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Steffany Baptiste, right, receives a hug
from sixth-grader Amy Jordaan from the
Amstelhof Primary School, Paarl, South
Africa. Baptiste participated in the
fourth annual South Africa Initiative, a
program at the Graduate School of
Education that takes graduate students
and working teachers to the Cape region
of South Africa.
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Last spring, Steffany Baptiste, a doctoral student at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education, held up a photograph for students at the Greater Brunswick Charter School in New Brunswick. It was a wide shot of a small frame house barely visible in the middle of a big grassy field.
“See the grass?” Baptiste said. “There were houses there; this was a lively place.” The photograph showed what used to be District 6, a racially mixed community in Cape Town, South Africa, that had been destroyed in 1965 by the government, its 60,000 residents scattered to segregated communities. “The government came and ripped it out,” she told the class in New Brunswick.
Baptiste was preparing the seventh and eighth-grade students to receive donated Polaroid cameras, which they used to document something important to them – families, pets, neighborhoods or schools. They wrote essays to accompany their photos,
and the projects were taken to Cape Town as part of GSE’s South Africa Initiative (SAI). Children in Cape Town received cameras and did the same, with their portfolios ending up back in New Brunswick this fall.
“The results were phenomenal,” said Darren Clarke, executive director of continuing education and global outreach at GSE and a cofounder of the initiative. “We were expecting to get maybe 30 to 50 projects spread over four schools [in South Africa].
We got 390. It completely blew us away.”
The South Africa projects will be shared with students at the charter school, when Claude de Jager, principal at Amstelhof Primary School in Paarl, comes to visit GSE later this month. The photographic literacy project was this year’s innovation to the four-year-old SAI program, which connects education graduate students and New Jersey teachers with educators and children in South Africa.
During a two-week stay in the Cape region this summer, Baptiste and 15 other participants exchanged teaching strategies and techniques with graduate students at four South Africa universities. They planned and taught lessons to South African children. While staying with host families for a few days, they did community service in Paarl, one of the poorest communities in the country.
Each year, the SAI participants bring back some aspect of South Africa history, culture or current events to use in their lessons with New Jersey students. Baptiste’s regular students at Lawton C. Johnson Middle School in Summit learn about percentages by discussing HIV and AIDS statistics in Africa.
New Jersey students learn that 11 years post-apartheid, poverty rates among black South Africans are still disproportionately high. Schools are still mostly segregated,
and the black schools are ill-equipped. Baptiste tells her students that kids in South Africa are using 50-year-old readers. Almost always, Baptiste said, they respond: Last year, her school adopted the Amstelhof School, held fund-raising drives and sent school supplies. The most important benefit of the program – funded in part by Peter Morales, founder nad president of 57 Main Street Wine Co., a Garden City, N.Y. importer of South African wines – is less tangible than a lesson plan, said James Giarelli, professor at GSE and cofounder of the program.
For Rutgers graduate students and New Jersey teachers, “the experience is truly transformative,” Giarelli said. “Many of our participants go there because they think they’re going to learn about South Africa. And they do, but they come back and say they have learned about themselves and the way they teach. Through the South Africa Initiative, they become more reflective about themselves as educators.”
Other South Africa Initiative projects for which graduate students have earned credit include studies of South African aesthetics and culture, special education policy and practice in South African schools, as well as several projects involving the development of curriculum materials for teaching about South Africa in U.S. schools.
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