STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL MECHANISMS CONDITIONING TEACHERS’ IDENTITIES IN
6.2 INTRODUCING THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THE FOUR TEACHERS’ WORK
Lwandle Township faces high population density, widespread economic deprivation, high rates o f unemployment, low levels o f education and challenges relating to teenage pregnancy, alcohol abuse and crime. All four teachers recognise this; in my interviews with them they all described the context in which they teach as being one o f the most challenging aspects o f their work.
As Beauty (MHI, tt.112-114) expressed, the community o f Lwandle Township faces many social and economic challenges which impact her role as teacher.
Even the teachers in the location57, they cry. ... It’s because [the children’s] parents are ... they’re pregnant. ... M ost o f these kids live with their grandmothers. The mothers go and live with their boyfriends and they care less about their kids. They don’t care for them. And I decided not to give them homework because nobody helps them. At least when you give a child homework, you think somebody’s going to help him or her, but you see nobody helps, she doesn’t do it.
Beauty’s comments about the present, are reminiscent o f her own childhood experiences. As narrated in Chapter Five, Beauty’s mother became pregnant with her when she was still in primary school and she spent most o f her formative years living with her grandmother. In addition to Beauty’s view that parents are negligent, she also mentions the violence young children have to endure.
These kids become raped at a young age so you must go to the parents, go to the social workers, seek the psychologists. That’s what I like about young children. Young children say my mom was drunk yesterday I couldn’t write my homework. You must call the parents so the child can stay here and do all their work. You must tell the parents what to do with their kids. (Beauty, LHI, t.264)
Given this situation, Beauty explained that the role o f teachers extends beyond the confines of the classroom. Veliswa concurred and told me that it was the responsibility o f teachers to get to know the home environment o f each child in their class. “You have to meet them (the parents) and discuss some things so that they can do something about their children’s work”
(Veliswa, LHI 1, t.318).
Meeting with parents is not always easy. Nokhaya explained that “sometimes if you call a parent, the parent doesn’t respond” (MHI, t.102). As highlighted above, all four teachers reflected on their roles in the context o f economic disadvantage, as extending beyond the confines o f the classroom. For them, it is a necessity to visit children’s homes in order to understand the child holistically, interact with parents, liaise between parents, psychologists and social workers, and provide some o f the children with food and uniforms. In many respects the context within which they work, requires them to adopt a pastoral role.
57 Location is another word for township.
This role is systemically mandated through the feeding scheme and inscribed in the Norms and Standards for Educators (SA.DoE, 2000a), which considers the importance o f teachers adopting a community-orientated, citizenship and pastoral role that requires teachers to:
practise and promote a critical, committed and ethical attitude towards developing a sense o f respect and responsibility towards others. ... W ithin the school, the educator will demonstrate an ability to develop a supportive and empowering environment for the learner and respond to the educational and other needs o f learners and fellow educators.
Furthermore, the educator will develop supportive relations with parents and other key persons and organisations. (p. 14)
Nokhaya and Beauty also noted that the school children need to be loved and encouraged.
“These are small children, they want to be loved. They want you to come to their level. . So I come to them, I go around them and when they find some difficulties I try to help them and I always encourage them to ask if they don’t understand” (Nokhaya, MHI, t.92). W hile the teachers acknowledge that the children need to be loved, they also regard them as troublesome and requiring discipline. Both Veliswa and Nomsa emphasised that children prefer to play in class rather than do their work. Veliswa contended that “ Sometimes they play when they are supposed to be writing” (PI1, t.90). She suggests that walking around the class while the children are doing their independent work is necessary to ensure that they are all on task.
Nomsa concurred, “I think another problem, when you are doing examples on the board, they are playing. ... They are not listening at all, especially those ones who are not clever in class.
They are the ones who are not listening. ... W hen it comes the time to answer questions they know nothing” (MHI, t.116). Similarly Beauty asserted that ‘these’ children are not interested in education. “But these kids are not keen on education. They don’t like education. Some people say it’s because o f this. ... They don’t like education” (Beauty, MHI, t.130).
During my research I spent time in two schools: Sontonga Primary School and Phambili Public School. The schools have quite different origins. Sontonga Primary School was established as a mission school and then taken over by the Bantu Education Department in 1979. Phambili Public School was established more recently, in 1997. It was hoped that this school would afford adults and children involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, an opportunity to complete their education, and that it would also accommodate the children o f displaced farm labourers who had hitherto only received a rudimentary education at farm schools. Given the community in which the schools are situated, both are now non-fee-paying schools and children are given
a cooked meal everyday as part o f the School Nutrition Programme. For some children, this is the only meal that they eat in a day (Stats SA, 2013).
There are some differences between these two schools in the present day. Sontonga Primary School is typically under-resourced, with no library, laboratories or computer facilities. By contrast, Phambili Public School does have a library and computer centre (although this is primarily for the use o f the secondary school children). Sontonga Primary School offers classes from Grade R to 7, whereas Phambili Public School is a combined school with classes from Grade R to 12. Children from the squatter camp across the main road from Lwandle Township attend Phambili Public School because o f its proximity. The school has large class sizes. The two Grade 3 classes in which I conducted this research, had 51 and 53 children in them, whereas the number o f children in each o f the two Grade 3 classes at Sontonga Primary School, was 27 and 28. A 40:1 learner-teacher ratio is deemed appropriate for primary schools (De Lannoy &
Hall, 2012).
Both Beauty and Nomsa raised concerns about teaching large classes. For Nomsa a large class constrains her teaching o f FP mathematics. “I think children find difficulty in maths. ... Like in my class, if I can have 20 or 25 learners I will be able to reach out to them. It’s very difficult for me to teach maths in this full class because I think in maths, learners must get individual attention” (Nomsa, MHI, t.104). Beauty explained “Lise, we have these big classes it’s difficult for us. When you see that there are a lot o f them who did not get it, you go and do it again on the board” (Beauty, PI2, t.110).
Absenteeism at both schools is very high. It is seldom that the all the children are in class on a particular day. On social grant days (i.e. when welfare money is deposited into the recipients’
accounts) many o f the learners accompany their parents or caregivers to the respective paypoints. For example, on the 3rd o f August, Nokhaya told me that she had very few children in her class that day as it was grant day and many parents had taken their children with them to town. She surmised that they wanted to spoil their children (Nokhaya, FN, p. 11). This has negative implications for work coverage and learner progression.
The structural context in which all four teachers teach, conditions the expression o f their roles in teaching FP mathematics. Specifically, the material condition in the community in which the two schools are located, is one o f abject poverty. Access to resources (e.g. water, electricity
and sanitation) is limited, many people have meagre formal education and unemployment is extremely high. The most significant income source for most families is social grants. In this environment, parents are inclined to view teachers as the ones who will look after their children during the day, while they try to find employment or food, and who will provide an education that will enable their children to become active in the formal economy. By contrast, teachers tend to believe that parents do not care sufficiently for their children and their schooling.
Having examined the material context in which the four teachers who participated in my research live and work, I now turn my attention to the expression o f these teachers’ identities in teaching FP mathematics. In doing so, I focus on T2-T3 o f Archers’ morphogenetic approach, that is the level o f social and social-cultural interaction (Archer, 1995). I have chosen to do this through a narrative in which I foreground the teacher roles (Archer’s (2000) social roles) expressed by the participant teachers in teaching FP mathematics. All o f the roles identified through the mathematics history and practices interviews and my observation o f the teachers’ teaching FP mathematics, are orientated to teaching children mathematics content.
Four key roles across all four teachers emerged from the empirical data in my research. These I refer to as: teacher as effective communicator, teacher as promoter o f dialogue, teacher as knowledge-worker, and teacher as connector.