Problem based learning: application to technology education in three countries

An increasing variety of professional educational and training disciplines are now problem based (eg, medicine, nursing, engineering, community health), and they may have a corresponding variety of educational objectives. However, they all have in common the use of problems in the instructional sequence. The problems may be as diverse as a mechanical predicament, an unexplained phenomena, or patient symptoms. Technology education in secondary schools is undergoing a period of significant change in many countries. It is therefore imperative that technology teacher education adopt not only the technologies that have been identified as being important, but also incorporate appropriate methodologies for the instruction of these technologies. PBL offers a number of relevant features to technology education and it is because of these that the project outlined in this paper has been developed.     

Veld products and income generation in the southern Cape Strandveld

Only marginal farming activities take place in the Cape Strandveld area south of Alber‐tinia. While income from farming and wages are low, coloured families in the district are still making a living from traditional, informal occupations. Over a period of one year the activities of roughly fifty coloured families in the Albertinia Strandveld area were studied. These people being mostly illiterate, no formal questionnaire was used, but the author directly participated in their various activities and asked informal questions about their occupations. A questionnaire was sent out by Du Preez (1988) to about 150 white landowners in the area and we discussed these findings in relation to the informal sector study. Activities included thatch reed cutting, mole catching, honey collecting, aloe juice tapping, firewood cutting, hunting, fishing, breaking in horses, picking wild flowers and collecting sour figs. Higher incomes would be generated by improved techniques and expanded markets, but these activities should not be absorbed into the modern and formal economic system.