This article reports on an ethnographic field study of project work in a grade 7 class in a disadvantaged primary school on the Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa. The purpose was to explore the potential use of project work (encouraged by the new South African school curriculum with its emphasis on continuous formative assessment)for information literacy education. The study found crucial gaps between official policy and classroom practice. Teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning were found to be the key to effective project work-and, therefore, to its value for information literacy programs.

Introduction

The underlying purpose of the research project I describe in this article is to explore ways of introducing information literacy education into schools that lack the resources usually associated with such education in the developed world. The study took place in a circuit of 15 primary schools on the Cape Flats. This article reports on the first phase of the project: a field study of project work in grade 7 in one primary school, Galant Primary, between July and September 1997. The school is situated in Paradys, a disadvantaged township about 14 kilometers from the center of Cape Town. (The names of the school, its teachers, and its surrounding township have been changed for this article.) The initial aim in this first phase was to take a close look at project work in one school with a view to "building on" to its information literacy education. However, as the study progressed, its purpose shifted to exploring the gaps between curriculum policy and classroom practice. An understanding of these gaps was found to be crucial to any future planning for information literacy education.

Background

Changes in education in South Africa since 1994 signal a more favorable climate for information literacy education. For example, our new curriculum, Curriculum 2005 (Department of Education, 1997a), recognizes information handling skills as one of its eight critical cross-field outcomes. Our Western Cape Interim Curriculum (Western Cape Education Department, 1995) allocates one period a week to information skills as well as recommending that information skills should be an "integrated part of a teaching and learning approach" (p. 2). The shift, evident in national and provincial policy documents, from examinations toward continuous formative assessment by means of projects and portfolios should encourage this kind of integration.

It has been claimed that information skills are inherent in project work. Much has been written about the common ground between the project method of learning and information literacy education (Avann, 1985; Wray, 1985; Kuhlthau, 1993). Primary schoolchildren in the United Kingdom apparently spend between 20% to 50% of their week on project work (Long, 1988). No figures are available for South African schools, but the recent changes have meant an increase in project work in all our schools.

In South Africa, classrooms are teacher- and textbook-centered (Kallaway, 1990) and fewer than a third of our schools have any sort of library (Department of Education, 1997b). Significantly, the Western Cape Interim Curriculum argues that the absence of a school library should not preclude information literacy education. It points out that "information resources can be found among the people and in the environment of any community" (p. 2). The challenge in South Africa is to design programs that use the insights of international research, yet are feasible in disadvantaged schools.

The term disadvantaged perhaps calls for some explanation. Apartheid, with its 19 racially based education departments, has left huge inequalities in our schools. In 1995, the Western Cape Education Department amalgamated five old departments. About 73% of our schools in the Western Cape Province are ex-House of Representative schools-the historically colored schools. In 1986, a national survey (Overduin & De Wit, 1986) found these to have 2. …