Suchergebnisse

Includes bibliographical references ; This thesis employs a life-history approach to investigate how a teacher-identity is cohered under conditions of education resistance in South Africa. The life-history is situated within the broad rubric of narrative studies, but extends this to investigating a teacher's life within its complex locations of class, race, gender and religion. Alie Fataar was a legendary teacher at the Livingstone High School in Claremont, Cape Town, was a founder-member of the Non European Unity Movement (NEUM), General-Secretary of the Teachers' League of South Africa (TLSA), founder-member of the African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), and Joint-Secretary of the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA) in exile. He was banned in 1961 under the Suppression of Communism Act, and went into exile in 1965. The study tracks his teaching and political journeys in South Africa, and across three fledgling post-colonial African countries, namely Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The primary data employed in the study are the transcribed narratives of more than fifty hours of semi-structured interviews conducted with the teacher, Alie Fataar. The study also employs secondary data in the form of life-history documents sourced from the respondent, and is supplemented by photographs sourced from the respondent, as well as archival materials which supplement the narrative data. This vast body of data is analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Data analysis was facilitated by the employment of QSR-NVivo 10, a qualitative data-analysis computer software package well suited to a grounded theory analysis. The study is the first known doctoral work in South Africa to utilise a life-history framework to explore the contextualised life of a teacher associated with the TLSA as this life engages with legislative frameworks, official policies, professional teacher associations, local communities, colleagues, personal networks, political movements and other social actors in the context of resistance in South African education. The study helps us understand the fluid discursive dimensions of a teaching life as it navigates complex personal, political and professional fields in the broader context of education resistance in fiercely contested social and political arenas. The study's main finding is that Alie Fataar resists several essentialising social forces, including class, racial and religious identities, and, in doing so, the study finds that Alie Fataar holds consistently to a central, life-organising identity of the teacher as the supreme public intellectual under conditions of resistance in education and the broader socio-political-economic framework in South Africa. The study contributes to the still-sparse academic literature on the teachers of the TLSA, and simultaneously contributes to Cape social history and the politics of intellectual marginalisation in the Muslim community in the Cape from the first quarter of the twentieth century. The study makes theoretical contributions to the academic fields of life-history and the literature on exile, and contends that the researcher-researched continuum must be made explicit throughout a life-history study if the authorial voice of the subject of such a study is not to be subjugated. In terms of teacher-policy formulation, the study finds that the complex and nuanced identity-formation of teachers makes it imperative that the teacher-policy arena incorporates the voices of teachers in policy formulation. This avoids policy mismatches with regard to the very group, teachers, who are expected to adopt and implement these policies in schools.

Includes bibliography. ; This study seeks to identify discourses of professionalism and the production of Teachers' professional identity in the South African Council for Educators (SACE) Act of 2000. These identifies are located in the context of their social impact on, and in the actualisalion of the political roles of teachers in post-apartheid South Africa. Central to the study is the conceptualisation that discourses coiistruct identities. The research methodology is derived from Ian Parker's approach to discourse analysis, which is premised to an extent on post-structruralist thought. The author summarises Parker's 'steps' to effect a discourse analysis, and constructs a set of five analytic tools with which no analyse the SACE Act of2000. The study's main finding is that two discursive frames constitute the roles of the post-apartheid teacher in South Africa. The first is a bureaucratic discourse of marketisation that defines a role for teachers in preparing students for participation in a global market economy. A second discourse which is identified in the study is a democratic professional discourse, which delineates a critical, independent professional role for teachers. The study suggests that the two teacher identities are in tension. The two identities are complex and are simultaneously constructed and actualised.