“This is an absolute culture shock! To see something that seems so simple, but the results of which are unmistakable,” says a specialist from child development and advocacy organisation Worldvision in an article published in The Witness, referring to the skills children from over 60 schools in the KwaZulu-Natal district of South Africa are acquiring in Psychomotricity classes. “Children’s behaviour changes and they develop self-pride from an early age,” he continues. “Parents have noticed that their children start to behave differently at home and a mother told me that her child intervened in a situation of aggression by saying, ‘We don’t hit each other’. The article goes on to say that in schools where children have the opportunity for regular psychomotor activities, teachers report the effects of more self-control and cooperation, and as a result of the work of the PEISA Psychomotor Association, aggression among children in KwaZulu-Natal has halved in the last 30 years.
How has this happened and what happens now?
This is what a BAPMT team will be checking on the ground in South Africa from the 19th to the 31st of August 2024. The reason for the study visit is the search for good practices in movement pedagogy in education around the world.
The BAPMT team will be hosted by PEISA and Michelle Kocheleff-Hoffman, who has been a friend and advisor to BAPMT since its inception in 2020.
On our agenda is a visit to a pre-school tutoring group at the Sunnylea Center, which is a PEISA training center. Its founder, Lynne Freestone, will be interviewed by BAPMT about the introduction of psychomotor practice at Sunnylea.
Observation lessons in several other nurseries and schools are also on the programme. These include both very poor and very wealthy institutions – Jacaranda Kindergarten is state-run, and in Dalton Settlement the nursery is organised by the locals in hut-like premises directly in a field in the African bush. The village nursery at Mpopomeni is of the same slum type, and Clifton School and Wykeham College are schools for wealthy children. Ridge, on the other hand, was the first to start a psychomotor programme more than 25 years ago. They all have one thing in common – children everywhere attend regular psychomotor classes and develop a socio-emotional competences that enables them to learn more and better, as well as being more relaxed.
We will meet Glen, a mother of a child in the first psychomotor toddler group in order to hear her stories for her child’s development.
We hope to be able to get a glimpse of the whole picture from the KwaZulu-Natal area, and to understand the circumstances that led to the introduction of psychomotor practice as a sustainable and helpful modality for all children there.
Stay tuned for reports and interviews.
