Diepsloot Case Study Essay

This case study was conducted at one of the schools around Diepsloot a place situated in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. The place is highly characterized by high crime, unemployment and poverty rate. The class consist of forty-five learners from different diverse and cultural backgrounds. Most of the learners are coming from disadvantaged family backgrounds where family members are unemployed, uneducated, lack of parental recognition and involvement, substance abusers and are living with chronic diseases. For most of them barriers to learning and development can be located within themselves, Centre of learning, education system and the broader social and economic context. These barriers manifest themselves in various ways and only become obvious when learning breakdown occurs or when they suffer from withdrawal symptoms from school or being excluded. Factors that arise as a results of poverty consequently raises the likelihood of learning breakdown and the inability of the system to sustain effective learning.
Subsequent to a thorough conduct of a case study, I then come to affirm that the notion of the barriers affecting the learner in question here encompasses only the external factors such as lack of home involvement in schooling, lack of access and availability to good housing, health and social services.

The contribution of Bruner’s theory of cognitive development lies in helping people understand how children learn and be assisted to learn, and he believed that mental information could be carried out by expressing completed tasks or things to do through the language, and selections and alternatives could be generated right away. Therefore, he took a further step to focus on the fields of perception, reasoning and thinking, cognitive characteristics, education, motor skills in infanthood and