1 Being a resourceful teacher in a challenging context

The purpose of this section is to help you to focus on the resources that you have available in your school, in order to help you teach science. Case Study 1 describes how a group of teachers responded to the challenge of being resourceful.

Case Study 1: Teachers brainstorm how to be resourceful

A group of mixed subject teachers working in challenging circumstances recently brainstormed suggestions about how to be resourceful despite such difficult conditions. They came up with many ideas – the list below shows the eight that were thought to be the most useful:

  • Make maximum use of the local environment as a teaching aid. All schools have an environment that can be exploited for discussion, investigations and sources of classroom data.
  • Make maximum use of the local community as a teaching aid. Parents and others are an important source for stories, for remembering what things were like in the past, and for having opinions on everyday issues. They can also help to find materials for lessons such as plants (use vegetables such as onions and tomatoes), chicken feet (to look at muscles and tendons), fish (to look at gills and external structures) from the market – perhaps something that is left over at the end of the day or from the farm.
  • Exploit the communication systems currently in place. Nearly all communities now have access to radio, often with many channels available. Use some of the programmes available to stimulate debate and discussion.
  • Make teaching aids from materials around the school. Old boxes, magazines, newspapers and even plastic bottles can be turned into teaching aids. (One of the teachers in the discussion group described how she had built a model of a volcano using such materials. The model could be opened out to show the ‘inner workings’ of the volcano.)
  • Cooperate with other schools, directly or by exchange of letters. This can be highly motivating for students and it opens up all sorts of possible exchanges of information (for example, exchanges of information between urban and rural schools can lead to interesting comparisons).
  • Let the school become a resource for the local community: one teacher described how mothers came to some lessons and thus improved their own literacy.
  • Set up a school garden: Plants can be grown in even a small area. Students of all ages can benefit from participating in the planning, planting, growing and use stages in the development of a garden.
  • Use the cybercafé in the local town to look at websites with more information about current topics.

For further ideas on using resources, look at Resource 1.

Pause for thought

  • What is your reaction to this case study?
  • Have you used any of these ideas in your own teaching?

Activity 1: Brainstorming to find resources

Like Case Study 1, this is an activity that is best done by you with a group of your science colleagues. The main purpose of this activity is to raise your awareness of the resources you have in your school. You might find that you are pleasantly surprised at the resources you have available that you were not aware of before.

Think about the next topic you are going to teach:

  • Brainstorm all the resources available to you and your group of colleagues in your school.
  • Brainstorm all the resources you would like to have available.
  • Brainstorm alternatives could you use instead.

If you are not familiar with the ‘brainstorming’ technique, you might find it helpful to look at the unit on this topic.

The activity is also concerned with getting you into the mind-set to think imaginatively and creatively about resource problems. It may be the case that you can’t think of any alternatives to some or indeed all of the resource issues. If so, don’t be alarmed. Ideas may occur to you as you progress through this and other units, so you might want to revisit this section at a later stage.

Figure 1 This teacher has taken her class into the school grounds to collect leaves. They will take the leaves back into the classroom and study them with hand lenses and microscopes (Activity 6.3 in the textbook).

Why this approach is important

2 Thinking about the learning environment