Teachers must be placed at the centre of efforts to reform the country’s ailing education system.
This is the message that resonated in the second day of the South African Basic Education Conference in Durban.
“The government should really listen to what teachers are saying,” said Yael Shalem, an associate professor at Wits University. “For example, when we introduced OBE [outcomes based education] teachers knew it was not going to work.”
Attended by 600 academics, teachers, principals, provincial government officials and NGO delegates, the conference is aimed at finding ways to improve the education system. Its range of speakers, who submitted more than 300 peer-reviewed abstracts, includes professors from the country’s universities and education advocacy groups.
Listening to teachers’ concerns and agreements over reform initiatives would help win their favour for those reforms, said Loyiso Jita, a professor at the University of Free State’s School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education.
Jita’s premise is that changes in the system can only work if teachers buy into it.
“They’ve got to be convinced that whatever we’re doing is necessary. We must appreciate that if we’re asking them to do certain things they need to be convinced that it is good for children,” he added.
This would also determine the type of support teachers need, he said. “We introduce a new curriculum and pre-determine that teachers need this support, while we have not established if teachers need such support.”
Failure to achieve that will maintain the status quo, which is coupled with confusion of what is to be done in the classroom — he said.
Jita had earlier told the conference that in a system dealing with teachers, some boasting decades of experience, introducing reforms was tantamount to effecting changes to their lives.
Currently teachers were not “intimately” involved in curriculum alignment. Shalem said this has to change if “we’re to treat teachers as professionals”.
“We ask teachers to produce miracles, and at the same time we blame and shame them,” she added.
“It’s time that teachers are not just named and changed. They must be held to account if they’ve given tools.”
Furthermore, “teachers’ work has been destabilised” by the three curricular systems the country’s education has undergone, said Shalem.
KwaZulu-Natal premier Zweli Mkhize, who addressed the conference, agreed that a “platform to listen” to teachers needed to be created. As the government “we must also be prepared to listen”, he added.
But it shouldn’t matter how current policies have been developed and adopted, said Joint Education Trust chief executive Godwin Khosa, adding that they now need to be implemented effectively to move the country’s education forward.
“What we got into [policies] it’s water under the bridge. We must see to it that teachers are supported.”