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Wimbainashe Zhakata Mutare Correspondent
Teachers must use locally available resources that are peculiar to local learners in order to make learning relevant to them.

Addressing graduates at Mutare Teachers’ College’s 61st graduation ceremony in Mutare on Friday, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Professor Amon Murwira said there is need for teachers to promote heritage-based education.

“In our development pact, we are saying let us base teaching on our heritage, and by heritage I am talking about our resources. When we teach, let us teach our students basing on the environment around us.

“Let us use locally available materials in teaching our students. A teacher cannot teach an ECD learner about snow that he or she has never seen. Teach them about locally available resources that are found here in Zimbabwe. We need to promote heritage-based education.”

Prof Murwira said the teacher’s job is to connect learners to reality and not invent reality.

“We are encouraging a national culture of thinking big. As a nation, we need to develop things that matter to us and we do it through our teachers. We want to develop things that have meaning to us. It is important that as we move towards a mountain, we track our own path towards that mountain with a lot of confidence,” he said.

“Heritage-based education is conscious of the environment. In Zimbabwe, we have different resources with a lot of agriculturally suitable land. We do not have a shortage of examples for orienting our syllabus towards exploiting our resources for our own development. If one thinks of inventing material for construction, he or she should use materials available in Zimbabwe. Great Zimbabwe was built with stones because stones were the only available material that time and, today, centuries later, it is still standing.”