Integrating Life Skills Learning and Teaching Support Materials into Teachers’ Teaching Strategies

This paper investigated the integration of Learning and Teaching Support Materials (LTSM) into teachers’ teaching strategies to mediate teaching and learning in Life Skills Grade 3 Foundation Phase classrooms. The aim was to understand teachers’ teaching strategies integrating LTSMs to mediate teaching and learning. The South African National Policy Guidelines for LTSMs require teachers to be mediators of teaching to improve the quality of results. This paper was informed by Engestrom’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory, whose strength lies in its ability to enable researchers to understand learning as the complex result of tool-mediated interactions. The study used a qualitative methodology with an interpretive perspective. In order to gather and analyse data, semi-structured interviews, structured observation, and documents were used. Three Life Skills teachers were chosen using a purposeful sample process, and they were interviewed and observed in action. Themes that were formed from the subsidiary questions and coded for convenience referencing served as the guide for the data analysis under the guidance of content analysis. Findings revealed that teachers demonstrate a lack of learning and teaching support materials and a lack of professional development to integrate strategies during lesson presentations. The researchers concluded that there is an imperative need for Life Skills teachers to integrate LTSMs in their teaching strategies to guarantee access and support to the delivery of quality education. The authors recommend that the Department of Education should develop and equip Life Skills teachers to integrate LTSMs into their teaching strategies.


INTRODUCTION
According to the South African National Policy Guidelines, learning and teaching support materials (LTSMs) are crucial components of every educational system. By effectively managing, utilising, and maintaining this priceless resource, access to high-quality education will be ensured. Fredriksen et. al accentuate the potential of textbooks as affordable inputs for enhancing educational outcomes. 1 The policy document further highlights that teaching methods should be flexible with LTSMs provided to cater to various abilities, interests, and learning styles.
Research conducted by Van der Berg (2016) has shown that there is widespread concern about the lack of LTSMs in both rural and urban schools and this hampers effective teaching and learning in all subjects including Life Skills. 2 From this perspective, LTSMs are directed toward changing teachers' existing strategies to improve learners' performance in Life Skills classrooms. Motshekga (2019) states that although LTSMs and teacher support were two critical areas, LTSMs were not enough, and some teachers did not understand how to use the available resources in their classes as they were not professionally developed. 3 This paper thus investigates the integration of Life Skills learning and teaching support materials into teachers' teaching strategies based on an observation that Grade 3 learners in rural areas around Dutywa District are particularly at risk of getting poor results yearly in the Eastern Cape Province. Evidence from the Annual Assessment National tests in FP shows that rural schools in the Eastern Cape Province are underperforming as learners' scores are low in Mathematics and Literacy in Grades 1 to 3. This has occurred over a period even though the Department of Basic Education provides LTSMs to all schools and the extent to which these are used to mediate teaching and learning cannot be established. 4 What the researchers noticed is that Life Skills were not included in those performance tests.
This research is therefore underpinned by Cultural Historical Activity Theory. 5 The research, therefore, draws on the second generation of the activity theory, which has roots in Leontiev's work on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) providing both explanatory and analytical tools. It seeks to understand the classroom interactions, appropriateness, and relevance of teachers' teaching strategies integrating the use of LTSMs to mediate quality teaching and learning in the Life Skills Grade 3 Foundation Phase classrooms. As Pea puts it, LTSMs play an important role in socio-cultural theories of learning because they guide activities by allowing learners to engage in some kinds of activities. 6 The researchers understand that the interactions in Life Skills Grade 3 classroom activities involve many people, for example, teachers and learners in an activity. When a teacher uses LTSMs to guide learners' growth during instruction, the crucial function that she/he performs during mediation changes the cognitive understanding of the individual interaction in an activity. The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of Life Skills LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies. The study aims at answering the question-How do Life Skills teachers integrate LTSMs into teaching strategies? To comprehend the participants' perspectives, the study used a qualitative methodology and an interpretative paradigm to understand the integration of LTSMs into their teaching strategies. A case study design was employed, semi-structured interviews, structured observation, and document analysis of three purposively selected Grade 3 Life Skills teachers to achieve the set objectives.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Learning and Teaching Support Materials (LTSMs) is a broad category of learning and teaching resources utilised in classrooms, Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). 7 Core LTSMs are the group that is essential to teaching a subject's whole curriculum for a Grade. This often consists of a textbook/student book, notebook, and teaching guide. 8 To help teachers comprehend how LTSMs are integrated into teaching strategies in Life Skills classrooms to mediate teaching and learning, they need to link their practices and student performance to the policy document guidelines. 9 The concept of LTSMs in educational terms is not very restrictive as it includes anything that can be used as an educational tool. In the context of this paper, LTSMs are all the resources that teachers have at their disposal to make learning more engaging and memorable. 10 Because textbooks and other reference materials are fundamental resources for teaching and learning at all educational levels, LTSMs are regarded as being vital. Eshiwani argues that this leads to teachers handling material in an abstract way and portraying it as boring and uninteresting. 11 A general shortage of appropriate learning and teaching aids exists in the majority of African Nations, especially in rural areas has been presented. For, example, research conducted by Gogo on the impact of cost-sharing of buying materials to be accessed and used during learning and teaching for quality education in Secondary Education in the Rachuonyo district in Kenya, revealed that the standard and quality of materials had not changed for several years as a result low learners' performance, especially in technology. 12 Thus, the availability of materials is a key component that sparks teachers' efficacy in schools. However, if teachers lack didactic and instructional abilities and if these materials are not available, learners will still fail. 13 Adebayo et al. argue that the availability and caliber of teaching and learning have an impact on learners' academic achievement and have a better chance of doing well on exams than those who do not. 14 Moreover, the problem of insufficient teaching resources has been recognised throughout the entire educational system, and these deficiencies may prevent learners from becoming proficient in the subject of Life Skills. For instance, empirical data from the research revealed that ineffective teachers who lacked the proper training and acceptable teaching resources could be harmful to the educational process. 15 Educational stakeholders may have serious concerns about the inadequateness of the available learning and teaching support resources, which can be caused by a variety of circumstances. In Life Skills education, such components could include; outdated materials; lack of adequate training; 16 lack of perceived importance; 17 and lack of professional development. 18 This is also emphasised by Jimenez-Castellano who posits that LTSMs affect a school's performance by serving the capability to create a positive school climate and superior instruction, and a lack of resources lowers the instructional program's quality. 19 Myende contends that it is still difficult to provide rural learners with quality in South Africa because of the lack of resources, which is also a legacy of the apartheid educational system. 20 This makes it harder to realise the nation's constitutionally guaranteed right to a high standard of education. UNESCO Global Monitoring Report (2013/2014), 21 commits member nations to objectives with a deadline of 2015. Additionally, it is imperative to note that the issue of the scarcity of LTSMs predominates largely in rural situations, making the pursuit of high-quality instruction in these circumstances a challenge. 22 In addition, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Education Goal commits to supporting the use of LTSMs in all schools and facilitating high-quality education. 23 This objective must be met by effective resource mobilisation at all educational levels, particularly in remote schools, or it will also be impossible to achieve.
A report by Former Minister of Education, Dr. Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor, 24 testified that anecdotal information suggested that the high schools with the nastiest results were bordered by primary schools, and some of them who did not have enough LTSMs to teach successfully underlined the necessity for resources in schools. 25 One wonders if the primary schools with no resources were given access to the high school's resources. The suggestion was that the development of catalogues and quality assurance for textbooks and other LTSMs should be centralised at the national level. The importance of LTSMs should be communicated at the highest level, and learners in Grades R through 4 should have textbooks for every subject or learning area, including Life Skills. 26 According to Fernandez, one component of education is the caliber of the learning and teaching materials used, including textbooks. 27 The lack of resources affects the learners in different ways as they do not get the most out of their education, for instance, as they study parts of topics and lessons, they do not get the full picture they deserve. 28 In Virginia, there is evidence that schools lack resources and highly educated teachers. 29 It is evident that the lack of LTSMs also affects parents as they are the people who deal with the learners once they come home from school. 30 Parents, after hearing about the insufficient number of resources at schools, become stressed and question the reliability of the school. Therefore, teachers should put learners into adequate and appropriate sensory contact with the concepts to be learned, and this is possible with the use of LTSMs. William opines that using a variety of LTSMs assists the individual teacher in finding ways of modifying their instruction to suit the diversified needs of their learners. 31 Thus, when learners work with LTSMs, they can solve problems that teachers never thought they could. Ensor adds that LTSMs allow learners to solve problems without any difficulties but through strategies designed and understood. 32 Also, LTSMs can facilitate learning and represent reality in the 20 Phumlani E Myende and Dipane Hlalele, "Framing Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies: A Case for Strength-Based Approaches," Africa Education Review 15, no. 3 (2018) form of an object to clarify the concept which is one way of simply allowing someone to see for herself/himself the characteristics of the object. Some teachers believe that if LTSMs are used in classrooms, they provide evidence that real-life applications could become the subject matter of the school.
It is essential, among other things, to clarify what constitutes this form of Life Skills subject in the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) Life Skills document, in a South African context. Life Skills acts as a cross-cutting subject that supports and strengthens the other core FP subjects (Mathematics and Literacy) and a variety of strategies are specified on how LTSMs are to be used to mediate teaching to enhance learning activities. 33 Thus, in the context of integrating LTSMs into teachers' teaching, strategies should embody different learning styles which include visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic approaches, and relate to the interests and prior knowledge of learners. 34 Spencer notes that the responsibility of the teacher is to organise and present the task using LTSMs and integrate different strategies in such a way that learners can assimilate it as efficiently and rapidly as possible. 35 Although studies above have lamented other things, they did not link this situation to the integration of Life Skills LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies. Since there are no sufficient LTSMs in schools, there is a gap in the literature that has to be filled. As a result, South Africa has continually focused on efforts to overcome the gap by putting efforts in adopting LTSMs in teaching and learning to improve learner achievement and creating a paperless classroom so that learners can benefit from better and more extensive learning options, such as active learning settings. 36

METHODOLOGY
This paper used an interpretive paradigm entrenched in a qualitative approach to determine the integration of Life Skills Learning and Teaching Support Materials into teachers' teaching strategies. Therefore, the primary goal of using interpretivism in this study was to comprehend how LTSMs were integrated into teachers' teaching strategies through their interactions with learners during Life Skills lesson presentations. 37

Research Design
A case study design was used by the authors for a more affluent analysis of the problem under study. This design assisted to give a more concise understanding as they investigated the integration of LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies. The researchers obtained an opportunity to investigate more by immersing a variety of questions with the intention to acquire rich data from the participant's responses. 38

Population and Sample
The population for this paper comprised Grade 3 Life Skills teachers. The sample was drawn from three selected schools in the Dutywa Education District in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Purposive sampling was used to select information-rich individuals as the sample was judged to be typical of the population under investigation. 39 Interviews, observation, and document analysis were used to collect data with the main question to be answered: How do teachers integrate LTSMs into their teaching strategies?

Data Collection Procedures Data Collection Instrument
The data collection instrument used was a semi-structured interview schedule which was conducted with the participants in their respective schools. 40 The researchers observed the interactions of both teachers and learners, teachers integrating LTSMs into their teaching strategies during lesson presentations. 41 The document analysis formed the point of departure and provided a picture of teachers' strategies in integrating LTSMs to mediate quality teaching and learning in Life Skills Grade 3 classrooms. Finally, the participants were informed ahead of the objectives of the study, and they gave their consent to be interviewed by the researchers.
All the collected data were studied and analysed to unlock the hidden information from raw data and transform it into user-friendly information and check if any themes have formed. 42 During the process of data analysis, the researchers tried to retain the voice and sense of originality and fully depended on what was revealed from the elements of CHAT Data were coded, units and categories were formed, and patterns were recognised. The data were grouped into an explication of themes and sub-themes and responses were transcribed and recorded themes were analysed thematically. 43

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
The following themes emerged during the data analysis, and are subsequently discussed:  Lack of Learning and Teaching support materials  Lack of professional development

Lack of Learning and Teaching support materials
The understanding of teachers' integration of LTSMs into teaching strategies was found to be different during the study. All the teachers complained about the non-availability of LTSMs which affects them because they are not able to use different strategies to mediate teaching and learning during lesson presentations. These are some of the views expressed by the participant: strategies in all situations. The LTSMs we have are not in good condition as there is a nonavailability of storage facilities (Interviewee 3C).
The findings reveal that the low level of teachers' understanding and integration of LTSMs into teaching strategies is because of their insufficiency. Despite the complaints, it was positive to hear one teacher saying that she was using the question-and-answer method as one strategy for integrating the LTSMs. The teachers also stated that LTSMs stimulate student thinking and encourage them to understand better. The lack of LTSMs, the condition of available books, sharing of books, professional development, and the non-availability of storage facilities was also a concern that impacted teachers not integrating their teaching strategies effectively. According to Jimenez-Castellano, LTSMs affect a school's accomplishment by either helping or hindering its capacity to create a school culture and deliver high-quality instruction and a lack of resources prevents the programs' quality. 44

LACK OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Lack of professional development was reported to be the cause of the inadequate knowledge and skills to integrate teaching strategies. This has affected some teachers, especially those that need computer literacy skills and is evident in the difficulty to integrate LTSMs into teaching strategies. Their views are highlighted below: The lack of professional development LTSMs affects me during lesson presentations as I am unable to integrate LTSMs into teaching strategies especially those that need computer skills (Interviewee 1A).
During lesson presentations, I have a challenge with the quality of training and the lack of support from the subject advisors. Because they are giving us more work within a short space of time it is worse for those who need computer skills (Interviewee 2B). I see myself having difficulty integrating LTSMs into teaching strategies because I am computer illiterate. If the time of attending workshops can be extended, I would understand better and be able to integrate LTSMs into teaching strategies every time during lesson presentations since I will gain more knowledge and skills (Interviewee 3C).
From the views of the participants, they are unable to integrate LTSMs into teaching strategies because of their lack of professional development and understanding. This is even more challenging for those who need computer skills. This confirms the position of Najumba that if teachers lack didactic and pedagogical abilities and if the needed materials are not available, learners will still fail. 45 He also states that without support from the school or district officials, teachers would be unable to apply their newly acquired knowledge and skills to the benefit of their learners because of the limited time frame of the training sessions. Evidently, there is a limited effort from the departmental officials to organize Life Skills staff development programs to revitalise teachers' efforts. Teachers also revealed that they had attended very few training sessions. Therefore, it is imperative that teachers should be equipped in using LTSMs to mediate teaching and learning for quality education. The supply of LTSMs should be accompanied by professional development to assist teachers to understand pedagogical approaches underpinning the materials they use. This was however not the case with teachers used in this study.
Furthermore, the policy on teacher professionalism draws attention to the importance of strengthening education support services as the DoE believes that the key to reducing the non-use of LTSMs to learning within all education and training lies in a strengthened education support service. 46 However, the findings revealed that there was inadequate support given by the district in terms of monitoring and motivation. This revealed a weakness in the manner in which monitoring and evaluation were being carried out at the district level. This was in conflict with what was stated in the policy document that district officials should evaluate the curriculum through supporting teaching. 47 It has been found that the use of LTSMs served as a targeted intervention for quality education to close the gap in the provision of education in schools. This was caused by the shortage of workbooks to be used by each learner. This was observed when teachers resorted to referring learners to copy activities from the chalkboard instead of using their workbooks. In some cases, learners ended up sharing books because they were not enough for them. In South Africa, the government is, to a larger extent, to blame for the non-availability of LTSMs at schools, more especially in the foundation phase of rural classrooms in the Eastern Cape. Life Skills teachers blamed the non-availability of LTSMs as a contributing factor in not using them to mediate teaching and learning in Grade 3 classrooms. The study found that schools in urban areas were better supplied with teaching and learning support materials than the schools in rural areas, and as such used them. Therefore, teachers and learners without adequate LTSMs become demoralised, and ended up not working productively. DoE advocates that LTSMs are essential to promote a culture of teaching and learning in classroom settings. 48 In support, Najumba contends that LTSMs have the potential to bring revolution in the field of education. 49

RECOMMENDATIONS
The study has revealed that although the Department of Education provides all schools with LTSMs, and clear guidelines concerning their role and use, some teachers are still unable to use them because they are not readily available and they also lack the professional skills to use them effectively. Life Skills teachers, therefore, need sufficient training on how to integrate LTSMs into their teaching strategies to develop their teaching. Also, teachers need to be provided with enough materials and computer skills for effective teaching and learning to ensure quality results. The Department of Education needs to put in the appropriate measures to provide sufficient learning materials and the necessary skills (through constant training) to use them.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, the authors investigated the integration of LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies. The study showed that all schools are provided with LTSMs with the aim of using them to mediate teaching and learning to enhance the quality of teaching. However, some teachers do not integrate LTSMs into their teaching strategies during lesson presentations because of their non-availability and lack of professional development. The Cultural Historical Activity Theory was used to collect and analyse data and its components were used to discuss the integration of LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies. The study concludes that for effective integration of LTSMs into teachers' teaching strategies, teachers need available materials and professional development.