THE EMERGENCE OF TEACHER IDENTITIES: DEFINING A PROJECT
5.4 A SOCIAL REALIST ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE DATA
“not her choice” and for Nomsa it was only “through the help o f my boyfriend” that she studied to become a teacher.
She told me:
I adopted. I just said to them. I was playing that time. And the social workers were here and were saying this child just got smacked and there are no clothes, no what-what. Her life is terrible. I just say why don’t you give me this child. The social workers said take her now. (Beauty, LHI1, tt.290-294)
Given that Veliswa did not get a visa to study in Namibia and Beauty could not get the bursary because o f her age, both had to reassess their situation in the light o f the constraints, and dedicate themselves to a new project. Despite the constraints, we can see examples o f agency as they deliberated about what they cared about in order to identify their ultimate concerns, and the actions they needed to take. Having finally decided on teaching as their work-related project, primarily because o f the bursaries available for teachers at that time, neither Veliswa nor Beauty had particularly wanted to be Junior Primary (Foundation Phase43) teachers. Both made strategic decisions to become FP teachers based on their knowledge that there were fewer FP teachers in the schooling sector. This was an important consideration, as finding employment was viewed as a means towards economic stability. As I note later in this chapter, Veliswa and Beauty are both autonomous reflexives who adopted a strategic stance towards structural and cultural constraints.
For Veliswa, Beauty and Nomsa, it was their personal aspirations that underpinned their persistence to study further and choose teaching as a career. Veliswa attributed her drive to become a professional to her concern for satisfying her mother’s aspirations for her. She said:
“Yes and I wanted to be successful because my mother had no money. So if I failed then she would have been hurt” (Veliswa, LHI1, t.252). For Nomsa, becoming a teacher, marked an elevation in status brought about by earning a salary and “dressing smart” (Nomsa, LHI1, t.190). Beauty, by contrast, spoke o f her sense o f pride. She said: “I’m proud. I like to be somebody. And I like when my friends I see . the people that I was with at the school, they are something, they are professional” (Beauty, LHI1, t.10). Each o f these teachers’ motivation to become teachers was driven by the desire to earn a salary so that they could move toward economic stability and a higher socio-economic status.
43 For ease of reading, I will use the new terminology, Foundation Phase, rather than the old terminology, Junior Primary even though these teachers were pre-1994 referred to as Junior Primary teachers.
Nokhaya’s narrative differed quite significantly from the other three teachers. Unlike Veliswa, Beauty and Nomsa who engaged in the DDD process in order to identify their ultimate concern (i.e. work) and to define their projects (i.e. teaching), Nokhaya had the decision, to become a primary school teacher and ultimately a FP teacher, made on her behalf. Nokhaya, like the other participants, was born into a context o f economic disadvantage. This was a context, as explained below, characterised by poverty. Nokhaya’s parents took the decision that she should become a teacher on the basis o f their perception o f what would be good for her given her shyness and so that she could assist the family financially by funding the education o f her brother. In Nokhaya’s narrative, as will be illuminated in the section below, gender can be regarded as both a constraint and enablement. W hile her gender constrained her opportunity to complete her schooling, it enabled her move into teaching. It appears Nokhaya is a passive agent, having been comfortable with decisions made on her behalf (i.e. becoming a teacher, and becoming a foundation phase teacher specifically). However, she is not passive in the sense that she is incapable o f action. Once the decisions were taken for Nokhaya, she authored her own projects in relation to those decisions. Later in this chapter, I suggest that Nokhaya’s acceptance o f these decisions could be related to her mode o f reflexivity at that time which privileged the voices o f her parents and those familiar to her in making decisions (Chapter Three). Archer contends that persons’ modes o f reflexivity, the manner in which we exercise our reflexivity, plays a role in how persons mediate structural and cultural enablements and/ or constraints.
Interesting in this narrative, constructed from the participants’ life history interviews, is a sense that all four were initially reluctant to become teachers. This begs the question, how many other teachers currently in the South African schooling system, and particularly in the Foundation Phase were also reluctant to become teachers. How many o f our current teachers in South Africa became teachers because it was viewed, out o f a limited array o f career opportunities, as a means toward economic advantage and, in Beauty’s words, a means to “be somebody”
(Beauty, LHI1, t.10)? In other words, becoming a professional was a move toward economic advantage.
I now turn to examine the SS and CS, that conditioned the decisions that each o f these four participants made to become teachers. As highlighted in the above narrative, the emergence of each of these teachers’ personal identities, that is their ultimate concern, was conditioned by a number o f structural and cultural mechanisms that existed in both necessary and logical
relations with each other. These mechanisms conditioned the environment that the four participants were born into. It is these mechanisms that I consider in the next section.