Bronwen Kausch
Women need to be the agents of change in our social discourse. What we value in society is what men do — what women do is viewed as unimportant and the field of education is no different.
These are the views of professor Shirley Walters, the director of the division for lifelong learning at the University of the Western Cape, the chairperson of the South African Qualifications Authority and a social activist.
“We need to think about positions differently. We get stuck when we look at women in leadership rather than focusing on women who lead. At a grassroots level, women are doing all the leading, whether it is in an informal crèche or soup kitchen in the community. It is women who are running these organisations and ensuring their sustainability,” she says.
The obsession with demographics obfuscates the real leadership issues and merely by looking at tick boxes for equity reporting, we are not eradicating sexism or the various forms of chauvinism from education, Walters says.
“What we need is to open the debate on how we classify one another. We need to find spaces where we can affirm who we are as women and where we can challenge the dominant or hegemonic structures in which we work.”
Walters is passionate about women taking control of how they interact and operate as teachers. This extends particularly to the impact of violence on both students and teachers.
With the issue capturing more and more headlines, Dr Junita Kloppers-Lourens, the Democratic Alliance’s shadow minister for basic education, believes violence in schools has to be addressed urgently.
“We are hearing daily of how teachers are being verbally and physically abused in the classroom. When basic security needs are not being addressed, I would be hard-pressed to recommend teaching as a career choice for a young girl in matric,” Kloppers-Lourens, herself an ex-teacher, says.
Walters says the effects of learning and violence are having a fundamental impact on our education system and believes that the incidence of abuse — whether sexual, physical or emotional — is so high that it is reasonable to treat most educators and students as though they are victims of abuse.
The Learning and Violence website, a Canadian project championed by Dr Jenny Horsman, goes into detail about the impact of violence on students and teachers.
According to Canadian researchers, repeated trauma can lead the brain to view all novelty, excitement or anxiety as a threat. As a result, students who attempt to learn in a violent environment may be defiant and pick fights, daydream, be listless and play truant. Often they may also be diagnosed with disorders and learning disabilities.
Walters believes that this violence leads to young girls withdrawing into themselves, becoming fearful and not wishing to attract attention to themselves.
“Often, through violence, women are taught to know their place, not to put themselves forward.
“How can we expect these women to extend themselves into leadership positions? Violence is everywhere. Patriarchy is a form of violence,” she says.
To approach teaching in a different way calls for a radical mind shift and Walters says it is only when we make the effort to let go of the calcified preconceptions we hold on to that teaching will move on to be more inclusive of women.
“We are captured by a legacy of not actually addressing racism and sexism. In fact, we should be talking about social justice, not racism and sexism. We are so busy counting numbers, we aren’t changing society,” she says.
Walters believes that the equity improvement we are seeing is not changing the system and says that even those women who are in leadership positions in education still tend to lead in a patriarchal fashion.
Issues of violence and how it affects students and teachers is gaining some airtime among academics. But, unfortunately, it still seems to be low on the government’s radar and the department of basic education has not commented on the issue — a fact that must sit uncomfortably with thousands of teachers, many of them women, who are thinking about leaving their classrooms for better working conditions.