Project Streetlight X: Building a Transformationspace

Building a transformational space for low-income learners to develop creative problem-solving abilities by engaging with community problems and crafting solutions.

The fundamental problem we are addressing is the lack of quality education in South Africa, especially for low-income families, which has led to 85% of South Africans lacking basic skills and being unable to access meaningful employment opportunities in the skilled labor market. Free public schools are overcrowded and under-resourced, lacking qualified teachers (68% of grade 6 math teachers exhibited content knowledge below grade 6). 78% of Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language, with primary school deficits being nearly impossible to catch up on at a later age. Learners lack exposure to 21st century skills like creativity, collaboration and critical-thinking, and market innovation has only improved middle-income schools charging R20,000+ per annum - an unattainable cost for over 80% of the population, thus perpetuating an unequal and unjust society in which over 16 million of the 19 million children in South Africa are unable to access quality education and create a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

At Streetlight Schools, we have developed a school model based on internationally acknowledged goals for a 21st‐century education and global best practices in education, along with the unique needs of students in our context. Our model emphasizes core knowledge and skills training, creative thinking and problem‐solving skills, responsible relationships and the ability to engage and collaborate to reach common goals. One of the key components of our model is that learning is inquiry-based and student-driven, often relating to problems that students are experiencing in the community and in their own lives. We have experienced great success thus far; however, our students' ideas and solutions largely remain in the classroom. The transformationspace is our plan to upend this paradigm.

Like a makerspace, a transformationspace recognizes knowledge as a product of experience and will provide a space for students to engage in authentic problem solving. What makes it different, however, is that as they build technical skills and problem-solving abilities, our students will use the transformationspace to engage with and craft solutions to real problems drawn from their own lives and the community.Student learning will take on an entirely new quality, and as students develop and engage with and solve increasingly complex problems, their academic outcomes will improve, they will become more likely to obtain higher education, and they will be better equipped to access meaningful, skilled, long-term employment opportunities. 

The impact of this transformationspace will be immense: throughout their primary and secondary educations, our students will make real differences in the community and the lives of themselves and others, and they will develop the critical thinking and problem-solving abilities necessary to continue making an impact throughout their lives as they tackle systemic issues plaguing Jeppestown, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the world.

Our transformationspace will be similar to a makerspace in that it is based on the recognition that knowledge is a product of experience and is designed to provide a space for students to engage in authentic problem solving. While we will use much of the existing low-cost technology that is commonly used in makerspaces, our innovation lies in going a step further and having our students use the skills and competencies they develop to engage with real problems rooted in their lives and the community. As students develop and grow, their transformational work will become more complex and impactful. 

Given the nature of our community, we expect that many of the solutions our learners eventually craft will rely on digital or low-cost technological applications. We will make use of technology such as 3-D printing, microcomputing, and robotics to provide our students with low-cost, high-impact tools they can leverage to address community problems. The focus of our transformationspace will be delivering lessons to students on how to utilize this technology effectively and efficiently while providing guidance and support to students as they independently design and create effective, sustainable solutions to personal and community problems.

Over the next 12 months, our major goals are to: 1) build a dedicated space in our school for the transformationspace; 2) create a repository of lesson plans that teachers can use in the future to introduce students to proper usage of tools and technology; and 3) train our teachers in the inquiry-based learning processes necessary for them to effectively guide and support students through identifying, selecting, creating, testing, and reflecting on solutions for problems.

Over the next 3-5 years, our school will grow by one grade each year, eventually adding grades 4-7. As this occurs, we will grow the transformationspace to accommodate the increased number of students while also modifying and creating new lessons plans and processes that account for the increased abilities and knowledge of our learners. As a consequence of this growth, the problems our learners take on will become more complex and the solutions accordingly more ambitious and impactful. This will lead to the transformationspace impacting more people, including our learners, teachers, families, and the wider community.

Word-of-mouth has been very effective for recruitment; we have been oversubscribed every year since opening and still have a waiting list despite expanding class sizes to accommodate demand. We rarely lose students, and when they do leave our school, we are able to quickly enroll new students. Accordingly, we are not concerned about reaching or retaining students, all of whom will have access to the transformationspace, which will be a core part of our academic model. Through our learners and their families and communities, we will deploy learner-created solutions. All solutions will include accessibility plans and roll-out strategies. 

We currently serve 186 students and their families, 28 full-time teachers and staff, and nearly a dozen contractors. We serve our students and their families by providing quality, affordable education alongside parenting classes on healthy habits and discipline strategies. We also use student-driven learning processes to empower students and are developing inquiry-based practices. We provide employment to our staff members, contractors, and teachers, and we also provide ongoing professional development and support to our teachers. They attend conferences and workshops to advance their practice, and they then turn around and deliver even higher quality education to our students.

In 12 months, we will impact another 50 students and families and 4-5 teachers, staff, and contractors. In 3 years, we will have an additional 100 students and 8-10 teachers, staff, and contractors. To-date, we have seen multiple years’ worth of academic growth per year in our students; the transformationspace will only accelerate that growth as students access hands-on learning and enhance their problem-solving and critical thinking skills. The solutions students create will positively impact the community, and our teachers will develop technological and pedagogical expertise as they support students.

Our core team consists of people with deep educational knowledge and a wide variety of expertise. By leveraging prior experience and networks, we will be able to incubate in our teachers the technological capabilities necessary for the success of the transformationspace.

Our staff and students come from similar communities, so teachers are deeply familiar with the challenges learners face and can effectively support them in creating solutions.Our teachers also receive constant professional development and change their practices accordingly – one of our founding teachers from rural Limpopo attended a design-thinking workshop and now embeds every lesson with it. 

We currently obtain our revenue through grants, school fees (approximately $450 a year), and individual donations.

For the long term financial sustainability of the school and our programs (including the transformationspace), we aim to not require donor funding for core operational costs within 5 years. We reduce overall cost while maintaining quality via innovations in staffing and facility design, and over time will have 3 revenue sources: school fees, a government subsidy, and an endowment. At capacity, our modest school fees (R5,700 per annum in 2018) cover 25% of the ongoing operating cost of running the school. We have applied for the public subsidy available to independent schools, which will cover 50% of the ongoing school cost. Finally, we will raise an endowment to cover the remaining 25%. 

Growth funding will come from our long-term donors: the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the DG Murray Trust, and consistent high-net worth individual donors. These funders have backed us to develop this model and have indicated their ongoing commitment to see it through. 

We are applying to 1) obtain seed funding to purchase necessary technology and 2) partner with MIT and other organizations to obtain access to content experts who can train our teachers in advanced technology use and eventually support our students. South Africa has a dearth of highly-qualified teachers with subject expertise; those who do exist typically work for elite private and public schools. While our teachers are quite talented, many lack the technical skills needed to run the transformationspace and support students. Through Solve, we can obtain training from partners and source experts to develop teachers, thus resolving this problem.

The biggest barriers for our solution are 1) a lack of expertise required to run an advanced transformationspace and 2) insufficient resources to fully train our teachers in inquiry-based learning. Solve can assist us in overcoming both of these barriers through organizational partnerships and mentoring support from individuals. The experts affiliated with Solve can help train our talented teachers to support students, and when teacher expertise runs out, they can provide assistance for our students. There will inevitably be problems students wish to solve that require expertise teachers cannot provide, and Solve connections will provide that capacity while developing teachers.