Abstract
The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the role of education trade unions in the construction of principals’ professional identity. The study focused on the following themes:
the personal dimension of school principals, which includes norms and values, task perception, self-efficacy and motivation; secondly,
social dimension of school principals, which entails teaching philosophy, diversity management, conflict and interaction with stakeholders;
the leadership dimension and union membership of school principals, which include professional development workshops, school management, union complains and cadre deployment.
Teacher unions are professional, registered lobby organisations that exist to protect teachers from unfair labour practices and to negotiate teachers’ salaries and government policies in education. They are key role players in major decisions made by the government in the education sector. Professional identity is attributed to the attitudes, values, knowledge, beliefs and skills shared with others within a professional group. Shared learning, sense making and dialogue are critical for the development of professional identity. Principals’ identity construction is linked to the professional community to which they belong and the engagement they have with it.
This qualitative study explored the role of education trade unions in the construction of principals’ professional identity. The study focused on eight participants – four participants were affiliated with NAPTOSA and four were affiliated with SADTU. Purposive sampling was used to select 8 principals representative of two union membership, primary and secondary schools, as well as gender and racial groupings.
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Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Prior to the interviews, the participants received a reflective question on their union membership and challenges and successes as school managers, as well as profile questions relating to their number of years in education, race, gender and norms and values. I adopted purposive sampling because I was only interested in two specific unions (NAPTOSA and SADTU), and my intended participants were only school principals.
In semi-structured interviews, the participant and the interviewer converse while being directed by an open-ended interview protocol and supported by additional questions, probes and comments. I used the narrative methodology, which allowed me to use stories as raw data to learn more about each participant’s identity, experiences and culture. Social constructionism, specifically leadership as identity construction, was used as the theoretical framework. The personal dimension of principals’ identity, the social dimension of principals’ identity and leadership and union membership were used to present the data. The findings revealed that unions did play a role in the professional identity construction of these school principals.
Keywords: leadership, professionalism, professional identity, teaching philosophy, teacher unions.