Pruebas Moleculares

The CAPS may well continue to provide a source of guidance for teachers for the foreseeable future; however, there is room for the enrichment and clarification of subject knowledge content within CAPS. This is particularly necessary in the Grade R component of CAPS. Such revisions are important for facilitating the specialist nature of Grade R teaching. They are also important for the seamless transition of teaching-learning processes from Grade R to the remainder of Foundation Phase; Grade 1 teachers and specialists are ideally suited to give feedback on what CAPS competencies they want Grade R teachers of CAPS to impart more strongly.

Generally, a curriculum document will be analysed both to understand it better and to use it more effectively. Only once this process has reached a certain point, will changes be suggested. The documentary analysis in this study was more concerned with the effective use of the curriculum than revision, which would be premature without due process. However, some tweaking of a reputable curriculum statement might result in a material improvement without casting the curriculum in a negative light, without shaking its foundations or undermining confidence in it. This is why, due to the comparative youthfulness of CAPS, a specific aspect thereof was analyzed, which may lead to a limited recommendation not without merit. To recap, in this study, the analysis of the CAPS Resource File for Grade R was conducted

with a view to addressing the following considerations:

(1) How explicit and comprehensive is the VP subject knowledge contained in the document, in accordance with recognized VP subject knowledge? (2) What subject knowledge of VP does the document provide the Grade R teacher with in order to teach and assess visual training towards early reading? (3) What subject knowledge of VP does the teacher still need to acquire, in order to effectively use the curriculum-document for visual training?

Six key publications within the CAPS Resource File needed to be analysed to deal with the aforementioned considerations thoroughly. This analysis revealed the following:

(1) In the Training Manual teachers are briefed on the progression from concrete to semi-concrete and abstract levels of learning. The Emergent Literacy discussed covers early-reading categories but not pre-reading ones. It also does not cover the need for progression from one set of competencies to another according to the levels of learning it summarizes. The discussion of the Balanced Language (BL) approach also does not clearly reference any pre to early reading type of progression, even though scaffolding is mentioned. Emergent Numeracy has some VP content in the reference to sorting, patterns and shapes. The closest possible reference to pre- reading visual training is the category, ‘Word and Sentence Level Work’ but as it is quite far down a list of early-reading learning categories, it would be understood to be an early-reading activity. So the Training Manual is valuable as an extensive overview and orientation. However, it does not provide a substantial or detailed enough teacher subject knowledge content framework for VP and visual training.

(2) In the NCS Requirements for English HL, the VP and visual training concepts are comprehensively covered by learning activities. But none of these activities are explicitly identified as activities which impart VPS or represent visual training. There is no mention of VP, the prominent VPS profiled in this study, or of visual training in general. As a result, the Grade R teachers are likely to do and assess visual training incidentally, and are more likely to leave gaps. Apart from comprehensive pre- service training, a comprehensive in-service “curriculum” would have to be applied to fill the gaps, as recommended in the next chapter. This study, being qualitative, with a narrow sample, is not in a position to differentiate the precise origin of VPS developmental gaps in the case of the sample. This study can also not make pronouncements about whether the School A and CWD gaps in visual discrimination and visual figure ground are related to teacher subject knowledge, or contextual issues, or systemic-curricular issues. This study says that if the gaps are there, they may have originated in the teacher training or the curriculum. It would also be expedient to address the matter simultaneously at teacher knowledge and at curricular levels as they feed off one another. Much of learning is incidental, but incidental teaching only works if it is embedded in a rich knowledge base which

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intuitively covers all the ground, for instance, all of the prominent VPS highlighted in this study. The model of professional development recommended in the next chapter is intended to develop such a knowledge base.

(3) The NCS for English Mathematics is a more valuable document than the NCS for English HL. It provides a 203-page long document entitled ‘Content Clarification Notes with Teaching Guidelines’ which has essentially the same purpose as the 22- page equivalent for English HL discussed above: the guidelines document explains the curriculum content in detail. It also applies that content to a variety of learning activities flowing from concrete to semi concrete to abstract levels of learning. It is therefore not surprising that it contains more explicit VP and visual training categories and, a more substantial base of concrete activities using suitable apparatus. However, teacher subject knowledge does not simply cover detailed learning activities; it also involves the synthesis of knowledge categories. Such a synthesis is needed for the design of teaching and assessment strategies which provide learning activities with well-defined outcomes. Both ECD Level 5, and the Training Manual module covering Emergent Numeracy summarized above, must be able to train teachers to set up learning programmes according to the new curriculum. Grade R teachers need high-level, field-specific training to effectively utilize something like the ‘Content Clarification Notes with Teaching Guidelines’. The CAPS training itself, with its workshop and best practices approach, needs to be able to do that, by demonstrating how the curriculum guidelines shape the learning- programme activities from concrete levels upwards. For every concept-content-skills learning requirement in the curriculum, principles or considerations for designing appropriate, scaffolded visual-training activities should be provided. The challenge is that more in depth pre and in-service training in the use of the curriculum itself is needed. Not in-depth in the sense of the application of CAPS-based learning activities, but in the sense of the design of CAPS-based learning activities.

(4) The NCS for English Life Skills is the only one of the three subject statements of CAPS curriculum content which explicitly explains most (6) of the prominent VPS profiled. It also makes the direct and foundational connection between VP and reading, writing and mathematics. Again, without more detailed information, Grade R teachers are here required to do the visual training incidentally.

(5) The Work Schedules are intended to support Grade R teachers’ implementation of the CAPS. However, they contain too brief guidelines to clearly delineate where activities would be placed in the flow from concrete to abstract levels of learning. They emphasise the BL approach and coverage of all the concepts, content areas and skills which comprise CAPS. “Visual development” as a concept-content-skill is placed more frequently with “Group, guided and independent reading and writing” as opposed to “Word and sentence level work”. This suggests that the approach to visual training in more closely related to immersion in a rich text environment than activities which explicitly promote specific VPS. Another feature is that the introduction contains a suggestion to conduct two weeks of baseline assessment at the start of the year parallel to the teaching of new concepts, without any instrument being provided for such an assessment.

(6) The Assessment Exemplars, although containing a simpler assessment design process than the one in the Training Manual module on assessment, place greater demands on general teacher subject knowledge. This is because a more simple design presupposes a deeper knowledge base from which teachers can interpret the design elements and fill in the spaces between them.

The findings of the analysis of the CAPS Resource File 2012 for Grade R raise concerns about the level of explicit, VP subject knowledge coming out of the document, and the need for the same to be included in the document, for visual training towards early reading. The challenge is that too little explicit VP comes out of CAPS, and too much must still go in, in order for anyone but the most highly trained Grade R teacher to use CAPS for effective visual training towards early reading. Although this concern is here applied to early reading, the analysis of the NCS for English Mathematics suggests that it is relevant to early numeracy as well.

Another vital matter that has arisen from analysing the delivery of pre-service training and of CAPS in close proximity to one another is the issue of exactly how much of CAPS is covered in pre-service training. To what extent has the recent implementation of CAPS resulted in the revision of aspects of the pre-service training streams tasked with preparing teachers to deliver CAPS? These issues lie outside the immediate focus of this study, but the challenge is to ensure that curricular-

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training alignment is deliberately and continuously pursued as a matter of departmental-academic policy.

It is significant that the WCED did not call upon Grade R CAPS to diagnose its own delivery based on its midyear results. It called on BtLAB to do that based on year- end results. BtLAB is a diagnostic instrument that is external to the standard curriculum; its assessment reporting promises to carry some objectivity and neutrality. The discourse analysis revealed some teacher knowledge about BtLAB and its potentiality. The connection between teacher subject knowledge of VP and visual training, and BtLAB, needs to be explored. This brings us to the analysis of BtLAB itself.