When Covid-19 closed classrooms I was worried about the education that students give each other. Official reports tend to emphasise the central role of the teacher in the delivery of the syllabus curriculum.
However, this overlooks the hidden potential and power that students have within themselves to educate each other outside classroom hours to better effect. Students are friends. They know each other more intimately than we do as teachers. They share residences, communities, churches, sports clubs, societies and social spaces. In these settings they speak in their own language about their personal experiences with education, social life, fears and aspirations.
They disclose more information to each other than they do to parents and teachers. They spend more hours with each other in these settings than they do at school and at home. Of course, this excludes sleeping hours and holidays, which are also probably spent within themselves interacting even more over the internet on social media.
In other words, the peer group space is the most critical environment for the adolescence years up to early adulthood. Students listen more to each other than they do to their parents and teachers. they learn more about love, sex, etiquette and even develop new languages and communication norms from peers and the internet more than their teachers and parents.
Education and learning in this regard also take on similar patterns. Students seek to break down the complicated concepts that were tabled by the teacher in class into more simple terms in their own language and in their own examples. The English becomes flattened, simplified, informalised and delivered with humour to make the learning experience more rewarding, fun and social.
They also get to establish mini-competitive spaces amongst themselves. Those who understand the concepts better seek to assume the teaching role in the social setting. But those who do not talk too much in the formal classroom also come out in this setting to offer their thoughts. The end product amongst them is to see each other succeed, with one or two of them coming through with distinctions ahead of the others. This creates a winning culture.
But the students do not just develop these attributes in a neutral environment. A winning culture is created deliberately. Sometimes it is the teachers themselves from the formal classroom who initiate these informal settings amongst students. School principals and university heads of departments create these reading clubs and encourage teachers and students to develop a vibrant intellectual culture within them to stimulate a passion for learning and results.
In other instances, however, the teacher might be the one who creates a hostile classroom environment that students do not enjoy, and they therefore recreate their own alternative settings to educate themselves.
The founders of the US Alliance for Childhood, Edward Miller and Joan Almon, wrote a comprehensive report in 2009 about self-created environments of learning that children create for themselves – and they found such informal settings to be the most beneficial to children’s cognitive ability, social development and emotional literacy.
In 2020, I wrote a research article for the Education for Social Change journal, where I showed how students learn best when they gather in student activist environments to learn from each other through art, songs, conversations, debates, mass meetings and blogging.
In this regard, higher education institutions and schools need to pay more attention to the value of students being their own teachers in their own spaces. The hostels, residences and communities where students live must not be seen as lifeless abodes were they only sit and sleep.
Rather, they must be seen as lively spaces of non-formal teaching, learning, research and engagement, where students are able to exchange critical knowledge in their own terms and language to self-develop themselves to be active agents of social change in education.
**Dr Mzileni is a sociology lecturer at Nelson Mandela University.
Self-created environments of learning vital for young learners to teach each other
PEDRO MZILENI | Students’ power to share knowledge must be harnessed
When Covid-19 closed classrooms I was worried about the education that students give each other. Official reports tend to emphasise the central role of the teacher in the delivery of the syllabus curriculum.
However, this overlooks the hidden potential and power that students have within themselves to educate each other outside classroom hours to better effect. Students are friends. They know each other more intimately than we do as teachers. They share residences, communities, churches, sports clubs, societies and social spaces. In these settings they speak in their own language about their personal experiences with education, social life, fears and aspirations.
They disclose more information to each other than they do to parents and teachers. They spend more hours with each other in these settings than they do at school and at home. Of course, this excludes sleeping hours and holidays, which are also probably spent within themselves interacting even more over the internet on social media.
In other words, the peer group space is the most critical environment for the adolescence years up to early adulthood. Students listen more to each other than they do to their parents and teachers. they learn more about love, sex, etiquette and even develop new languages and communication norms from peers and the internet more than their teachers and parents.
Education and learning in this regard also take on similar patterns. Students seek to break down the complicated concepts that were tabled by the teacher in class into more simple terms in their own language and in their own examples. The English becomes flattened, simplified, informalised and delivered with humour to make the learning experience more rewarding, fun and social.
They also get to establish mini-competitive spaces amongst themselves. Those who understand the concepts better seek to assume the teaching role in the social setting. But those who do not talk too much in the formal classroom also come out in this setting to offer their thoughts. The end product amongst them is to see each other succeed, with one or two of them coming through with distinctions ahead of the others. This creates a winning culture.
But the students do not just develop these attributes in a neutral environment. A winning culture is created deliberately. Sometimes it is the teachers themselves from the formal classroom who initiate these informal settings amongst students. School principals and university heads of departments create these reading clubs and encourage teachers and students to develop a vibrant intellectual culture within them to stimulate a passion for learning and results.
In other instances, however, the teacher might be the one who creates a hostile classroom environment that students do not enjoy, and they therefore recreate their own alternative settings to educate themselves.
The founders of the US Alliance for Childhood, Edward Miller and Joan Almon, wrote a comprehensive report in 2009 about self-created environments of learning that children create for themselves – and they found such informal settings to be the most beneficial to children’s cognitive ability, social development and emotional literacy.
In 2020, I wrote a research article for the Education for Social Change journal, where I showed how students learn best when they gather in student activist environments to learn from each other through art, songs, conversations, debates, mass meetings and blogging.
In this regard, higher education institutions and schools need to pay more attention to the value of students being their own teachers in their own spaces. The hostels, residences and communities where students live must not be seen as lifeless abodes were they only sit and sleep.
Rather, they must be seen as lively spaces of non-formal teaching, learning, research and engagement, where students are able to exchange critical knowledge in their own terms and language to self-develop themselves to be active agents of social change in education.
**Dr Mzileni is a sociology lecturer at Nelson Mandela University.
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