What a relief it was to finally see the curious, interested little faces of the grade 6 Life Orientation class at Reddam, Sea Point. UCT Policy on Research Ethics, requires permission from the head master and relevant teacher, signed consent forms from parents, detailed explanations of what the study will be about including a letter to the parents and head master that includes the research proposal. Then a suitable day and time had to be confirmed. I was hoping to have the focus group before Reddam closes for the first term holiday.
I had a meeting with Mike Rahfaldt, MD of Children's Radio Foundation at their offices in Spin Street two weeks earlier on 23 March. The idea was to gain something from his expertise and find out what he would consider to be good questions for the focus group - questions that might help them in their work. I agreed to give him feed-back after my studies. I chose a radio programme that seemed to fit in well with the Revised National Curriculum Statement for Life Orientation on constitutional rights and responsibilities.
On the Thursday afternoon, a day before the Reddam school holiday, at 13h00, I had the pleasant experience of meeting the grade 6 Reddam class for a focus group discussion on the chosen recorded radio programme. The programme was made available to their parents and the teacher beforehand. I thought the children would be well-equipped to formulate views and give suggestions on how to improve this kind of programme for use in classrooms.
There were 18 children and 18 consent forms. After I explained to them what would be happening and made sure they knew it was not compulsory to attend or participate, I played the Human Rights programme recorded for SAFM by the Children's Radio Foundation in South Africa. (Permission obtained from the MD of the Children's Radio Foundation. The programme is called "Human Rights - a real life story." I used my lap top and separate speakers, since I did not want sound quality to be a problem. Unfortunately the speakers did not work properly. (They still worked when I left home some hours earlier). The main character in the story, Jonathan from Zimbabwe, spoke a good English, but his accent was a little difficult to follow. Everytime he spoke, I could see them lose a little bit of interest, except when the story became dramatic (Jonathan's friend drowned in the Zambezi)
Despite the fact that it was towards the end of the day for the children (basically the last period) and that the sound was not good, they were surprisingly attentive during the 18 minute programme.
I watched them closely and took notes of their reactions throughout the programme. I found it interesting that most of them looked at the laptop where the sound was coming from. Others lay on their arms with their eyes open, clearly listening. Because the sound was not very good, they had to be very quiet. It must have been a new experience to many of them to listen without an image or a real person talking to them. All the action had to take place in their mind's eye.
I used dictaphone to record our discussion afterwards.
As expected, the children expressed themselves well, were eager to answer questions and put up their hands to offer suggestions throughout the rest of the school period. We had about 35 minutes left for questions and discussions.
Questions included:
What was the most memorable thing for you about this programme?
Do you think you learnt anything, if so, what?
What did you not like about the programme?
If you could make a programme like this, how would you have done it differently?
Which questions would you have like to ask Jonathan in the story?
How could you play a role in making sure other people's human rights are respected?
There was interesting feed-back. Most of them felt the story should have more dialogue and less monologue and could have been dramatised with sound-effects.
They would have liked to know more about Jonathan's life in Zimbabwe before he came to South Africa. What was so bad that he was prepared to face all the ordeals to get to Johannesburg?
They wanted to know more about his family back in Zimbabwe. How often could he talk to them, did they know where he was and what happened to him? Does he ever see them?
They liked the short music breaks in between. One of the girls felt the music could be happier and that the happy ending should have been emphasized more.
I found the class very well behaved and helpful and it was a pleasant experience for me and hopefully for the children.
Now I have the interesting task of transcribing my recordings and write up the data...
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