01 October 2010

EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION TO LEARN FROM CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Christians in their congregation they heard their preachers when preaching they oftenly repeat the words of Jesus Christ in the John's gospels which says: ''You shall know the truth ,the truth shall make you free and you shall be free indeed''.
Like the purpose of religion to give the truth of the spiritual world ,Education is also the light of the society from one generation to another.
A society which invests in Education of its citizens ,especially children is really sanctify its prosperous future.
Education by vitue of its enlightment ,is the holistic process by which one generation transmits its known knowledge and cultural activities to the succeeding generations or the system by which individual aspirations and vision are reviewed to findout how effectively they can be responsible in their society. The trationalists regards Education as preparation for life ,whilst pragmatists argued that Education is life itself through participation in various spheres of life to counter the menace of their environment.
According to Gwarinda(1997) Education for Liberation is a process where an individual is freed from ignorance ,superstition and any form of oppressions which are physically ,emotionally or mentally. The oppressive values or attituades and parasitic mentality.
Freire(1972) suggests that the oppressed or former oppressed require their own pedagogy (teaching strategies) which are alternatively radical. The contemporary Education system is geared towards domesticating Education.
The oppressive Education system is characterised by determinism as it entells learners that all unfolding divine plans promotes parasitic tendences ,that's dependence syndrome, hence it is concerned with traditional banking method of learning where teacher is the fountain of knowledge pouring it to the empty slates children.
This form of Education is teacher centred and children are the passive recipients.
Inaddition progress in oppressive Education centres on the external sources of knowledge ,wisdom and ideas trickle from the teacher to the learners for them to accept them and go through stages of their oppressive behaviour. They (children) rationally agreed to be loyal to the elite in authority and subscribed to their dominance,thus become Educated servants.
In constrast liberation Education is mainly concerned for each member of the society to take exclusive part and not only the teacher is the guru of all social knowledge,wisdom ,facts and ideas ,then the learners can question them freely without any form of fear and nepotism.
Knowledge should be built and as changeable with the new demands of the society and can refined to suit the new community situation ,hence Education should not be domesticated ,but rather emancipated to select the best from other cultural activities done elsewhere as they should tally with own immediate culture and select the best out of it. Which really means Education is the selection from culture. Community members despite their age differences should be respected as equal beings with the capability to think and have feelings to perceive reality with their own senses.

Teachers can improve on commenting Learners in developing the commuincative skills

Children in the primary schools,learn language specificaly to develop their communicative skills.For them to be very successfull in the language learning there a need for the teacher to improve on the way delivering instructions in the language lessons and giving good comments both orally and in their written work.
The teacher should therefore do marking of the children's work and emulate their efforts , view it sympathetically as they are still developing these essential skills for the way they should communicate informally and formally. Plenty of oral practice is essential before they are directed into any written work. Following these oral sessions the teacher can easily spot some errors which can be avoided when they are writing.
The comments teacher gives to the learner's written work should motivates the learner rather than being abusive which can left the learner even more demotivated and lose focus on the way to develop communicative skills.
Children feel well satisfied and secured when their teacher goes through their work and give them constructive comments.
The comments should convey the information received and application of rigorous assessment not necessarily the grammatical accuracy.
Usually the teacher should give children a purposeful written work ,so that when marking the more emphasis should be concentrated on the purpose. Generally if children are guided to perform according to a specific purpose they intent to get empowered and seek to know the reason why they get involved in such exercise. For example when you tasked your children to write a letter to their parents asking for a money to go to a certain educational trip.The layout might be the focus not spelling errors ,accuracy of languge structures like prepositions and other points this is the major point supported by Chomsky's theory of natural way of learning a language.
If your marking system involve the use of symbols GR,W.O,SP, sometimes these learners has a problem to get these meanings.Thereafter your marking is more punitive than to be supportive and appreciative.

After the children's work is well marked and the areas they went wrong is clearly spotted,then of course they is a need to do some corrections.The teacher can now go through with them again into oral practice inorder to revise their weakness. The teacher 's eye conduct should be more improved to read every child so that they should not repeat the same mistakes again.This will help them to be more attentive and carefully listen to instructions from their teacher. Remember a well done oral work before written work can produce a good results with few mistakes. Then the corrections are rare. However the corrections must be done as soon as possible after the exercise , The reflective teacher is obliged to mark the children's work as soon as possible before they get into new written task of the same subject and children must taught to do corrections first before they write the next exercise which usually is completely different from this previous one as this can easily disrupts the lesson demands and easily lead the learner to be confused due to constant changes of the specific attention needed.The teacher should be well organised such that the major errors allocated are dealt with in a given enough time promptly before they go out of control.