DEDICATION
5.2 EXTENDED DISCUSSION OF BROAD THEME ONE AND CONNECTION TO THE LITERATURE TO THE LITERATURE
5.3.2 The Rhetoric of Interference by District Officials on Promotion of Learners and Disciplinary Issues
manage. Teachers have to be parents as well, which they seem to find burdensome.
Teachers had added responsibilities because of parents who did not involve themselves in their children’s education. Such parents lacked responsibility and had the attitude of being unconcerned about their children’s education. Noah talked about parents who were
‘absent’, and completely not involved in the education of their children.
Noah: We have to deal with the children who seem to have been ‘thrown away’ to us by their parents who are ‘absent’ (NT 12).
Noah observes that there are parents who did not have the ethic of care and love for their children, parents who did not care about what went on in their children’s lives. According to Noah, such parents were not only absent in their children’s lives, but also uncaring.
Teachers in this study understood parents’ involvement to be operating on a logic of difference based on their explanations of both positive and negative experiences with parents. From what these teachers shared about parents’ involvement, it seems that some parents shared the responsibility of educating the child, whereas other parents appeared to be involved only when there was a problem with the child.
5.3.2 The Rhetoric of Interference by District Officials on Promotion of Learners
are left with no authority. The most palpable in the condonation process were learners who had failed and were just put through to the next grade. In a sense, what the department was doing was taking away the motivation to be a good teacher. The teachers were likely to think that they did not have to teach well or excel because even if learners failed, the department would just pass them. So, why should teachers work hard? What Noah and Mercy indicated were the inherent problems created by this practice of promoting learners who were not ready to progress to the next grade. In fact, one teacher (Faith) indicated that this practice had emotional effect on her.
Faith: The mark-schedules come back with a list of learners who were not supposed to progress, having been promoted by the managers at the district office who are not in the school, who are not teaching the learners, who do not know what is going on at school, particularly in class, particularly in the subject; and then they promote those learners. It drives me nuts… (FT 33).
Faith revealed how demoralising it was for teachers to know, after a year of teaching, setting tests, assignment tasks and any form of assessments activities, and marking rigorously and fairly, that the learners who had failed were just promoted to the next grade by the department officials at the district level. Teachers felt that they were being denied the power to decide who progresses and who has to repeat the grade, and power or authority had been taken away from the teacher. Teachers felt disempowered and totally displaced by the decisions made by district officials on teachers’ behalf about which learners should be promoted. Faith talked about the difficulty of having to endorse the rules which were made by district officials who are not well-informed about the learners and their capabilities. In this case, the rhetoric was about how learners are made to hop from one grade to the next without meeting the academic competencies. This progression of learners, which was not a true reflection of their performance, interfered with teachers’
work and had enduring consequences for teachers and learners as well. This comes through in Mercy’s and Faith’s responses.
Mercy: So you find that from grade 8, they would have been condoned from grade 7 and that person (learner) will progress in that manner up until grade 12 (MT 16).
Faith: Some learners have never really passed on their own. They have never!! They get condoned all the time, and then we expect them to do well in Grade 12. How can they (FT 34)?
Teachers were aware of the repercussions of the learners who are constantly condoned over the years and their fate when they reach the Grade 12 class. Faith indicated that such learners were highly unlikely to pass, which then tarnished teachers’ reputation (teachers portrayed as having failed to make learners pass). What Mercy and Faith noted that when learners are promoted undeservedly, it usually contributed to learners’ incompetence and under-preparedness. Therefore, learners were more likely to be frustrated and not do well in their studies because they continued to work on a deficit. What one detects here is a discourse that was characterised by what Laclau and Mouffe (2001) refer to as the chains of equivalence; whereby teachers’ articulations revealed a systematically closed discourse or ideology about the of department officials’ practices.
The promotion of learners by the district officials was seen as having a negative role on the teachers as it did not assist teachers or the learners to be effective in their work. So, the rhetoric in this case, indicated indirectly, that the imposing of hierarchically made decisions, and the expectation that teachers as employees should just implement what has been decided on their behalf, was highly problematic and detrimental to the teachers.
The teachers in this study also indicated that the interference by the district officials was evident in the disciplinary matters, as noted by Faith and Kadesh.
Faith: I really don’t know where the disconnect is – when the school has decided that the learners deserve suspension and then the District office says ‘NO’ (emphasis) (FT 18).
Kadesh: I know that some parents go to the Department of Education and they plead with the Department of Education (when the learner has been expelled). The Department of Education plays a role that the learner is to go back to school and then the principal at the end looks like a person who is incompetent” (KT 10).
On the one hand, Kadesh noted that whilst parents were not really involved in the everyday processes of teaching and learning of their children, they were, however, much involved when the child got expelled from school. Principals were also not spared from the consequences of the parents’ and Department of Education’s involvement, and principals ended up being portrayed as incompetent. On the other hand, Faith notes how the school’s decisions are questioned or undermined by the district office (Department of
Education). She observed that the district office did not seem to have trust in the school officials to make the right decisions on issues pertaining to the discipline of learners.
Consequently, Kadesh talked about the Department of Education’s decisions that indirectly makes the principals’ competence questionable. Furthermore, Kadesh highlighted how sometimes the Department of Education seemed to be pressured by parents into making decisions which were contrary to the school’s decision.
What one gets from Faith’s and Kadesh’s articulations is that, there is a disconnect between the discourse represented by the department officials and the discourses that teachers hold for their practice. This disconnect can be characterised as an interface between the dominant discourse of the department and a marginalised discourse, when it comes to the disciplining of the learners. Chains of difference are operational in so far as the department and the teachers’ (or schools’) perspectives on disciplinary issues are concerned.
It seems that for the teachers who participated in this study, the involvement of the district officials or the Department of Education has only a negative role on both levels (promotion of learners and disciplinary matters) because it does not contribute positively towards teachers’ work. Therefore, the rhetoric indicates indirectly that the Department of Education or the district officials have to be knowledgeable about the specific issues faced by teachers in class (both academic and social) on a daily basis before they can make decisions that affect teachers and their work. Perhaps, when all of these things are considered, what is seen as interference can be considered as an intervention and may be experienced positively by teachers.
In this discussion about ‘interference’ some teachers referred to the Department of Education or simply the ‘department’ without specifying whether these terms referred to the national, provincial or local/ district level. For this reason, the ‘Department of Education’ or Department can exist, in Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) discourse theory terms, as an empty signifier because one can put their own meaning to it, as it is not clear which level is being referred to. Perhaps at this stage, a question that one can ask is: How can one facilitate the discursive effect of these discourses that have been identified among the teachers?
5.4 EXTENDED DISCUSSION OF THEME TWO AND CONNECTION TO THE