CHAPTER 5: CARVING UNIQUE PORTRAITS OF TEACHERS’ PERSONAL-
5.1 INTRODUCTION
The preceding chapter presented my response to the first research question: What are the personal-professional stories of teachers teaching in the dilemmatic context of different school quintiles? In Chapter Four my role as a master carver of this research was to take the data generated from the interviews, collage inquiry, photovoice and poetic inquiry of each participant and assemble the data into a multi-layered portrayal of each participant’s life. The chapter offered a space to view the co-constructed and reconstructed stories of my five participants with a focus on their personal and professional life experiences. Their personal life experiences incorporated their journey from their childhood to adulthood. In contrast, their professional experiences honed in on their teaching experiences within different school contexts comprising different school quintiles. However, an essential component in both their personal and professional lives was the various relationships that either offered them a supportive climate for growth as individuals or constrained them.
In this chapter, I present the second level of analysis. The focus of this chapter is to provide insight into the second research question: What personal beliefs and meanings inform the teachers’ professional identities in the dilemmatic context of school quintiles?
In this chapter, my responsibility as the researcher and master carver is to offer an interpretation and give meaning to teachers’ personal-professional experiences within the context of school quintiling. While my role in Chapter Four was to restructure the data into a multi-layered storyline, in this chapter I aim to disentangle the importance of critical moments and events. This exercise will be accomplished by unpacking the teachers’
experiences within their family and homes, the significant relationships that they cultivated, their educational journeys from childhood to adulthood, and their meanings they adopted which informed their choice to become teachers.
This chapter aims to analyse how the experiences gained through their primary and secondary socialisation within their families and communities shaped the biographical
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makeup of the teachers (Samuel, 2008). All this is viewed against the backdrop of race, class and gender within their respective socio-cultural, economic and historical environments. Also, attempting to understand what personal meanings inform teachers’
identities has to be seen in relation to the macro-political environment and the history of apartheid within the South African landscape that had impacted every facet of a person’s life. This chapter, additionally, forms the basis of the analysis of the third research question, which draws on the participants’ personal experiences and meanings to negotiate their professional lives as teachers. In an attempt to understand what personal meanings inform teachers’ identities in the context of school quintiling, I draw on the metaphor of The Jadeite Cabbage for inspiration and deeper understanding.
Figure 5.1 The jadeite personal-professional identity of the teacher
The one aspect of the metaphor that I can draw on for this chapter is the cracks and ripples found on The Jadeite Cabbage. The cracks and ripples — the “imperfections” on the jade
— meant that the piece of jade could not be regarded as highly prized. However, while the imperfections reduced the value of the jade, it was the same cracks and ripples that
PROFESSIONAL LIFE
PERSONAL LIFE
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gave The Jadeite Cabbage its unusual character and allowed the carving to look more lifelike. The participants in this study also recounted life as having its cracks and ripples;
it’s high and low moments. I now compare the cracks and ripples on the jade to the life experiences of my participants. The teachers’ dilemmas and difficulties are evident in the stories they told. Also, being treated as inferior because of race, gender and class denied them space at the centre of society and pushed them to the margins. Those experiences also added to the cracks and ripples, the dilemmas in their lives that at times made them feel insignificant. However, while the teachers recounted their difficulties, I began to look at how those problems were negotiated. Did they attempt to overcome their dilemmas, or did they give in to a defeatist mentality? What self was foregrounded in the choices that were made? What would have become of these teachers if they had allowed those cracks and ripples, those “imperfections”, to make them bitter about what life has thrown at them? What “beautiful” meanings can I, as a researcher, draw from their dilemmas and their negotiation thereof?
In assisting me to answer these questions, critical moments of the teachers’ lives were then extracted from their storied narratives and presented in the form of storied vignettes.
Ely et al. (1997, p. 70) has described vignettes as “narrative investigations that carry within them an interpretation of the person, experience or situation that the writer describes”. Vignettes have also been described as “compact sketches that can be used to introduce characters, foreshadow events and analyses to come, highlight particular findings or summarise a particular theme or issue in analysis and interpretation” (Ely et al., 1997, p. 70).
I chose to write the storied vignettes in the first person (Coulter & Smith, 2009). These vignettes took the form of a “snapshot scenario or a story that unfolds through a series of stages” (Jenkins, Bloor, Fischer, Berney & Neale, 2010, p. 176). Although the storied vignettes give me power as the researcher to offer my interpretation of the data, it is, however, the theoretical lens that helps me to explain the selection of the data, not only in a reliable way but also in a theoretical way.
In analysing the second research question, I therefore drew on Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) SIT and Rodgers and Scott’s (2008) TIT. SIT is a general theory of identity that identifies people through group processing (Trepte, 2006). I lean on SIT to understand how norms, group influences, motivations, stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes can be a catalyst to
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reinforce the idea that people’s social cognitions are socially constructed depending on their group or collective frame of reference (Hogg & Abrams, 1999). SIT helped help me to understand how social categorisations like race, class and gender contributed to my participants’ process of identification and identity construction, and how these eventually contributed to their behaviours and dispositions. Rodgers and Scott (2008) allowed me to look at how context as an external force influenced the teachers’ identities. This understanding is vital, as the teachers all come from diverse backgrounds. These contexts were instrumental in the construction of their identities as teachers.
Also, to assist with the analysis of this question I created a collage portrait, my jadeite carving, of each teacher’s life depicted as a visual work of art. The pictures and texts that I selected in creating the collage portrait of my participants reflected the critical moments of their personal-professional lives and events, and significant people in their lives who had played a part in their identity construction. It must be noted that the collage portrait that I created was my interpretation and understanding of my participants’ narratives (Gerstenblatt, 2013). Collage portraits offered me as the master carver of this research “a venue for producing research that is adaptable to diverse populations and conveyed meaning beyond the constraints of language” (Gerstenblatt, 2013, p. 305).
I commence my analysis with Solomon, a teacher at a Q1 school. Solomon’s vignette foregrounds the issues of class and race, and shows the impact of poverty on the type of experiences that Solomon encountered. I then unpack my vignette for Happy, a teacher at a Q2 school. This vignette focuses on issues of class, race and gender that were instrumental in shaping Happy’s life within a poor rural context. The third vignette highlights Bernell’s experience, and focuses on how the issues of gender, race and class affected her life within an unorthodox family. The fourth vignette, for Shamilla, foregrounds essential aspects of gender, class and race that were dominant discourses that were instrumental in shaping her identity as a woman within a poor, working-class family.
The fifth and final vignette is for Bianca. This vignette foregrounds the dominant discourses of gender and class that were instrumental in shaping her identity as an Indian South African woman within an orthodox family.
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