Teacher identities in policy and practice.
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Date
1999
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Abstract
This thesis brings together my two study and work interests, postcolonial theory and
classroom-based research, in order to explore how teacher identities are constructed within the
tensions between policy and practice. I begin by arguing for the usefulness and value of
postcolonial theory in interpreting empirical findings because it foregrounds the politics of
representation and provides good theoretical tools for examining how modernist policy
discourse constructs traditional, rural teachers as subjects of difference. I use a postcolonial
view of identity and agency as being always strategic and provisional, arising out of the
subject's attempts to negotiate the contradictions in western modernity's false claims to
universality. This view of the subject is linked with the interactionist concept of teacher
strategy as arising within sites of contradiction and constraint that are generated within the
wider social structure. In my attempt to identify the primary contradictions and constraints
with which teachers work, I draw on empirical work carried out in local schools and argue
that for rural teachers the tensions between policy and practice hinge around the disjuncture
between tradition and modernity. I use Giddens (1990) to argue that, due to its origins in the
West and its history of colonialism under the guise of rationality and enlightenment, modernity .
cannot be integrated with tradition but can only displace or shallowly assimilate tradition. In
light of this theory, I question the assumption that an imported modernist policy discourse can
be contextualised and made appropriate to South African conditions. To explore this question
further, I use Durkheim (1964) and Bernstein's (1971) concepts of mechanical and organic
solidarity to map the features of these two different forms of solidarity onto case studies of
South African schools. These case studies reveal that policy requires traditional rural schools
to undergo fundamental changes that threaten the foundations on which their cohesion and
effectiveness is built, leaving many schools with a profound sense of displacement. Turning to
the question of the strategies teachers use to negotiate the contradictions that arise within
these "displaced" schools, I find further evidence of modernity's attempts to appropriate and
shallowly assimilate traditional subjects in what I perceive as a strategy of mimicry. Arguing,
with Bhabha (1984), that the strategy of mimicry is a response to, and disruption of, the
western modernist discourses of rationality, democracy, meritocracy and equal opportunity on
which all of modernity's promises of progress rest, I examine the particular mimetic strategy
of "false clarity" (after Fullan, 1991) and suggest that the often unfounded confidence of "new
outcomes-based teachers"is partly a mimicry of the false clarity of policy, and the false clarity
teacher development programmes which attempt to "transfer" the abstract principles and "best
methods" put forward by policy by means of "generic" skills and values which are not generic
at all to rural teachers in traditional contexts, and which they then tend to shallowly and
mechanically mimic. In light of this discussion, I recommend that teacher development needs
to pay more attention to "the singer, not the song" (Goodson in Jessop, 1997: 242) by shifting
the focus from methods and principles to teachers' subjective understandings of their own
work and contexts, and by strengthening teachers' grasp and enjoyment of the formal,
conceptual knowledge they teach. I also suggest that, to avoid the risk of trying to prescribe
and reform teacher identities, how teachers establish their own "sense of plausibility" (Prabhu,
1990) in their own contexts should best be left to them.
Description
Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.
Keywords
Teacher identity., Theses--Education.