research in three-to-five-year-old children’s homes and communities in Fiji, has revealed that children’s regular engagement in literacy across many different media has supported good literacy outcomes.

There were ten main ways of engaging in literacy-building activities. These included print and information, communication and entertainment technologies, arts and crafts, making marks on paper, screens and other surfaces like sand and concrete, reading and creating images, and talking, telling and acting out stories that were real or imagined.

Children also engaged with reading, recording and talking about the environment, reading signs in the environment, engaging in music, dance, song and, lastly, with texts and icons of religions and cultures.

These activities were enjoyed and valued by children and their families as part of their everyday lives, and were further bolstered by creating books with children in their home languages and English.

This research can be used to add to our discussions on how parents can help develop their children’s early literacy.

The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research found daily reading to young children improves schooling outcomes, regardless of family background and home environment.

The OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results also indicate a strong correlation between parents reading and storytelling with children in the early years and reading achievement at age 15, with those students performing one to two years above their peers.

However, it is not just being read to that matters. The adult-child interactions are also very important.

These interactions need to be lively and engage children with the text-in-hand. Alphabet toys and phonics programs alone offer little to develop literacy, as they focus on a code without contextual meaning. Words, and their letters and sounds, are best understood when seen and applied in everyday experiences, driven by children’s motivations.

How to be a talking, reading, writing, viewing, and listening family

There are several practical things parents can do to encourage broad literacy and learning in early childhood years.

1. Don’t wait. Read what you are reading aloud to your newborn. Children become attuned to the sound of your voice and the tones of the language you speak as their hearing develops.

2. Share stories at mealtime. Provide prompts like: “Tell us what your teddy did today”. Alternatively, randomly select from ideas for characters, problems, and settings, for example: “Tell us about an inquisitive mouse lost in a library”. Oral storytelling provides a bridge to written stories.

3. Record on your phone or write down your child’s stories. Turn them into a book, animation, or slide show (with an app). Children will see the transformation of their spoken words into written words. These stories can be revisited to reinforce learning of words, story structure and grammar.

4. Talk about their experiences. For example, prompt them to describe something they have done, seen, read or heard about. Research shows children’s oral language supports their literacy development, and vice-versa.

5. Guide literacy in your children’s play, following their lead. For example, help them follow instructions for making something, or use texts in pretend play, such as menus in play about a pizza place. Children will engage with various texts and the purposes they have in their lives.

6. Books, books, books. For babies and toddlers, start with durable board books of faces, animals and everyday things with few words that invite interactivity (e.g., “Where is baby?”). Progress to more complex picture books with rhyming language. Talk about personal links with the stories and ask questions (such as “I wonder what will happen next or where they went to”) as these will support comprehension. Look to the Children’s Book Council for awarded quality children’s literature.

7. Talk about words children notice. Be sure the words make sense to children. Talk about what words look like, what patterns, letters and sounds they make. This builds children’s word recognition and attack skills, and understanding of what words in context mean.

8. Involve your children in activities where you use literacy. For example, if you make shopping lists or send e-cards, your children could help create these with you. Explain what you are doing and invite children’s participation (e.g., “I’m looking at a map to see how to get to your friend’s house”). Children can meaningfully engage with and create texts and see the place these texts have in their lives.

9. Use community and state libraries. Most offer interactive family literacy programs. Early Years Counts and The Australian Literacy Educators Association has a range of resources for families.

Above all, be sure the experience is enjoyable, playful, and encourages children’s active involvement. Literacy should be engaging for your children, not a chore.

Louise Phillips, Lecturer, School of Education, The University of Queensland and Pauline Harris, Research Chair in Early Childhood, University of South Australia

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South Africa's universal health care plan falls short of fixing an ailing system

South Africa’s Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has finally gazetted the bill detailing an ambitious plan to roll out universal health care in the country through a National Health Insurance.

The bill responds to a global campaign spearheaded by the World Health Organisation and linked to the UN’s sustainable development goals to make sure that no-one is left behind in accessing quality health care.

There’s no dispute that South Africa’s health care system needs major reforms. There are considerable inequities in health care between urban and rural areas; between public and private health sectors and between primary health care and hospital care. And the country has a complex disease burden with heavy caseloads of HIV, TB and non-communicable diseases.

South Africa has poor health outcomes compared to other middle-income countries such as Brazil with similar health spending as a percentage of GDP. It spends more than R300 billion – or around 8.5% of its gross domestic product – on health care. But half is spent in the private sector catering for people who are well off while the remaining 84% of the population, which carries a far greater burden of disease, depends on the under-resourced public sector.

The health system performs poorly due to a combination of factors including the poor management of public sector hospitals, health professional shortages (particularly in rural areas), low productivity levels among staff, escalating private health care costs and poor quality of care.

But in its current form the proposed legislation won’t be a silver bullet. There are still too many inconsistencies and unanswered questions for it to be the final roadmap to universal health care in the country.

For example, the bill focuses on curative services, missing an opportunity to take a public health approach that focuses on disease prevention, health promotion and health protection. In addition, it doesn’t address the relationship between the public and private health sectors which is seen as a major impediment to fundamental change.

How it will work

The bill is informed by a vision of ensuring equitable access to quality health services, regardless of a person’s ability to pay or whether they live in an urban or rural area. The proposed insurance fund envisages the consolidation of public and private revenue into one funding pool.

The idea is to enable a more equitable system through, for example, cross-subsidisation and ensuring that essential services are made available.

All people will have to register as users of the fund at an accredited health care establishment or facility (whether public or private). And the fund will decide on the health benefits that the facilities will have to provide. This will depend on what resources the facility has. People will be able to pay for complementary health service benefits not covered by the fund.

To be paid, health care providers, such as general practitioners and hospitals, will have to register with the fund. They will have to claim for each patient that they treat and will have to keep a record of diagnosis, treatment and length of stay.

Governance

The structure that’s been proposed for the fund is raising concerns on two fronts: it appears unnecessarily cumbersome and there’s a lack of clarity on lines of command.

The bill makes provision for the fund to establish an independent board that will report to South Africa’s Parliament. But it makes no mention of how the board will engage with the health minister (political custodian) and public servants in the health department. Nor does it explain how the performance of the fund will be evaluated.

The bill also introduces two additional management layers: district health management offices and contracting units for primary health care. These units will provide primary health care services in specific areas. It includes a district hospital, clinics and community health centres as well as ward-based outreach teams and private primary care service providers. They will be contracted by the fund.

National, provincial, and municipal health departments will still exist.

But the bill fails to explain the relationship between the district health management offices and the contracting units and how they will engage with the national, provincial and municipal health departments.

Given that there are ten health departments operating in South Africa – a national department and one in each of the country’s nine provinces – these additional offices and units could result in a more cumbersome bureaucracy. This could lead to more inefficiency and greater opportunity for corruption.

The new structure will also change the responsibilities of provincial health departments. Some of the proposals don’t make sense such as the idea that municipalities should take control of managing communicable diseases. Ideally this should be a national function, given the serious threat that is posed by some infectious diseases.

Many questions

Other parts of the bill are also unclear. These range from financing to how complaints will be managed.

Health financing and management: The bill doesn’t explain what the tax implications of the national health insurance will be for citizens. It also doesn’t set out the mechanisms that will be put in place to strengthen financial planning and monitoring systems, particularly in the public health sector. These are very important given current chronic overspending, inadequate financial management and corruption and lack of accountability in many provincial health departments.

Service provision: The bill says everyone is entitled to a comprehensive package of services at all levels of health care. But it doesn’t spell out what these packages will include. Given budgetary constraints, it’s obvious that there will inevitably have to be trade-offs and difficult choices.

The health workforce: South Africa doesn’t have a comprehensive health workforce strategy with detailed norms and standards. This remains the Achilles heel of health sector reform in the country. The lack of detail remains a serious omission in the bill.

Complaints mechanisms: The bill introduces a new separate complaints directorate – the investigating unit. But it’s unclear whether this will be the first level of complaints or whether it’s a duplication of the complaints directorate in the existing Office of Health Standards Compliance. There also isn’t clarity about where the Health Ombud fits in.

Ensuring that South Africa has a quality affordable health care system is critical. And the bill presents an important opportunity to think systematically about what needs to be done to fix the current health system. But there is still a long way to go.

Laetitia Rispel, Professor of Public Health and DST/NRF Research Chair., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.