[MUSIC] You are welcome to week four, lecture four which focuses on labeling. What is a label? Teachers begin from virtually the first day of a child's entry to the classroom to classify the child on the basis of attitudes, applications, relationships and many other signs. These may have been passed on by parents, siblings or other children but they are very difficult to overlook or try to approach children with an open mind - a clean slate. Rist, 1970, has this to say, "The expectations teachers hold for their students can be generated as early as the first few days of the school year and then remain stable over the months to follow." What labels, as a teacher, do you use to describe children? What labels do children use to describe themselves? What labels do parents use? What labels do you find in the literature? And what have you noticed about the effects of being labeled? Have you considered the power of words on learners? When words such as clever, brilliant, intelligent, smart, quick, gifted, creative and obedient are used as labels on children, have you considered the power or the extent to which such words which influence the child? Each of these have their opposite. What terms are used in your school, classroom or home? What would be the alternatives of each of these words? Clever, intelligent, brilliant, smart, creative, quick, obedient? Think about these and identify the opposite for each of these words, in a moment. Now, have you considered the effects that these labels, or any other form of label, would have on the child's identity? How may the self-identity and behaviour of individuals be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them? What are the effects of labeling? As you'll find on this slide, once a person has been labeled, it is extremely difficult to remove that label. That person becomes stigmatized, and is likely to be considered and treated, as by others as naughty, stupid, deviant, or whatever label is attached to him or her. It is therefore important that, as a teacher, you become careful in using labels to describe your children, because labels can have a very strong impact or influence on the child. Every label, when you describe a child as slow, or bright, trouble-maker, or difficult, entails a set of expectations that are associated with it. Expectations that when made known to the student may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, if you tell the students: "You are slow. You are not university material.", this can have an adverse effect on the progress of the child. There is an excerpt from the book Pygmalion which I want to consider. The extract says, "If you think you are only a flower girl, you will always be a flower girl." What does this mean to you, in terms of labeling and how it affects the child's development? As I feel through the saying, I remember my own experience, where as a result of poverty, as a result of my parents not being able to send me to a secondary school, the impression was created that I wasn't university material, therefore I should not think about the university. But because of encouragement by my parents, because of counseling that I got from other adults in the community who kept telling me, "George, you can make it." I took to a private study, and was able to go through a university, after then the University of Cambridge, where I did my PhD. It is the resilience, it is the impact of counseling, the encouragement, that helped me to go beyond that "You cannot do it", seen to the PhD level. As a teacher, you need to encourage your children. To make the best out of the worst context within which they find themselves. So, as a teacher, go beyond labels to encourage children to have high expectations of themselves. A story from an Australian student could be of interest to you. Let's read it on the slide and find out how it relates to the story I told you. Encourage your children. We need also to consider Plato's book, The Republic, in which he created what is called the magnificent myth, in which he urged people to believe that there are different types of children. Some can be described as gold, some who have more silver in their make up, and some who are mainly base metal. Which implies that there are some children who can, and those who cannot, so that society can be constructed. Now, this is one thing which the teacher in the classroom must try to avoid because it does not help children to progress, to aspire higher in terms of achievement. And you need to reflect on the story I told you about myself, in understanding this magnificent myth - which others have described as the noble lie, because we know in reality, that is not the case. Then there's also the question of language. As we've already mentioned, language plays a crucial role in the whole process of learning. A language which categorised children as feeble-minded, imbeciles, and uneducable would today be almost universally regarded with dismay. We are moving slowly but progressively to question the Platonic myth of children as gold, silver and base metal. We have come to understand more fully the harmful affects of labeling. And this is what MacBeath, 2011 says in his book, To Be a Teacher. Now, take time and reflect on the issue of labeling. How do you describe your students to colleagues? In other words, ask yourself, how do I describe my students to colleagues? To their parents? And to children themselves? What labels are used by others in my school and by children? What have I observed as the effect of children being labeled? How might I pay attention to the language used by myself and by children in my class, outside school, in the yard, playground, or even the dining hall? These are questions you need to reflect on, remembering that every child has the potential to reach their highest level, so far as learning is concerned. Thank you. [MUSIC]
