Out with the term ‘educator” and bring back ‘teacher”. This is one of 40 recommendations contained in report entitled A National Framework for Teacher Education in South Africa.
Released in June, the report was produced by the ministerial committee on teacher education, initially set up in February 2003 to look at how current policies could be drawn into a unified system for teacher development.
And, some say , this latest step comes not a moment too soon. As the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union pointedly notes, ‘nearly 12 years into the new South Africa, we still have no national teacher-development strategy”.
While the report outlines many practical nuts and bolts of how such a system could work, it also analyses how terminology and perceptions of teachers have created obstacles to their professional development.
For example, the report’s first recommendation — to retrieve the word ‘teacher” — may sound like a purely cosmetic detail, but it is identified as a central ‘conceptual” problem in the education system. The current term ‘educator” is used for almost everyone, from district managers and principals to those who do the actual teaching. This, the report argues, has resulted in the distinctive roles of those in education — managers, administrators, teachers — being blurred. It also leads to a failure to recognise that all other education posts are there only to serve the central purpose of the entire system — teaching and learning. Retrieving ‘teacher”, argues the report, will refocus the system.
The term ‘qualified teacher” is also identified as ‘a source of resentment and controversy”, and the report recommends that it be replaced by the term ‘licensed teacher”. Becoming licensed would be directly linked to teachers gaining a set number of professional development points through their participation in a range of endorsed professional development activities in three-year cycles.
Wally Morrow, one of the authors of the report, also warns of the dangers of ‘the continuing tradition [inherited from apartheid] of wanting to exercise micro control over the work of teachers” and seeing them as ‘unwilling employees”, rather than as committed members of a profession. Such a perception amounts to the status of teachers being systematically undermined, says Morrow, which becomes another stumbling block to the national transformation drive to offer quality education for all.
In line with the central role of teachers as professionals in the education system, the report recommends the implementation of the ‘teaching and learning” career path that will emphasise the role of teaching in the whole system and allow teachers to be recognised and rewarded for staying in the classroom (rather than being promoted out of it, as is currently the norm).
Offerings in continuing teacher development — usually devised by an uncoordinated range of players, from provincial departments to countless NGOs — come in for criticism, described as being ‘haphazard, not clearly focused, and directionless”. This, the report notes, has resulted in substantial resources being directed towards professional development but without meaningfully improving the quality of teaching. It recommends that a Continuing Professional Teacher Development system be devised, managed by the South African Council of Educators, that is integrated with other systems such as the Integrated Quality Management System and the Workplace Skills Plan. Importantly, this should ‘enable teachers to become less dependent on outside agencies for their professional development and more able to become responsible for their own development”, in line with an understanding of them as self-motivated professionals.
The report also warns of the very real prospect of the system facing ‘severe shortages [of teachers] in the medium to longer term”. Even discounting the effects that the HIV/Aids pandemic will have on teacher attrition, the report estimates that the country is already producing at least 13 000 teachers too few a year to meet the system’s needs. Reasons offered for this include the high costs of study, especially with the closure of teacher training colleges, and decreasing prospects of employment for newly qualified teachers.
The report recommends that the traditional system of providing full-cost loans for initial teacher education students be reintroduced, linked to service contracts.
The Director General of education, Duncan Hindle, says the department is ‘excited” by the report. It will form the basis of the department’s considerations of a national policy framework, hopefully to be completed before the end of the year, says Hindle.