Let the Pupils Take Charge: Pedagogical Practices that Promote Learning Among Penan Children

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Paper presented at Seminar Pedagogi Kebangsaan, held at Institut Perguruan Tengku AmpuanAfzan, Kuala Lipis, Pahang, on 11 – 12 September 2007.

Let the Pupils Take Charge:Pedagogical Practices that Promote Learning Among Penan Children

Gan Teck HockInstitut Perguruan Sarawak, Miri[Email: ganteckhock@yahoo.com]

This paper shares some insights on the pedagogical practices from a project carried outto promote learning among Penan children in an interior school in Ulu Baram District,Sarawak. One significant concern of the project was to explore ways to nurture afavourable learning environment that is psychologically comfortable for these pupils. Thisconcern was addressed mainly by allowing pupils to take charge of their classroomlearning activity. Primarily, it was achieved through (a) providing support for independentlearning, (b) allowing pupils to check and correct their own work, and (c) allowing pupilsto develop their potential individually. By and large, many positive effects of theseactions were observed. In addition, this paper also argues for the importance of learner-centred teaching which places understanding and fulfilling interior children’s learningneeds as a vital task of the teacher. To achieve this, a “Learn-Practise-Check”framework is proposed to guide the design of learning activities. Finally, this paperconcludes that all interior pupils can learn well in schools if their teachers can providethem with opportunities to perform every learning task repeatedly and mistakes areconstantly checked for corrective actions.

Introduction

Narrowing the gap in education between different geographical regions, especiallyrural and town schools, has been identified as a major concern of the Ministry ofEducation in Malaysia (Kementerian Pelajaran Malaysia, 2006). In view of this,educators from various educational institutions have constantly strived to find ways toupgrade the quality of education in rural schools through out the country. In

Institut Perguruan Sarawak

, Miri, an instructional project was carried out in a Penan school inthe year 2006 (Gan, 2006). In this project, I, a mathematics lecturer was workingcollaboratively with

Cikgu

Mieheal, a mathematics teacher, to upgrade the quality of theinstructional processes in

Cikgu

Mieheal’s classes. This paper shares some insightsfrom the project, particularly on pedagogical practices that were found to promotelearning among the Penan children.

The School and Its Pupils

The school is a typical under-enrolment school (

sekolah kurang murid

) surroundedby lush forest in the interior of Baram District, in the state of Sarawak. From Miri city,one has to go to Long Lama town either by “express boat” along the Baram river or by 4-wheel drive on laterite roads. The “express boat” journey will take about four hourswhereas the 4-wheel-drive journey will take about three hours. From Long Lama, onehas to go on another two-hour journey by 4-wheel drive on timber tracks.In 2006, there were six classes with 57 pupils in the school. All these pupils werePenan and they mainly came from two nearby villages. The school provided basicboarding facility for all these pupils. These pupils were highly self reliant and discipline inmanaging daily routine in the boarding house. In addition, they were well mannered andkeen in learning in the classrooms (Gan & Mieheal, 2007). There was no differencebetween these pupils and pupils in the town area in term of their response to the

teacher’s instruction, except that they were very much obedient and well behaved (Gan,2006).

A Significant Concern

“How to help these Penan children learn in the classrooms?” This was thefundamental question that we asked at the beginning of the project. A critical incidentthat happened in

Cikgu

Mieheal’s Year One class had provided a fascinating insight intothis question.There were two boys and five girls in the Year One class. In this class,

Cikgu

Mieheal would typically begin his lesson by asking the pupils to gather and sit on thefloor at the front part of the classroom. He would then instruct the pupils to performsome tasks in a whole-class setting. Although

Cikgu

Mieheal interacted well with hispupils and learning seemed to take place, but the girls appeared to be extremely quietand passive as compared to the boys (Gan, 2006). In one instance, when a girl wascalled to respond to the teacher’s question, it took her quite a long time to stand up andremain silent for quite some time. Shortly after that, some other girl pupils started toutter the word “

takut

” [scare] as a description of her feeling. It appeared that although

Cikgu

Mieheal tried to give every pupil an opportunity to participate in the class, heremained the single person in control of every aspect of the lesson. This kind of formalclassroom environment was possibly perceived to be quite threatening to some of thepupils.Both

Cikgu

Mieheal and I were very concerned with this hidden threat in theclassroom. Unintentionally, we may have set up classroom environment where thepupils are feeling humiliated, threatened, ridiculed and betrayed (Weinstein & Mignano,2003). Thus, we began a significant journey to construct a new understanding ofnurturing a psychologically comfortable learning environment for our Penan pupils. Westarted to look for ways to create a more favourable classroom environment that will beperceived as less threatening by these pupils.

Let the Pupils Take Charge

We started our exploration by providing opportunities for the Year One pupils toengage in small-group instructional games. In our first attempt, we decided to reducethe time for teacher-controlled teaching and used most of the class time used for pupilsto engage in a small-group game that required them to match numeral cards with picturecards. We hoped this attempt would help to create a learning environment that is morefamiliar to the pupils.After a very brief whole-class teaching, the seven pupils were divided into two groups.One group had three pupils and one group had four pupils.

Cikgu

Mieheal and I guidedone group each to play the game according to the following rules:

•

Shuffle the picture cards (or numeral cards) and place them face down at thecentre of the table.

•

The teacher takes the set of numeral cards (or picture cards) and shows one cardat a time.

•

The pupils take turns to turn over a picture card (or a numeral card). If the picturecard matches the numeral card, the pupil keep both the cards. If the two cardsdo not match, the turned over card will be put back face down.2

We guided the pupils closely to start the game but withdrawing ourselves from thegroups gradually. In doing so, we were trying to allow them to take charge of the game.For example, I sat together with my group of pupils in order to explain the rules of thegame and guided them to play the game at the beginning. After a few rounds of game, Ipassed the set of cards to one particular pupil and said “you are the teacher” in order tocontinue the game with that pupil playing the role of the teacher. After another fewrounds of game with the pupils taking turns to play the role of the teacher, I stood up butremained near to the group. As the game went on, I withdrew myself totally by movingfarther and farther away from the group.The result of this attempt was very promosing. Both groups of pupils “

were able to carry out the game all by themselves. When one round finished, they automatically started the next round and switched roles by themselves.

” (Research diary, 22 Feb2006). In fact, the girls looked more relax when they were in the small groups withoutthe teacher. Interestingly, I observed that the farther we were away from the pupils, themore active they were in playing the game. Without the our control, the pupils were seento show a number of young children’s natural behaviours. For instance, as they playedthe game, they would stand, cover their faces with their palms, speak and laugh anytimeas they liked (Video record, 22 Feb 2006). Compared to the teacher-controlledenvironment, the small-group instructional game learning environment was very muchless restrictive to the Penan pupils. Psychologically, they might have felt more secure inthis kind of environment. As a result, they felt free to behave in ways that werecomfortable to them and hence were more active in performing the learning tasks.We started to realise that allowing pupils to take charge of classroom learning activitymay be an important key to the development of a favourable environment that isconducive for them to learn. As we continued our exploration, we found three vital pointsin relation to our effort in allowing pupils to take charge of their learning. These pointsare:(a) the need of providing support for independent learning;(b) the wisdom of allowing pupils to check and correct their own work; and(c) the importance of allowing pupils to develop their potential individually;

Providing Support for Independent Learning

Allowing pupils to take charge of their learning often give rise to the need of reducingtheir dependency on the teacher to correct or confirm their responses to learning tasks.At the early stage of playing games in small groups, the Year One pupils were oftenseen to refer to

Cikgu

Mieheal to check their answers. Later, in a particular lesson (Gan,2006), while arguing over their answers as they were playing a game in small groups, Iobserved that a particular pupil referred to the numeral-word cards pasted at the side ofthe blackboard in order to confirm the correct answer. This act of checking and self-correcting their mistakes prompted

Cikgu

Mieheal and I to ponder the need of providinglearning support to the pupils so that they do not need to refer to the teacher. So, wedecided to display appropriate instructional materials (such as numeral cards, number-word cards and picture cards) on the wall of the classroom. We also started to train thepupils to look for the relevant materials themselves when they needed learning supports.After doing so, we observed that certain pupils would automatically refer to the materialsfor checking their answers during small-group games. In addition, we also found thatmore pupils would refer to the materials if the materials were used to teach the pupilsbefore they were pasted on the wall. Furthermore, we also found that the effect waseven better if pupils were involved in the preparation of those materials.3

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