The transition of South Africans from school to university : what are we to do to make it smoother and less overwhelming and shock to the young students

We need to embrace them and mother them twenty-four hours.  We need to be very patient with them, and continuously reassure them and work with them patiently and slowly.  We need to be with them, listen to them and talk to them.  We need to have a system of second, third, fourth year, and graduate students supporting them and reassuring them in exchange for scholarships, extra credit and letters of reference for the mentors who will gain experience mentoring and training in mentoring.  

We need to have sessions where the students begin by saying who they are and what is important and valuable to them in life.  They will describe where they are coming from.  They will describe their families, family life, friends and communities.  They will explain to us why they came to university. They will note what they want and expect from universities. Other students will listen attentively.  No one is permitted to interfere and speak whilst a person speaks.  Cellphones are left at the door or shut in the bags or coats.  After a fixed allocated time the group is to respond to them and comment very gently at first.  They then respond to the comments and answer questions.  The facilitator will make sure the conversation is polite and the students respect each other and avoid personal attacks and interfering whilst people talk. 

Then, the meanings of the courses are discussed, what is the rationale and reasoning of the course, how it fits with the subject. 

Students who have taken the course in the past convey their experiences and learning, the mistakes they made and how to do well on the course.  We need to cover the very basics of learning, studying, and acquiring and internalizing new information.  Everything must be rationalized.  We explain the rationale of and for everything both in the big picture, the macro level and as an idea in the micro level.  We keep things very simple, without jargon or technical words.  We keep everything in the vle4vel of amicable conversation.

We need to draw on the students embodied knowledge and experiences.  They have gained most fascinating input on life in and from living in the townships and being part of the clan, community and tribe. 

They are extremely street smart, much more than us academics who are book smart.  They can teach us one thing or two about life.

We need to show them how fascinating their existing knowledge base is and build on their existing tacit, personal and embodied knowledge.  We need to show our fascination from this type of knowledge and inquire about them, their lives, their background, personal history, where they come from, the meanings of their names, why they were given their names. 

We need to encourage them to convey their knowledge base and know hot, that and to that they accumulated over eighteen years, what did they learn and did during those eighteen years?  We need to base the learning on the students' existing knowledge and build on and add to and transform this knowledge.

We must acknowledge and remind them and us that they are human beings with knowledge, cognition, identity, background, leaning, cognition and social-cognition.  They are not empty vessels to which new knowledge, materials and learning is to be filled.  They are filled with knowledge, knowledge, personas and life-stories that we need to work with and cater.

We need to have an exchange where they give us their existing knowledge and experiences of living in, with and towards the world - township, clan, tribe and community and we give them our experiences of life, academia and scholarship and the courses.   We need to show them how fascinating they are to foreign Western academics or  privileged socio-economic background. 

I keep telling them how much they enrich my life and knowledge and are of value to me and my work. 

We need to co-enquire together with them, from within our shared and diverse knowledge base and learning, on how to improve and qualitatively transform the subject, life, community and country, the nation, the world and humanity.  We need to read together, starting with very basic text and building up to more complex texts.  If grading is required, then we should grade them based on their participation and conveyance of existing knowledge and building up and learning more knowledge.

We need to formulate questions together and discuss the meanings of these questions and why they are important to the course, humanity and life and wellbeing.  We need to think how to respond to and answer these questions.

The last thing we want is to throw at them alienated skills and information and ignore their existing knowledge and the identity they formed over eighteen years. 

We need to co-enquire with them on who they are and why, are they happy with who they are and their identity?  We need to look at and explore their historical, psychological and anthropological identity, the history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics and philosophy of who they are without entering into jargon, just exploring it and telling stories.  We can bring the jargon in the course of the discussion and the narratives and bring in simple reading materials that we can read together. 

We need to draw on the existing and bit by bit expands on it.

We must remember that those students have fascinating knowledge base  and life-stories from a very complex life.  Where one is born to is pure luck.  They could have been born to wealthy people in Europe.  I could have been born to very poor township people.

We need to give them the space and confidence to articulate and bring this knowledge to the open and the world.  The fact they had greater hardships and difficulties than the ones wealthy European is an asset.  They can teach us one thing or two on life if we listen to them and exchange knowledge and skills with them.

We need to take things very slowly.  We need to continuously follow and monitor them in the first months and year until they find their feet and make things very easy for them.  I would suggest that in the first months they will teach us, foreigners, about life in the townships.  We will reciprocate by telling them about our life as academics and Europeans/Westerners.  We will converse, ask and answer questions, listen and formulate a programme together on how to acquire and internalize academic, critical and life skills.  We will not have difficult test on foreign knowledge and new skills and questions.  What are their expectations, needs and wishes?  How are we to cater what they want and need for them?

Perhaps we can read together Achebe's Things Fall Apart and discuss the relationships between Africa and Europe and the clash between the two. 

We will discuss Africa and the history and tradition and the traditional ways of studying, communicating learning in Africa, and what happened during the height of colonization.

Chinua Achebe (1958), Things Fall Apart. Oxford. Heinemann

We will discuss contradictory ideas within an intention and co-enquiry how to construct progress and qualitative transformation together.  We will learn to dissect ideas together as ideas, to find flaws and strength in most academic ideas and transform existing ideas to improved novel ideas.  We  learn to avoid dismissing ideas offhand and completely and to critically engage with the ideas of others and one's own ideas.

 After the initial few months, when the students begin to gain confidence and find their feet, we start together a glossary of technical words and jargon.  We discuss their practical meanings again and again. We incorporate them in the discussions so far.  We make them part of our language.  The point is that the students will be proud of themselves for speaking a new scholarly language which is different from the ordinary mundane language.  It becomes their language.  They are very slowly, at their own pace,being transformed into the profession and professional community. They begin to speak this new language among themselves and become fluent in it. They begin to form an identity with the nerw language of the profession and field.