Dr Leland Devon Melvin in blue NASA suit. (Brent Hutcheson)
NASA astronaut Dr Leland Devon Melvin who served on board Space Shuttle Atlantis as a mission specialist on STS-122, and as mission specialist 1 on STS-129 will on Tuesday be visiting previously disadvantaged schools in Gauteng.
Dr Melvin and eight other NASA officials will be under the care of the Lego foundation. The NASA officials will be visiting two schools in Atteridgeville and will also visit Eduplex, an inclusive, parallel medium mainstream school, which also caters for hearing impaired children.
Melvin will address the children about his experiences as an astronaut. His interaction is hoped to encourage children to dream big and use education to achieve their goals.
Director of Hands on Technologies, a Lego Education agent in Africa, Brent Hutcheson says: "Dr Melvin saw a presentation about our project in Denmark earlier this year and he wanted to see the project. NASA have similar education outreach projects and activities that they run and they wanted to see if they could find a way to work with Lego Education in the future."
"We are currently running a project in previously disadvantaged schools in Atteridgeville. We provide the schools with special Lego Education equipment (tactile learning tools), we provide training to the teachers on how to use these tools, we provide workbooks for the learners and teacher guides for the teachers, and we provide support and conduct evaluation through regular visits and on-going teacher training."
He says the aim of this project is to promote creative thinking, improve communication and co-operation skills and strengthening the ability to acquire new knowledge.
We need to dramatically improve the way in which teachers are perceived by society - we need to get professionalism back
Hutcheson says since they started this project in township, tremendous success has been achieved so far. "Teachers have commented on the number of learners who they thought were struggling, but who now are able to show their understanding through solutions they find while playing with the manipulatives. These teachers say this project has even improve their (learners) sense of self-worth, their self-belief and allow them to participate far more in classroom activities."
He was also quick to point out that this project has also been met with few challenges. "I think the most surprising challenge has to be the fact that so many teachers in the township schools are not qualified. They may now have experience (by way of years) but the lack the methodology and struggle to understand new concepts themselves. We have also found that in general, teachers are not very motivated and are not very positive about their future as teachers."
He says the best way to solve this problem of incompetent teachers is to re-open all the teacher training colleges in South Africa.
"We need to dramatically improve the way in which teachers are perceived by society we need to get professionalism back. To do this, we need to train teachers at specialised institutions bring back classroom management, specialisation and methodology, train people to educate with passion, not just take up a job as a teacher. It s not about getting teachers to work harder (which we seem to think is the case) it s about getting the schools to work smarter and be smarter , added Hutcheson."