Browsing by Author "Samuel, Michael Anthony."

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Accountability to whom? For what? : teacher identity and the Force Field Model of teacher development.
(University of the Free State, 2008) Samuel, Michael Anthony.
The rise of fundamentalism in the sphere of teacher education points to a swing back towards teachers as service workers for State agendas. Increasingly, teachers are expected to account for the outcomes of their practices. This article traces the trajectory of trends in teacher education over the past five decades arguing that this "new conservative trend" is but one of the many forces that characterise present interpretations of the goals of teacher education and development. A de-professionalisation of teaching as a career looms on the horizon. Each era has progressively provided new insights into what the goals for teacher education could and should be. These have become increasingly layered into expanding roles and responsibilities being foisted on teachers. The article argues that this could threaten teaching as a career and fewer individuals now willingly choose the teaching profession. If they do, their accountability is seldom to quality teaching and learning as professional teachers find themselves threatened on a number of fronts by contradictory and often competing forces. The article presents a model for understanding the complexity of forces influencing teachers' identities, and shows why there is a need for creative discursive spaces for the coexistence of these many forces. Rather than capitulate to the forces of conservatism, the article argues that teacher professional growth can flourish when it is able to understand deeply the biographical, contextual, institutional and programmatic forces that impinge on teacher identity. The Force Field Model of Teacher Development thus provides stimulus for creative dialogue and renewal.
African Students who Excel in South African Higher Education: Retro(Pro)Spectivity and Co-Regulation of Learning.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2015) Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Munro, Nicholas.
In addition to being more likely to fail and dropout, African students are also less likely to succeed academically, let alone excel while doing so. In a critical move against a dominant deficit, failure, and drop-out discourse that surrounds African students in South African higher education, this paper reports on a study that explored exceptional academic achievement in African students. Specifically, using the data production strategies of auto-photography and photo-elicitation, eight academically exceptional undergraduate African students in a South African university explored the (academic) activities that were associated with their academically exceptional outcomes. Interpretative thematic analyses of the auto-photographical accounts highlighted not only how the participants excelled academically, but also who they were becoming in the process. Data from three of the eight participants is drawn upon in this paper to introduce the notion of retro(pro)spectivity, and to show how co-regulation of learning can be centralised when explaining an exceptional academic achievement trajectory for African students in South African higher education.
Archaeology of a language development non governmental organisation : excavating the identity of the English Language Educational Trust.
(2003) Dhunpath, Rabikanth.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.
Any attempt at understanding the influences that impinge on teacher development in South Africa is incomplete without an exploration of the role of NGOs, particularly those alternative development agencies that were conceived in response to apartheid education and which continued to pursue progressive, contextually relevant interventions in the transitional democracy. Using the archaeological approach to excavate deep insights into the behaviour of a language development NGO, this study documents the institutional memory of the English language Education Trust (ELET). Portraying two decades of its history (1984 to 2001) through the eyes of key participants in the organisation, the study traces the multiple influences, internal and extraneous, that have shaped ELET's mutating identity as it negotiated the challenges of a volatile and unpredictable NGO climate. The study pursues two reciprocal outcomes. First, it attempts methodological elaboration. In advocating transdisciplinary research, it borrows from the established traditions of empowerment and illuminative evaluation, appropriating their key tenets for an institutional evaluation. Underpinned by the genre of narrative research, the study expands the lifehistory method as an evaluative tool, providing opportunities for organisational members to engage in self-reflexive interrogation of the organisation's life as it negotiated a multiplicity of development challenges. Second, it attempts theoretical elaboration. It challenges classical organisational theory (which derives from the structural - functionalist corporatist mode of management theory), as conservative and inadequate in understanding the organisational culture of an NGO. The study proposes a post-structuralist mode of discourse analysis as complementary to classical management theory in organisational analysis. Conflating theory and method provides incisive conceptual lenses to appraise the contribution of ELET to language teacher development. The study finds that while ELET has been complicit in allowing its mission as a counter-hegemonic agency to be undermined by its submission to normative, coercive and mimetic isomorphism, it nevertheless demonstrates agency to innovate rather than replicate. It achieves this despite the cumulative constraining pressures of globalisation, manifest through volatility in corporate funding, shifting imperatives of bilateral funding agencies, and the fickle agendas of the fledgling democratic government. The study demonstrates that, given these unpredictable conditions, NGOs Iike ELET are forced to reinvent themselves to respond to emerging development opportunities as a hedge against attrition. In this regard, ELET has benefited from astute management and a vigilant quest for homegrown intervention programmes as alternatives to imported literacy programmes, all of which helps it redefine what constitutes emancipatory literacies. Despite its proven record of accomplishment as a site for alternative teacher development, the study demonstrates that a competitive higher education sector a hostile policy environment and the debilitating reporting mechanisms demanded by funders results in ELET's potential as a site for 'authentic' knowledge production to be devalued. A further consequence of this marginilisation is that the organisation finds itself increasingly vulnerable to co-option by the state as a functionary of service delivery, accounting upwards to funders rather than downwards to beneficiaries of development. The study argues that the exploitative relationship the NGO endures with other development constituencies is as much a consequence of the NGO's failure to embrace an expedient corporate culture as it is the failure of these constituencies to acknowledge the potential of the NGO. Hence, rather than preserve the antagonistic relationship between higher education institutes and alternative agencies for knowledge production, they will each benefit by mutually appropriating the accumulated expertise of the other, giving substance to the ideal of a community of reason through creative dialectical evolution. The study concludes with the proposition that one mechanism to operationalise the notion of a community of reason is community service learning, a partnership between higher education institutes, corporate funders and development NGOs, a relationship in which the NGO provides leadership in appropriating disparate energies towards the cultivation of a socially literate country.
Beyond Narcissism and Hero-worshipping: life history research and narrative inquiry.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2015) Samuel, Michael Anthony.
Available in pdf article.
Beyond the Garden of Eden: deep teacher professional development.
(Taylor & Francis., 2009) Samuel, Michael Anthony.
Becoming a professional teacher is falsely understood to be a simple process: usually consisting of a transference of skills to execute classroom pedagogy or classroom management. This article begins by exploring the many forces which influence the curriculum of teacher education in higher education, signaling the complexity of the practice of teaching and the expected roles of teachers within a charged socio-political, ideological as well as educational research arena. It offers a definition of the scope of deep teacher professional development which embraces the complexities of these forces. It particularly addresses the theoretical underpinning that could inform the design and delivery of Initial Professional Education of Teacher (IPET) higher education curricula. The article draws on the experiences of enacting a reconceptualized teacher education curriculum at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Faculty of Education showing the translation of these theoretical conceptions within a curriculum geared towards deep professional learning.
Biographies, experiences and language practices : teachers of early childhood education in Mauritius.
(2013) Ankiah-Gangadeen, Aruna.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.
This study explores Early Childhood Education teachers’ experiences of learning English in multi-lingual Mauritius and the way these influence their pedagogical practices. English is the official language of instruction despite not being the first language of the majority of teachers and learners. Consequently, the children’s first language has become an inexorable feature of Mauritian classrooms. Studying the construction of language pedagogy through teachers’ accounts is a significant step towards understanding the existing dynamics among languages used in the classroom − more so in Early Childhood Education, a key stage that lays the foundation for further language development. My study examines my participants’ experiences of learning and teaching English in a range of contexts. The interpretative paradigm informs the choice of life history as research methodology. This methodology allows the researcher to co-construct the voice of the participants as agents and critics of their own experiences and practices. It provides the researcher with an insight into their experiences of language learning and teaching practices. Data was produced through biographic narrative interviews, classroom observations, informal conversations, and assemblage and commentary on selected artifacts. The data production process was directed towards producing deeper textured insights into the challenges and potential of the use of English. The data was analysed through a grounded and inductive approach. The production of the narratives constituted the first level of analysis. In the second level of analysis, themes identified in the five narratives were analysed through a cross-case comparison. The third level of analysis acted as a validatory move wherein antithetical cases (‘outliers’) were further scrutinised to test initial findings. The findings indicate that the process of teacher development spans across time and contexts that teachers occupy from the time of birth onward. Formal and informal as well as local and foreign contexts influence the teachers’ language experiences in various ways at different points in time. The findings further draw attention to the individualised nature of teachers’ becoming in the midst of blurred boundaries wherein a multiplicity of interacting factors mutually impact upon one another. Teacher agency also emerges as a salient feature of the process. A model of teacher professional development is then presented using the biological construct of evolution to show the intricate link between biographies, experiences and practices. The metaphor of the evolutionary drift depicts teacher development as a process that comprises change through transformation, adaptation and assimilation. The double-edged nature of this process is however indicated since teachers can also modify their environment. The “double helix model of teacher professional development” is then proposed to represent the nuanced complexities of negotiating language learning in Early Childhood Education classrooms. The upward movement of the spiralling double helix highlights teacher professional development as a continuing process whereby biography and pedagogical practices evolve in the light of teachers’ on-going experiences. Teachers enact the interpretation and re-interpretation of these experiences in their pedagogical practices. The thesis concludes by elaborating on the ways in which the study has pushed methodological, contextual and theoretical boundaries. It states the implications of the findings on teachers, teacher educators and policy makers while pointing to the limitations of the study and proposing possibilities for future research.
Burning candles: Turkish Student Teachers’ Experiences of South African (Teacher) Education.
(Kamla-Raj Enterprises, 2011) Samuel, Michael Anthony.
This paper uses a life history methodology to trace the experiences of a group of Turkish students who are training as teachers in the South African higher education system. It analyses the influence of culture, wider societal formings and the role of philosophical approaches to the valuing of teachers, especially the faith-based Gulen Movement which challenges the dominant caricatured notions of Muslim identity and values. The constructions of the identity of Muslim as terrorist and fundamentalist are seen as a product of Western constructions of othering. The Turkish students’ experiences of having been taught by teachers inside and outside the Gulen Movement schooling system allows them to identify their personal career goals of becoming teachers. Links between the reconstructive agenda of post-apartheid South Africa and the Gulen Movement become points of comparison. Their reflections of what marks the identity of student teachers in the Faculty of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and their views of engaging with practicing teachers in South African schools, provides perspectives on what teacher preparation is and could be in a transforming South African education system. Their insights suggest service to humanity through deep commitment and caring, but rooted in the notions of excellence and expertise in disciplinary knowledge. Their international insights provide a means to question the goals for our South African teacher educational curriculum and the training of teachers.
A case study of Mathematics teaching and learning at a rural school in KwaZulu-Natal.
(2001) Van Laren, Linda.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; De Villiers, Michael David.
Abstract available in the PDF.
Casualisation and career pathing of supply teachers in state secondary schools in Mauritius=Ukulondolozwa kanye nokuthathwa komsebenzi kothisha abahlinzeka ezikoleni zamabanga aphezulu eMauritius.
(2022) Boodhoo, Devpreetum Kumar.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Mariaye, Hyleen Marie Sandra.
This qualitative case study examines the casualisation of teachers at secondary school level with the goal of better understanding how short-term contractual teachers carve their careers in response to their casualised status. Despite the importance of teachers in maintaining the quality of education, teaching is becoming a more non-permanent and casualised profession, potentially causing instability in the educational system. The study uses an interpretive lens to explore the ways in which supply teachers personally experienced, perceived and understood the casualisation phenomenon and further probes how these experiences influenced their career path. The conceptual lens of a ‘precariat’ was used as a starting point to elucidate the insecurities faced by supply teachers in relation to their casualised professional status. Data was produced with different categories of supply teachers as well as non-supply teachers in two phases. Firstly, an art-based methodology was used to compose metaphorical collages representing casualisation of teachers. In the second phase, each metaphorical collage was used as a trigger material to carry out stimulated recall interviews, which constituted the main data production tool. The data analysis included building case reports, which were compared and contrasted intra and inter category wise. A further analysis included unraveling supply teachers’ symbolic representation of casualisation and career pathing, firstly, in their narrative reports and, secondly, in the symbolism assigned to numerous aspects of the phenomenon in the metaphorical collages that they produced to portray the professional selves of short-term contractual teachers. The findings suggested that the participants interpreted the casualisation of supply teachers in complex but not always contradictory ways. The supply teachers construed supply teaching both as a no-career job and as an integral part of career-building. The study concludes that the supply teachers were concurrently enfeebled and empowered by their casual status, but they demonstrated hope and resilience despite being cornered by professional precarity. The contribution of this study hinges on the conceptualisations of different categories of supply teachers about the ways their casual status influences their career pathing and on the new perspectives around the ways they convert the challenges of working on short term contracts into leverages for agentic possibilities. The study has implications for broader academic theorisation since it uses Mauritius as a site to generate new knowledge about casualisation in relation to Small Island Developing States. IQOQA Lolu cwaningo luhlose ukuhlola ukutohoza kanye nokucabeka kwendlela yokuqashwa kothisha betoho. Ubuthishela bubhekene nenkulu ingcindezi njengalokhu kunokuqgoza kokuqasheka kwabo emhlabeni jikelele. Le nselelo ibangwa ukuthi othisha abasaqasheki ngokugcwele, okwenza ukuntengantenga kwezemfundo. Ucwaningo lwesimo oluyikhwalithethivu kulandelwa indlela e-interpretive ukuhlonza imizwa yokwesaba othisha betoho ababhekene nabo ngekusasa labo. Kube sekusetshenziswa ikhonsepthi iprecariat ukubheka lesi sihlava sokungaqashwa ngokugcwele kothisha okuphinde kwasebenzisa indlela e-art-based eyindlela yemetaphorical collage. Icollage le isetshenziswe ukuqoqa ulwazi lapho khona othisha bekhumbula izingxoxo zenhlolokhono, okube yilona thuluzi elinqala ekuqoqweni kwemininingo. Ukucutshungulwa kwemininingo kubandakanye ukwakhiwa kwezimimbiko okuye kwaqhathaniswa ezigabeni zonke. Olunye ulwazi lubandakanye izethulo zothisha abayitoho. Ucwaningo lukuvezile ukuthi akubona bonke abanethemba lokuthi umsebenzi wabo uphephile futhi unekusasa eliqhakazile. Othisha betoho bakubona ukusebenza kwabo kuyitoho ngethemba lokuthuthuka ekutholeni isipiliyoni esingabasiza ngengomuso. Okunye okugqamile kulolu cwaningo yithemba abanalo othisha betohi yize noma ikusasa libukeka libufiliba. Ukubaluleka kothisha betoho kuvela lapho kunesidingo nesikhala sabo lapho kushoda khona abantu abaqeqeshelwe ukufundisa. Izwe laseMauritius yilo elisetshenziswe njengendawo eyisibonelo, yokwenza lolu cwaningo, kodwa imininingo etholakele ingasetshenziswa ukubhekana nezinkinga ezingaphansi kwalesi sihloko ngokusabalele.
A critical analysis of the national policy on whole school evaluation and its impact on the management capacities of school principals in the Durban south region in Kwazulu-Natal.
(2007) Neerchand, Rajesh.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.
Critical dialogues with self: developing teacher identities and role.
(Pergamon., 2000) Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Stephens, David.
Abstract available in PDF file.
A curriculum framework for undergraduate studies in dental health science.
(2009) Laher, Mahomed Hanif Essop.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Reddy, Jairam.
This study begins with an ethnographic self-study w hich allows for a reflection on traditional learning experiences. This study is located in the context of the initial development of dental health professionals within those higher education institutions that end eavour to provide education and training in a rapidly changing context. This context is charact erised by the simultaneous need to address the blurring of boundaries and the dichotom ies that exist such as the first world and the third world, the developed and the less develop ed world, the rich and the poor, health and wealth, the private and the public sectors, the formal and the informal sectors, the advantaged and the disadvantaged, the privileged an d the underprivileged. The definitions, concepts, theories and principles around curricula and professional development are examined in an effort to extend int o discoveries of educational research usually beyond the purview of dental health practit ioners, policy makers or higher education specialists involved in training these dental healt h practitioners. It poses key questions regarding the nature of prof essional competences within dental health science undergraduate studies and how the curricula are organised around these perceptions of competence. Investigative tools include particip ant observation, interviews and questionnaires which have included both education d eliverers – the teaching staff - and education consumers – the students. The areas of access by students to programmes (inpu t), activities whilst in the programmes (throughput) and their competences at the exit end of the programme (output) are examined. It was found that institutions and programmes are p aradoxically positioned declaring missions to be globally competitive and internation ally recognised and at the same time wanting to reach out to the population who are disa dvantaged and who form a majority. Whilst the needs of the wider community is for basi c dental services and primary health care, the resources appear to be geared for producing tec hnologically-superior professionals who will cater for a largely urban and middle class pop ulations. The resources available, particularly human resources, for this training, ar e going through a critical shortage. Simultaneously demands are being made to challenge the epistemological rationale of the curriculum practice of the training sites at both u niversities and technikons (now known as universities of technology).
De-colonising international collaboration: the University of KwaZulu-Natal-Mauritius Institute Education Cohort PhD Programme.
(Routledge., 2014) Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Mariayeb, Hyleen.
This paper explores the setting up of the partnership across the Mauritian and South African higher education contexts with respect to the development of a postgraduate PhD doctoral studies programme. The Mauritian Institute of Education (MIE) aims to develop staffing capacities through engagement with doctoral studies, especially in the context of limited experience in doctoral supervision. The South African model of doctoral cohort supervision at The University of KwaZulu- Natal (UKZN) School of Education is a recent alternative model of delivery in the building of these student and staff capacities through shared ownership of the process and products of doctoral education and development. This paper highlights the expectations, constraints and enabling features of the setting up of the UKZN-MIE PhD programme across international boundaries, driven by mutual reciprocity through valuing of indigenous local knowledges, a non-colonising engagement and innovative methodologies for postgraduate education. Adapting the UKZN cohort model for the international context is the subject of this paper. The paper draws on the experiences of the designers and deliverers as well as users of this programme. The paper explores what drives this form of international collaboration for both contracting partners in the context of shifting conceptions of a teacher education institution.
The development of the linguistic repertoire of primary school learners within the Mauritian multilingual educational system.
(2017) Mahadeo-Doorgakant, Yesha Devi.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Rughoonundun-Chellapermal, Nita.
Since Mauritius gained its independence in 1968, English has remained the official medium of instruction within its schooling system, despite the fact that it is used minimally within the broader Mauritian society. This study seeks to understand the development of the linguistic repertoire of the multilingual primary school learners within the changing Mauritian education system, which has recently (2012) undergone a major policy redirection with the official introduction of Kreol Morisien (KM), a dominant lingua franca, taught now as an optional language. This introduction of KM offers potentially a new contextual avenue for the development of the linguistic repertoire of primary school learners. This study adopted a linguistic ethnographic approach to produce data with learners aged from 6-8 years in a single Mauritian primary school. Linguistic ethnographic data with the participants was produced over a nine-week period through classroom observations, audio-recording of different instances of interaction of the participants in numerous contexts, including informal chats with the participants. The data was produced to gain a better understanding of how the linguistic repertoire of learners develops within a multilingual educational system and why it develops the way it does. The ethnographic data was then analysed through comparative discourse analytical strategies emanating from the linguistic field. Key informants providing a more holistic depiction of the emergent linguistic repertoire trends included the staff and management of the school. The analysis reveals that the linguistic repertoire of the learners is shaped by the space in which they use it, by the participants (dominantly peers and teachers) who make up the interactional acts within which they find themselves, and by the semiotised objects which originate within these interactional acts. A thesis emerges to explain the emergent linguistic repertoire of these learners: when learners start their schooling, they carry with them into their primary classrooms and learning spaces a fluid, dynamic linguistic repertoire drawing from the various resources within their unique linguistic backgrounds. Such a repertoire consists of a multiplicity of voices. However, the multilingual educational system, like a centrifuge, works as a rigid system, separating the dynamism of the linguistic repertoire, and extrapolates the fluidity and multiplicity into discrete languages. Consequently, the multiplicity of voices becomes unified into one single voice which correlates with that of the system (educational, social, cultural), and this in turn resonates with the voice of the state (political, ideological). The Educational Centrifugal Linguistic Acculturation Framework (ECLA Framework) paradoxically reinforces rather than challenges the hierarchies between the different languages of the Mauritian society. This ECLA Framework is consequently presented to shed light on how the linguistic repertoire of primary school learners works implicitly to develop hegemony within the Mauritian educational system despite the laudable intention of providing an alternative. The study opens possibilities for reflection on deeper systemic reforms required to enact more democratic recognition of linguistic diversity.
Education for rural medical practice.
(2010) Reid, Stephen John Young.; Vithal, Renuka.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.
In the context of a country and a continent that is largely rural, education for rural medical practice in Africa is relatively undocumented and poorly conceptualized. The arena of medical education in South Africa has been largely unchanged by the transition to democracy, despite intentions of reform. The literature reveals a lack of empirical evidence as well as theory in education for rural health, particularly in developing countries. This report presents twelve original papers on a range of key issues that represent the author’s contribution to filling this gap in South Africa. It aims to contribute to the development of a discourse in education for rural medical practice in an African context, and culminates in a theoretical paper regarding pedagogy for rural health. A conceptual framework is utilized that is based on the standard chronological steps in the initial career path of medical doctors in South Africa. Beginning with the literature that is focused around the need to recruit and retain health professionals in rural and underserved areas around the world, the report then addresses the policy context for medical education in South Africa, examining the obstacles to true reform of a transformatory nature. The selection of students of rural origin, and the curricular elements necessary to prepare graduates for rural practice are then investigated, including the actual career choices that medical graduates make in South Africa. Out in the workplace, the educational components of the year of compulsory community service are described, including organizational learning and apprenticeship as novice practitioners, placed under severe pressure in rural hospitals in the South African public health service. A community-oriented type of medical practice is described amongst exemplary individuals, indicating the aspiration towards a different kind of educational outcome. Finally the thesis as such is presented in the final paper regarding a theoretical basis for education for rural health, consisting of the combined notions of placed-based and critical pedagogy. It is argued that while the geographic elements of rural practice require a pedagogy that is situated in a particular rural context, the developmental imperatives of South Africa demand a critical analysis of health and the health care system, and the conceptual basis of this position is explained.
Educational leadership: the audience creates the text.
(University of South Africa., 2014) Samuel, Michael Anthony.
Alternative conceptions of educational leadership that challenge the performativity culture do not appear substantively to alter the trajectory of practitioner’s everyday choices. This article uses as data the responses from three different audiences to a presentation on such alternative conceptions. The three groups were academics attending an educational leadership conference, circuit managers as part of a post-project workshop, and a group of aspirant school rectors in a training diploma programme. The first two groups were South African and the third a Mauritian audience. The audience responses show how they subverted, re-interpreted and jettisoned the message of the presentation. Three vignettes constitute the analysis of the audiences’ foregrounding of the lived complexities of making alternative leadership choices. The article suggests we need to be aware of how and why practitioners will choose or not to become alternative proponents of the dominant discourses around ‘educational quality’.
Emergent frameworks of research teaching and learning in a cohort-based doctoral programme.
(University of the Free State, 2011) Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Vithal, Renuka.
This article argues that alternate models of doctoral research teaching and learning pedagogy could address the challenge of under-productivity of doctoral graduands in the South African higher education system. Present literature tends not to focus on the models of research teaching and learning as a form of pedagogy. The article presents a case study of a doctoral cohort model programme where attention to both quantity and quality of doctoral “production” are engaged in the curriculum design and methodological approaches employed. In this alternate to the traditional “master-apprenticeship”, epistemologies that the programme creates are influenced by its pedagogical methodologies. This reflective theoretical exploration draws on the experiences of supervisors, staff and students as co-producers of knowledge involved in the research pedagogical process. The doctoral graduands that emerge are able to embrace the roles and responsibilities as researchers and knowledge makers. Rather than the PhD being about individualistic learning, the programme attempts to infuse multi- and interdisciplinary notions of responsiveness to knowledge production in community. It concludes with emergent frameworks for doctoral pedagogies –“democratic teaching/learning participation”, “structured scaffolding”, “Ubuntu” and “serendipity”– as useful explanatory shaping influences which underpin and frame the model promoting a contextually relevant and appropriate doctoral research teaching and learning pedagogy.
English literature teachers’ pedagogical choices at upper secondary level: narratives of Mauritian teachers.
(2020) Korlapu-Bungaree, Rajendra.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Nadal, Pascal Sylvain.
Teacher decision-making is of particular significance in a world increasingly influenced by productivity and accountability mechanisms that simultaneously delineate and constrain teachers’ roles in education. Investigating how teachers make pedagogical choices and how they account for these within their teaching contexts offers a means to explore the dynamic factors that influence the way they teach, and to identify potential relationships between subject specificities and signature pedagogies. Given that English literature is often called upon to reinvent itself in terms of its focus and relevance to contemporary learners, teachers of this subject confront the need to reconcile pedagogical objectives with overarching normalising contextual mechanisms. While there is a rich body of literature on the processes guiding decision making, there is limited empirical research on pedagogical choices in the teaching of English literature. This study explored the pedagogical choices of eight English literature teachers at upper secondary level in the Republic of Mauritius. A qualitative approach was used to identify the different pedagogical approaches and strategies and explore the various factors influencing these choices through an interpretivist paradigm. Narrative inquiry provided deep insight into the pedagogical choices and the rationales teachers ascribe to them. The research participants were co-constructors of knowledge and their voices and experiences were foregrounded through the generation of rich, thick data. Individual interviews, classroom observations, vignette discussions, instructional resources and the researcher’s log provided a nuanced perspective on the phenomenon of pedagogical choice. A grounded approach was adopted for data analysis, with the first level being the production of narratives based on the different data sources, while the second consisted of a cross-case comparative analysis of themes across the eight narratives. The findings indicate that pedagogical choices at the level of planning, instruction and assessment are made in complex interactions amongst intrinsic, curricular, school and external influences. Furthermore, choice in the classroom marks the intersections between teacher beliefs, teacher knowledge, teacher efficacy and teacher agency in relation to the demands of their profession. Pedagogical choices not only impacted on the learning context, but also revealed the school climate and the systemic affordances or restrictions that teachers face, as well as their reactions. Factors such as personal beliefs about the subject as well as pedagogy, subject content and pedagogical content knowledge, experience, a supportive administrative system and leadership could encourage some teachers to venture out of their comfort zone and take pedagogical “risks”. Making pedagogical choices could be also construed as statements of intent, and could reveal ideological and pedagogical positionings which could equally be nuanced by power dynamics. These impact at different levels and moments on the pedagogical choices teachers make, bringing forth elements of hope, anxiety and risk. The thesis proposes that pedagogical choices and stances exist within a continuum. Given these dynamic interactions, trends such as a pedagogy of compliance, a pedagogy of resistance and a pedagogy of compromise can be defined. The findings suggest that teachers could find themselves at different points across the continuum at different points in time and that such positionings are often negotiated through their understanding of freedoms and ‘unfreedoms’ in making pedagogical choices. Few studies have considered the construction of freedom of pedagogical choice and the way it is experienced by teachers and used for a variety of purposes. This study thus contributes to a deeper understanding of how pedagogical choices are made in the classroom and the active role teachers play in the process. Given these findings, it is important for teachers to become more mindful of the conditions under which they make specific pedagogical choices, and the way these become part of their repertoire of pedagogical moves.
The experiences of women leaders in the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU)
(2008) Mannah, Shermain.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.; Govinden, Devarakshanam Betty.
This study answers the critical question: How do women leaders experience gender equality in the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU)? It focuses on five women leaders in the union, illuminating their experiences and evolving gender consciousness. This qualitative study addresses a gap in research on gender in teacher unions, to understand and reveal how women who have accessed previously male-dominated spaces experience gender equality. The women leaders’ experiences are a prism through which to understand the “depth” of the substantive experience of gender equality in the union. It examines how the union through its organisational bureaucracy, culture and politics shapes their experiences. Through a historical analysis of the gender and liberation struggle, I demonstrate the trajectory of achievements, challenges and visions for gender equity in South Africa within the trade union movement, noting the achievements and highlighting lost opportunities to advance gender struggles of its members. The study theorises different conceptions of feminisms and imagings of organisations to understand the women’s experiences in relation to the union and to broader society, within the culture, politics and bureaucracy of the organisation. I extended this lens by exploring differing conceptions of feminisms to understand the gendered experiences of the women leaders as they traverse life from childhood to adulthood. Conceived with the broader realm of feminist methodology, I use elements of life history research, notably in-depth interviews to produce narratives in the form of “harmonised poems” to illuminate the public and private experiences of the research participants, providing deep insights into their evolving gender consciousness. The analysis is multi-dimensional, traversing the influence of the family, school, and the historical and political contexts that shaped the women’s gender consciousness. The findings indicate that teachers’ contradictory class location, history of patriarchy and acceptance of sexual division of labour contribute to the women leaders’ experiences of gender inequality in the union. These experiences of inequality were magnified by apartheid’s1 structural and ideological roots, which shaped gender roles while simultaneously catalysing the development of gender consciousness and advancing political activism. In this regard, the family served as a crucial site of gender socialisation, while the school formally reproduced a hierarchical gendered society. At the organisational level, hierarchically bureaucratic structures maintained and reinforced particular patterns of control and power through the formal system of trade union governance in which gender oppression is institutionalised and legitimised under its banner of emancipatory politics. However, women in the organisation are by no means innocent victims of hostile patriarchal forces, but are active participants in their own oppression as they strategically comply with institutional norms. Significantly, the findings indicate that equality of opportunity for women leaders in the union does not translate into equality of outcome. This thesis contributes to the theoretical debates on evolving gendered consciousness by advancing an extended conceptual lens to interrogate women’s gendered experiences in predominantly patriarchal spaces. It identifies four domains of evolving consciousness. Starting with the divided self in the domain of home, girl children imbibe the dominant hierarchical social structures, and fixed gender roles are inscribed here. However, the family domain provides the catalyst for a developing consciousness among the women as children. The socialised self emerging in the domain of the school emphasises the gender socialisation, both overt and covert, that occurs in schools. It illuminates their evolving gender consciousness by resisting such subjugation initially as students and later as radical teachers. Progressing to the domain of the union, the women embody a strategic self in response to gender inequality in SADTU, which often takes an organisational form that contradicts its espoused policy and public pronouncements. Armed with the maturity to transcend their individualised gender consciousness, the women leaders emerge with a collective consciousness determined to break down the barriers to equality at the structural level. Finally, in the emerging collective self, the women simultaneously embody elements that constrain their individual emancipatory impulses while trajecting them to potentially higher levels of consciousness as change agents. Their willingness to embrace a shared consciousness and their call for activism indicate a shift towards heightened collective consciousness. As they move from their individual subjugated selves to their heightened collective, transformed consciousness, they express a compelling desire for collective agency to challenge structural drivers of inequality and enact change at the systemic level.
A failure of care : a story of a South African speech & hearing therapy student.
(2002) Beecham, Ruth.; Samuel, Michael Anthony.
The South African 'helping' profession of Speech and Hearing Therapy (SHT) is unable to train sufficient numbers of Black African First-Language (BAFL) speaking graduates to support claims of equity in service provision to the population as a whole. The first part of this study presents a model of professional development that argues for the profession's epistemological foundations to be significantly implicated in creating a training programme that is both structurally racist and resistant to fundamental change. Set against this, however, is the socio-political context of South Africa that is demanding educative parity. This study, therefore, attempts a re-problematisation of the professional curriculum by firstly re-locating the research approach away from the problematic epistemological foundations of the discipline, and secondly, by introducing the historically marginalised voice in professional curriculum debates: A BAFL-speaking student who has experienced significant difficulty in negotiating the professional curriculum. This life-history study is, therefore, aimed at revealing a student's interpretations of her training through the lens of her past life experiences. Nolwazi's story points to a fundamental difference in conceptualising the nature of 'help' or 'care', from that of her professional training programme. As a result, and while claiming that the rational, objective discourse of the training programme teaches separation of therapist from client, she experiences significant alienation from the teaching and learning process. On the basis of her analysis offering a significant resonance to the arguments put forward in developing the current model of professional training, an alternative model of curriculum process for a therapeutic discipline is presented. Realistically, however, it is suggested that a curriculum founded on 'care' will not supersede that based upon 'separation' - because of the interests served in maintaining the latter. It is concluded that the professional training programme will be able to resist change to its epistemological foundations, and that issues of inequity will become obsolete, once South African schools are able to provide a sufficient pool of BAFL speaking students who have been educated to accept western rationality as the legitimate basis for the expression of a health profession's 'care.'