Soshanguve south secondary school
For the past four months I have spent Tuesday mornings at Soshanguve South Secondary School with Briana Boland. Our ultimate project at Soshanguve South Secondary School was presenting information about applying to universities and jobs to grade 11 and grade 12 (matric) students. However, we did not plan and implement this project until after a month of going to the school due to a miscommunication between the school administration and our program.
At first the school administration thought we were only there for a short amount of time and had us labelling textbooks. After two weeks of disillusionment about our purpose at Soshanguve South Secondary School, we were able to meet with the deputy principal and share our ideas for small group meetings with matric students who were planning on applying to universities and colleges. Unfortunately, this is when we learned that this idea was not plausible as the school was already facing a shortage of classrooms due to a recent fire. We were told that we would not be able to meet with small groups unless it was after school, but we already had a commitment after school at SAVF aftercare. The following week we met with the vice principal, a separate position than the deputy principal, where we discovered that we should have been communicating with her all along as she had the most experience with Fordham students in the past and best understood our purpose. As a result of this meeting we were able to develop a more meaningful long term project.
For the remainder of our time at Soshanguve South Secondary School we would present to grade 11 and grade 12 life orientation classes about applying to universities and jobs. For each class we would begin with a survey to gauge how much they had thought about their post-matric plans whether it be applying to university or finding a job. We also asked them what they saw to be their biggest challenges towards accomplishing these plans. With their responses in mind, we prepared handouts and presentations about universities, colleges, APS scores, unemployment in South Africa, CVs, and email etiquette. We were able to meet with JuniorTukkies to learn more about the university application process in South Africa and they gave us some materials to handout to the students and two posters of APS requirements to hang up at the school. Although we faced difficulties with scheduling and keeping the learners attention we were able to present to four grade 11 classes and one class of matric students and conveyed important information that many students were happy to learn about. To accomplish this Briana and I split up the gathering of information so we each became experts on separate topics, but we completed all of the presentations together. The results of the survey and the handouts we created are in the Google Drive folder linked below.
The process of hanging up the admission requirements poster is representative of our time at Soshanguve South Secondary School as a whole. In the picture on the left you see how happy I am to finally have it hanging up after at least 2 weeks of asking the deputy principal to hang it up.
The deputy principal shared that they have issues with vandalism so we decided to just hang up one of the two identical posters that JuniorTukkies gave us with the hopes that teachers would still be able to use the extra one in Life Orientation classes. For the rest of the day, whenever we passed it, there were multiple students looking at it! That day the vice principal also tracked us down to take a picture with the poster and five students we didn't know which was uncomfortable for us, and I assume the students as well who seemed to think they were in trouble when the vice principal first entered their classroom. As we thought might have happened, when we returned a week later the poster was no longer hanging up and we were not given a straight answer on what had happened. |