PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS
4.1 INTRODUCTION
Teacher leadership, an emergent trend in South Africa, is a transformative process that could serve as a crucial ingredient to school and community reform. I agree with Wright (2008) when she states that the current pedagogic policy shift towards learner- centred education, driven largely by ideology, as well as the need for schools to be more self-reliant, necessitates shared leadership amongst teachers. In the South African context, Grant (2006, p.514) argues that “the only way that schools will be able to meet the challenges is to tap the potential of all staff members and allow teachers to experience a sense of ownership and inclusivity and lead aspects of the change process”.
Similar to Grant (2006), I argue in this chapter that teacher leadership should ideally run parallel to formal leadership and, for a school to be successful, teacher leadership should complement rather than compete with formal leadership. Teacher leadership is therefore a bottom-up approach that could mitigate the complex reform initiative undertaken in South Africa by serving as an expansive and viable source for engaging with education matters by critiquing policy, practice and leadership, among others.
Similar to studies on teacher leadership conducted by Singh (2007) and Ntuzela (2008), I predominantly used the Grant (2008) model of data analysis, and allowed the data to speak in a grounded and iterative manner. Accordingly, Glaser and Strauss (1967), cited in Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007, p.491) state that such “theory generation in qualitative data can be emergent, patterns and theory are implicit, waiting to be discovered in an inductive manner”. I established the major themes from the data, and aimed to merge the data analysis with a discussion of my findings within a conceptual framework of distributed leadership defined by Gronn (2000), Gunter (2005) and Spillane (2006). I then juxtaposed this
framework by adopting a more micro focus on teacher leadership as described by Muijs and Harris (2003), Katzenmeyer and Moller (2001) and Grant (2006), among other prolific writers.
This chapter presents the major themes and findings of my study which emerged from the data collected using journals, focus group interviews, semi-structured interviews as well as an observation schedule, as outlined in Chapter 3. I elected to use a postmodernist, experimental writing style in that I employed both subjectivity on the one hand, and reflexivity on the other, adopting a crystallization, rather than a triangulation approach to the interpretation of the data (Richardson, 1994).
The South African education system is faced with a myriad of complexities and challenges.
These include rampant learner absenteeism, teacher apathy, infrastructural backlogs, parental detachment from learners work, perceived lack of District Office support and a constantly evolving curriculum among others. This study therefore attempted to illuminate how visionary teacher leadership, both within and beyond the school, formal and informal, could assist in addressing some of these challenges. Not withstanding these challenges, there have been policy and legislative shifts in the post-1994 era in South Africa to address the
hierarchical and autocratic order of the past.
The South African Schools Act (1996) explicitly demands a more democratic management style in schools and offers teachers multiple leadership opportunities such as membership on School Governing Bodies and serving on School Development Teams and related
committees. The Norms and Standards for Educators (2000), concretizes this call for greater participation of teachers through democracy and collegiality within schools. It requires teachers to take on seven roles, among them that of leader, manager and administrator.
Although I administered and analysed the questionnaires to the entire staff of the school by using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), I ultimately used the data from the three respondents of my study only. I used their perceptions of teacher leadership minimally, and quantify their responses within this chapter, since I adopted a qualitative approach.
This chapter takes a peek into the lives of three teacher leaders using the lens of leadership, and distributed leadership in particular, rather than that of social justice. I begin by
qualitatively sketching my case study school referred to as Teacher Leadership Primary School (TLPS) (pseudonym) in this study, followed by a profile of all three teacher leaders.
Thereafter I present the themes that emerged from the data relating to teacher leadership in
action. A brief explanation of factors that promote or hinder teacher leadership is presented, and I conclude with a summary of the main findings.
To remind the reader, I reiterate my key research questions:
• How is teacher leadership enacted in a semi-urban primary school?
• What factors hinder or promote this enactment?
To recapitulate the data collection process, the table below is inserted and lends clarity to dates of collection, data collection techniques and participant codes.
The table indicates the keys to the various codes I used in this and the following chapters.
Method of data collection Participant/s Data collection date/s
1.School observation schedule
TL A, TL B and TL C
Entire staff (briefly as not focus of my study)
22 September 2008 to 23 March 2009
2. Questionnaires Entire school staff 4 respondents from SMT 21 respondents from level- 1 educators including TL A, TLB and TLC
15 October 2008
3. Focus Group Interview Teacher leaders A,B and C (TL A,B,C)
23 October 2008
4. Journal entries TL (A),TL( B) and TL(C) October 2008- March 2009 5. Individual Interviews TL (A)
TL(B) TL (C)
26 January 2009 26 January 2009 20 February 2009
6. Documentary file Researcher September 2008 to March 2009
7. Field notes Researcher 22 September 2008 to 23 March
2009
The following section represents a brief description of the school.