Abstract
Ph.D. (Education and Curriculum Studies)
This study is about teachers’ identity shifts during the first waves of educational reform in South Africa in the post-apartheid renewal and restructuring of the education system. I studied the everyday life of four teachers in a “township” school in Gauteng Province, the industrial heartland of the country.
I set out to find, over a three of years, how teachers saw themselves as professionals in this changing landscape, which included a three of new policies, including a new curriculum policy and a school governance policy. The study started with the knowledge claim that the researcher would find a shift in teacher identity, working from theories of self, specifically symbolic interactionism. I argued that in the establishment of a “post 1994” identity, as citizens and as educational practitioners, teachers have been the object of multiple social interventions. The least of these is not their adapted teaching modes and their performance as “OBE practitioners”, but as educators who took on the identity of the curriculum and its ideological intent. This was to shift teachers’ focus to learning outcomes more than content input and to see themselves as “guides by the side”, facilitators of learning, creating learning conditions that would optimise the potential of children and youth. For many teachers, the move away from being the giver or instructor to being the guide may be disturbing, I argued at the outset. I was interested to see how they engaged with a new life in a new system, or rather, a system “under repair” and one which may ask of them not only to adopt the “seven new roles of educators” as per the first policy change, but with that, also their sense of who they were, their sense of self as practitioners ...