The Sunday News
Thembinkosi Khumalo, Sunday Life Reporter
REALISING how Continuous Assessment Learning Activity (CALA) may be vexatious to most learners, Manners Msongelwa from Kwekwe and a history teacher at Mt Pleasant High School Shamiso Sibanda and Hon Cain Mathema joined hands to come up with a History textbook.
The three historians will host a launch for the textbook titled “A Competence-Based Approach To Regional History” on 27 April at Mt Pleasant High School in Harare. The event is going to be graced by provincial education directors from different provinces, headmasters and other stakeholders in the education sector.
Hon Cain Mathema
CALA is a student assessment that requires learners to perform and demonstrate their knowledge, understanding, and competence. The coursework contributes 30 percent to the student’s final marks. It was put to practice during the second term in preparation for the November 2021 Zimsec examinations.
In an interview, one of the authors Msongelwa said, “In this book, we touched on the issue of CALAs. These CALAs were introduced in our new curriculum sometime last year. So, we saw that so many students and teachers are having challenges with what exactly should be done to implement these CALAs.
Student learning
This motivated us to write so that it could be simplified so that teachers and learners can specifically know what they should do when they are attempting these CALAs.”
The textbook also touches in length, on topics that are run on the surface by a number of teachers and pupils. The significant topics are examinable in the Zimsec exams.
“We also noticed that we do not have enough content on the history of our region specifically on topics such as slave trade and slavery, Samori Tory of the Mandinka Empire, Menelik of Ethiopia, and The Maji Maji of Tanzania, Scramble for Africa and the Liberation struggle for Mozambique.
It becomes easy for students to relate to what really transpired on these topics. Several teachers were reluctant to teach these topics because they were not having enough information on what really took place in those incidents.”
