This part of the analysis considers the envisaged macro level pressure from the education department to fast track school language change which according to the change agents should involve coercive pressure on schools and individual educators to engage in language transformation and vigorous monitoring of the implementation of the national LiEP at all levels of the education department, state, district and school levels, as well as at the level of teacher education and training.
All four change agents stressed the need for the education department to exercise pressure on schools and educators to transform their language policies and practices by bringing this in line with the underlying principles of the national LiEP. The perception was that
coercive pressure from the education department would reinforce their own attempts at driving and sustaining school language change.
While there were some similarities between Agent L‟s conception of this pressure and that of the other three agents (Agent G, R and S), there were some differences as well.
Agent L believed that the education department should force language transformation by linking it to service conditions and pay progression. He felt that teachers should be given a financial incentive for upgrading their qualifications in terms of undertaking Zulu language courses. He also expressed the view that it should be a condition of service that teachers upgrade their qualifications to meet the needs of transformation, particularly language transformation. In this respect he suggested that teachers in service be forced to attend INSET courses in isiZulu to remain in the profession or face the prospect of becoming redundant. He felt that the SGB does not have the power to exert this kind of pressure on teachers but the education department as employer could make this obligatory on serving educators. Agent L‟s views are conveyed in the following responses:
You see the normal thing is everyone is working in English and for change to happen someone with muscle must be able to make the change.
See right now being on the SGB, I am telling you I haven‟t got much power. I would like to have the support of the dept., Department of Education, if they can come in here and… you see at the end of the day who pays the teachers got the muscle. If they say the teachers they now need to upgrade they will have to.
I am telling you now as a SGB member if I have to go and tell all the teachers what to do, they would say who are you although I am a GB member. But if it comes from the department, the department says if you all do not in the next three years learn Zulu you can put yourself in a position of getting redundant.
The directive must come from the department not the SGB. The soft way of doing it is to give a financial incentive for them to be more inclined towards isiZulu, if that fails you give them a harsher incentive where they got a phase-in period in which to know isiZulu but obviously in steps. Once the teachers‟ attitudes change, jeez! Believe
you me, it wouldn‟t take long, less than two years for the child to adapt and change.
The notion of pressure from the education department held by the other three change agents involved providing competent and ongoing INSET courses in isiZulu and forcing serving educators to retool in terms of isiZulu, forcing schools to transform their language policies and practices and monitoring the process of change, and making it compulsory for teacher trainees to be bilingual in English and isiZulu before entering the profession.
As was expressed by Agent G in the earlier discussion on prioritizing the learning of isiZulu, Agents R and S also felt that there had been no real initiative taken by the department to provide INSET courses in isiZulu for non Zulu-speaking teachers. In addition, Agent G felt that what had been offered was offered largely through Teachers‟
Centres and these were merely beginner courses and were inadequate to meet the needs of teachers in schools where there was a genuine attempt to transform language policies and practices. This is reflected by the following comments on isiZulu courses offered at Teacher‟s Centres from an educator at Willy Wonke Primary and Agent G respectively:
It was a very simple programme. It met some of my needs in the sense that when I went there I didn‟t know anything. When I came out I knew enough to get me around, introduction, giving them instructions, when somebody was speaking I was able to pick up the key words and understand what they were speaking about. But it wasn‟t effective enough for me to teach in the classroom. That‟s where the attention should be.
We are not talking about these courses that are run for one or two weeks and they get someone to come and teach, we are talking about a competent course in language as we all learnt Afrikaans.
The three change agents also expressed a strong need for the education department to apply pressure on schools to transform their language policies and practices. Attention was drawn to the old apartheid regime‟s quest to entrench the position of Afrikaans in
South African society by making it one of the two compulsory languages at schools. The suggestion was that isiZulu in this province should be made compulsory for all learners, which will invariably force all schools in the province to revise their language policies to meet this need. In addition, more than one of these agents assert that the state has abdicated its responsibility by merely introducing policy without monitoring the implementation of policy. It is the view of these agents that pressure in the form of close monitoring of the implementation of the post-apartheid LiEP in schools by the education department is needed to sustain school language change. This position is captured in the following responses from Agent G:
I want to go back to the days of apartheid and when we were first exposed to Afrikaans, and that was implemented without much fuss and without much opposition and we all changed and became very fluent in the language of our oppressors because they were demanding it and we did not object to it and what is strange is that we are an isiZulu-speaking province and there is no support coming from the authorities to say that this is the language that should be spoken.
100% there is a lack of political will in driving this process. We have had democracy from 1994 and we have implemented isiZulu teaching from 1998. I think it was but to date since maybe last year the dept.
came down and said we want isiZulu teaching done in your schools other than that there was nothing. What stops the dept. from giving a directive there and saying we want isiZulu teaching starting from grade 1 this year but they merely give you a policy outline and nobody monitors the policy to see if it is being implemented.
There has to be pressure brought by the authorities concerned to try to initiate changes if it is not already being initiated in schools and, of course, when you talk about implementing a policy we supposed to be implementing this in schools. I think there is a need for the authorities to monitor transformation or implementation of language change in schools.
Agents G and R supported the idea of overhauling teacher education thereby making it compulsory for teachers to be bilingual in English and isiZulu as was the case in the past where PRESET courses made it obligatory for trainee teachers to have qualifications in English and Afrikaans. This view was expressed in the following responses from Agents R and G respectively in the Focus Group Discussion:
We just spoke briefly about the Afrikaans issue, how if you did not pass Afrikaans you did not get your teacher‟s certificate. So you had to pass Afrikaans as well as your other subjects, so even if you passed all the subjects and failed Afrikaans you would become a temporary teacher. So I think with change now what happened at that time was that we became proficient in Afrikaans.
I think just picking up from what Mr R said besides teaching qualifications it is important to be bilingual. Many students in the days of apartheid didn‟t get their matric exemption because they didn‟t pass Afrikaans and because of that requirement and that pressure from the authorities I think many learners were forced to learn Afrikaans. That‟s the kind of pressure you need if you want language change to be sustained.
This part of section one considered the envisaged pressure from the education department to fast track language in education transformation. An interrogation of the data in this part revealed that the education department has the relevant authority and power to exert pressure on educators and school managers to implement multilingual education and in this way support the school language change initiatives of the change agents. The areas where the education department could exert pressure, according to the change agents, were making the learning of isiZulu compulsory for serving educators and linking this to pay progression, making isiZulu a compulsory course for student teachers in KZN, forcing schools to transform their language policies and practices by aligning these with the national LiEP and monitoring the implementation of multilingual education at regional, district, ward and school levels. The latter recalls Fullan‟s (2005a, 2005b) contention that trilevel development is necessary for sustainability of educational change.
However, instead of supporting the implementation of multilingual education in ways conceptualised by Fullan (2005a, 2005b), the state, according to the change agents, had abdicated this responsibility. This “lack of political will in driving this process” claimed by Agent G finds resonance in the literature23.
23 For further discussion on the failure of the South African and other African governments to deliver on policies that affirm the value of using African languages alongside English as LOLTs and subjects see Heugh (2002), Alexander (2002), Bamgbose (2000).
4.2.1.6 Managing pressure
The tensions and dilemmas associated with using pressure to bring about school language change are evident throughout this section which focuses on pressure to sustain change.
To explore these tensions and dilemmas, this part of section one presents three scenarios of managing pressure. Each scenario is forwarded as exhibiting particular characteristics of how pressure to effect school language change was managed by each change agent.
The first scenario depicts the unassertive position adopted by Agent S which prevented her from exercising either persuasive or coercive pressure to effect change, the second depicts persuasive pressure applied by Agents L and R, and the third depicts coercive pressure applied by Agent G. In an attempt to extend understanding of how pressure can be used and managed to effect change, the change agents‟ experiences of exercising/not exercising pressure are explained in terms of basic Physics principles concerning pressure24.
4.2.1.6.1 Three scenarios of managing pressure
Scenario 1
Unassertive – afraid of antagonizing others
….I might come across as arrogant and a know-it- all (Agent S)
In the case of Agent S, she did not articulate the need for pressure as strongly as the other agents, nor did she exert coercive pressure to bring about change although she was passionate about transforming her own practice to benefit the learners. In addition, she worked relentlessly to sustain these bilingual teaching/learning practices. The following response illustrates her commitment to school language change that benefits learners:
24 The following Physics principles are used in this part of the analysis:
Pressure exerted is equal to force exerted per unit of area. Force is equal to a push or a pull. Keeping the force and/or area constant or varying them impacts on pressure.
Newton‟s 3rd Law of motion states that for every action there is an equal opposite reaction.
My experience as an agent of change came when I was given a grade 4 class in 2004. It was a challenge because the class was one third isiZulu-speaking and there were different age groups of Zulu-speaking children as well and they came from a very poor socioeconomic background, they were already disadvantaged in that they were L2 learners and they come from a poor socioeconomic background and they had a backlog which was created in the foundation phase as a result they practically were Zulu-speaking (meaning they could not communicate effectively in English) and this class had severe behaviour problems as well and I was given that class. I was lucky in that I could speak a little bit of isiZulu so the isiZulu-speaking children benefited from my code-switching and I was able to help them to learn through code-switching.
Evidently Agent S exerted pressure on herself and was directed by moral purpose in her quest to transform classroom language practices. Fullan (1993, 2005a) identifies moral purpose as one of the key drivers in educational reform. He defines moral purpose as making a difference in the lives of students by committing to raising the bar and closing the gap in student achievement. However, Fullan (1993) adds that “increased commitment at the one-to-one and classroom levels alone is a recipe for moral martyrdom” and urges teachers to “combine the mantle of moral purpose with the skills of change agentry”. The data revealed that Agent S was directed by moral purpose in her attempts to address the linguistic challenges facing African learners in her class but was unable to initiate and sustain institutional language change at her school. Whether this inability was as a result of lacking the skills of change agentry or through other factors is contemplated below.
Agent S had attempted to initiate change among her colleagues but experienced only marginal success. This was partly because there was no real commitment to change and partly because as a level 1 educator she did not have the necessary power and influence to effect change as was mentioned earlier in the analysis. However, another reason was that this change agent was unable to assert herself and was reluctant to use coercive pressure to bring about and sustain institutional language change. In the following response Agent S explained why she thought making an attempt to influence management to address the
challenges facing African learners in an English-dominant school context “was a dead end matter”:
I might come across as being arrogant and a know-it-all and they might take it badly.
Evidently Agent S was afraid of antagonizing her colleagues. This change agent was not aggressive in her stance and did not exercise coercive force to effect change. In this respect, her principal‟s perception of her personality is insightful:
By nature she is quiet, reserved, maybe even reticent. To date there would be other teachers with the same skills who would have pushed, so Mrs S is not of that personality. She has a lot to offer that I know from the time I came here.
Scenario 2