Mother Tongue in Education
Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
OPINION
3 July 2007
Posted to the web 4 July 2007
By Dorcas Moefhe, Owen Pansiri and Sheldon Weeks
Gaborone
It is now a known and accepted fact that the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in early days of schooling contributes to improved classroom learning and related academic achievement.
Children who learn to read and write on their first language or mother tongue then transfer those skills to other languages such as Setswana and English. What is more problematic is how to start with mother tongue education in a multilingual society such as Botswana. Collaboration between governments and non-governmental organisations in educational development is one major strategy that the World Conferences on Education of 1990 and 2000 endorsed.
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Botswana has used this strategy to deal with, among others, the education of remote area dwellers. The government has also embraced the Minority Education Project with a specific focus on the education of the San, but the project does not seem to be coming out clearly between the Ministry of Education and the other interested parties. The University of Botswana and the University of Tromso (UB/UT) are currently working together on research and capacity building for the Basarwa whom they refer to as the San.
Through this initiative, various research activities and consultancies have been conducted to explore the educational needs of the San. This project has extended collaboration beyond academia.
It has drawn in stakeholders such as the Ministry of Education, UNESCO and other partners such as Letloa Trust Board of Trustees of the Kuru Family of Organisations and the business communities, especially De Beers and Debswana and other regional and far-flung organisations that have shown an interest in inclusive education and the education of children in marginalised communities. Informed by research and consultancies, all those who are involved in the Minority Education Project have understood the wider historical context of the San as an educationally marginalised segment of the Botswana society.
The project engaged with the idea of trying to achieve inclusive education so that the San children have equal and easier opportunity to participate in the cycle of 10 years of basic education as envisaged by the Revised National Policy on Education of 1994. Through a series of consultations, the issue of Mother Tongue Pilot Schools emerged and the Letloa Trust took it further for support with various interested parties, particularly De Beers and Debswana and then the Ministry of Education.
Along the way it appeared that the Minority Education Project was not clearly conceptualised by the parties involved, that is, the Ministry of Education and De Beers and Debswana.
Some people were neither comfortable with the term “minority education project” nor its focus on a specific ethnic group. To make the project friendlier to all stakeholders, efforts were made to redefine its objectives and refocus, hence the emergence of the “Support Programme for Education in Remote Areas” (SPERA).
SPERA was inclusive of other groups living in remote areas, but maintained its focus on the educational needs of the San. While these agencies were willing to support the project, some issues such as focus, management capacity and sustainability were raised by the government, which seemed to want a project that was not for a specific or particular ethnic group.
In the long run, after a number of years of planning, formulation of documents and other activities, the proposed SPERA pilot project has not taken off. The Support Programme for Education in Remote Areas needs to be pursued further as a pilot project on inclusive education.
This would be a step towards the implementation of the policy recommendation on teaching through children’s first language or mother tongue that has been pending since 1994.
The project should be viewed as an opportunity on which the education sector and its partners can inform themselves on the best practices in developing mother-tongue language education programmes for the various non-Setswana speakers in Botswana. The already existing partnership between the University of Botswana and the University of Tromso, the Ministry of Education, Debswana, Letloa Board of Trustees and other interested agencies such as UNESCO, provides a positive climate upon which the SPERA project cannot be allowed to fail, provided all is done to ‘educationalise’, but not to ‘politicise’ the project.
