David Macfarlane
As many teachers dying every year of HIV/Aids as qualify to teach; school districts exhausting their annual budgets within two months on transporting deceased teachers to their homes; widespread closure of schools because HIV/Aids has stripped them of their teachers …
These nightmare scenarios afflict Zambia, Malawi and the Central African Republic respectively and South African schooling could be heading the same way. The devastating impact of HIV/Aids on teachers and learners was a repeated concern at a national policy conference on teacher training and development convened by the Department of Education last weekend in Midrand, Gauteng.
The conference also heard that there has been an incredible 85% decrease in the number of students in pre-service teacher education programmes between 1994 and last year.
These alarming trends are being identified at a time when the need for effective and widespread teacher training has never been greater. The country is poised to implement Curriculum 2005, the radically new teaching and learning methodology that has been on the drawing board since the mid-1990s. Nearly 400000 in-service teachers have to be trained in the new curriculum by 2004.
“We can no longer afford the silence [on HIV/Aids],” Minister of Education Kader Asmal said in his opening address to the conference, Learning to Teach: Teaching to Learn. “Although reliable information on teacher infection is difficult to obtain, what information is available shows that teachers in this and other countries constitute a high-risk group … [T]he reality is we are now faced with increasing absenteeism and deaths in our educator corps.”
Addressing a conference workshop entitled HIV/Aids and Teacher Supply, Dr Saul Johnson of Abt Associates pointed out that HIV infection levels of women attending antenatal clinics show no evidence of levelling out. “And since 40% of teachers are women under 40,” he said, “we must conclude teachers are at a high risk of infection.”
The increasing incidence of Aids orphans also places teachers under new and intense pressures. “We don’t have a conception of the difficulties and stresses teachers are already under because of this,” said Sue Rees, director of professional and curriculum development at the Independent Schools Association of South Africa. “Teachers are going to have to be able to cope with rapid change; they’ll primarily be carers.”
Worryingly low numbers of teachers are entering the profession, the conference also heard. “Enrolment in teacher training is way down,” said education department consultant Luis Crouch. More than 30 000 new teachers per year are needed, but production capacity is now at best 5 000, he said.
And areas such as science and maths remain seriously short of teachers. The University of the Witwatersrand told the Mail & Guardian it has 75 students enrolled this year for its teacher qualification, the HdipEd, but only 10 of these have science and maths as teaching subjects, and eight have maths and biology. Of about 80 students in this year’s teaching certificate programme at Rand Afrikaans University, only four have maths or science.
The teaching profession has a serious image problem, the conference repeatedly heard, and ways need urgently to be found to attract more people to the profession. “One of the primary tools must be a more aggressive marketing and recruitment campaign, “Asmal said, “as well as new recruitment modes … This will need to be supported by a change in the public perceptions of teaching.”
Fast-tracking teachers into the classroom in substantial numbers will require a fundamental rethink of teacher qualifications. Rees said a two-year diploma followed by on-the-job training will probably become the norm, rather than the current four-year, full-time standard qualification.
Because all teacher training now takes place in universities and technikons into which the former colleges of education have been merged the need to bump up teacher numbers drastically will have implications for admission criteria. “There is no question that in the short term tertiary institutions will have to recruit students, such as matriculants with a poor schooling, who may not have been accepted before. Universities must just adapt their education curriculums,” Rees said.
An additional concern for some educationists is that a national strategy for teacher development has not yet emerged, although other moves towards implementing Curriculum 2005 are far advanced. Public comment on the draft curriculum closed two weeks ago, and the education department is now analysing submissions with a view to finalising the curriculum within three months.