‘Friday Absenteeism’ is a project that started with the recognition of the principal of a primary school in rural KZN that many of the learners, especially those from the nearby informal settlement missed school on Fridays because they needed to earn money in the market. While the amounts they would make working at the stalls would only be ten or twenty rand, according to him, it was enough to see them through the weekend in terms of food and necessities. The principal, though, was concerned that the learners could not afford to miss a day a week of school, and also that it sent a message to other learners that school was not important. He worked with the grade six learners over five to six class sessions, starting with giving them some basic instruction on using disposable cameras and brainstorming with them some of the issues in their community that might keep them from coming to school. The photo taking was divided into two sessions: Session One the principal accompanied the learners into the community to take pictures of ‘the issues’: Poverty, alcohol, HIV and AIDS, pollution, poor housing, inadequate toilets. Session Two, he accompanied them into the market where they took pictures of the children working in the market, working conditions, etcetera, and where they also conducted interviews and kept field notes. Sessions Three to Five were devoted to:

(1) looking at the pictures in groups and selecting particular pictures that ‘told the story’ of problems and solutions;

(2) putting together in each group a poster that included the five ‘best pictures’ of the problems along with a narrative write-up; and

(3) a session where the groups presented their work to each other. As a follow-up the students were to present their findings to the whole school and a stakeholders forum.

The ‘findings’ from the work of the learners in the community were dramatic: Images of adults drinking in the middle of the day, the inside of a shebeen, dangerous places for walking, pollution and so on. Their images in the market were even more dramatic. For one thing, they discovered that it wasn’t just children from their school who were skipping school; there were learners from many other schools. One of the girls from the school was there, she said, because she was bullied at school. When she had reported it to the teacher, she was told to ignore it, but her way of ignoring it was to leave the school. In this case it was the principal who took action to confront the teacher. The children’s posters suggest ways of following up, but the presentation of the posters to the community exists as a ‘follow up’ in and of itself for taking action.

Students with Jean Stuart and Claudia Mitchell