Clusters of meaning: portraits of teachers’ lives
5.3 Diverse lives, multiple subjectivities
5.3.4 The supportive teacher: ‘comforting learners and giving them hope’
This subjectivity positioned the teacher as someone who provides guidance and counselling to learners and helps them to cope with challenging situations. Narrative collaborators constituted themselves as ‘counsellors’ who assist learners to deal with traumatic experiences; in particular, by counselling learners who are infected or affected by HIV and AIDS. Sandile explicated that as an educator, when teaching about HIV and AIDS, I take the place of a parent and counsellor. I advise learners from the point of view of both the counsellor and the parent.
Andrew maintained that teachers need to have good relationships with learners, with open communication, dialogue and more understanding. Learners must not be afraid to ask questions about personal issues and confidentiality is very important. He expressed his concern about the youth in South Africa, who are like a lost generation, and the crime.
Furthermore, he has attended many HIV and AIDS as well as counselling courses that were organised by the Department of Education and acknowledged that these have been useful.
Similarly, Zibuyile draws attention to her ‘counsellor’ or ‘supportive’ subjectivity and highlighted the need to recognise which learners are sick and need help and support, and by teaching them values and awareness, I need to counsel them about changing their behaviour.
She added that she is encouraged since her learners are eager, interested and want her to continue talking about HIV and AIDS. This persuaded her to do more research and give them better information to help equip them for the future. Open communication, she asserted, was vital for this ‘supportive’ subjectivity, she also emphasised that teachers need to be neutral and not take sides. However, she contends that not all staff are ‘supportive’, with some teachers only teaching the facts and terminology about HIV and AIDS without doing
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counselling. Moreover, she maintained that the Education Department does not support teachers with resources, like charts and books, nor do subject advisers organise workshops to assist in HIV and AIDS teaching.
In contrast, Sandile admitted that the HIV and AIDS workshops he attended were valuable since they equipped him to assist learners. Also, he suggested that it is important to educate learners and the community about HIV and AIDS, so that they became more knowledgeable and equipped to cope with the disease. He added that his learners know that he is approachable and willing to discuss anything with them and help to solve their problems.
This made it easier for them to communicate with him since they knew he was eager to assist them. For Sandile, this ‘supportive’ subjectivity involves comforting learners and giving them hope. He asserted that he needs to be very diplomatic with learners who come forward and share their personal experiences with him.
Like Andrew and Sandile, Nombu found the HIV and AIDS workshops organised by the Department of Education beneficial since they enabled her to counsel and assist HIV positive learners. In addition, she emphasised the importance of transparent, good relationships with learners and the need to give them good advice. She explicated that her learners trust her and consult her about their problems:
learners feel free to come and ask me about HIV and AIDS and I give them advice and counsel them, I encourage them and follow up on them.
My ‘counsellor’ role includes helping learners to think about HIV and AIDS, since they must know what they have to do in the future. Moreover, some parents bring treatment for learners to school and we have to give learners medication on time.
Like the other narrative collaborators, Mary-Ann made her ‘supportive’ subjectivity explicit in the following excerpts:
I want to make a difference. Besides giving learners the correct information about HIV and AIDS, I tell learners about sugar daddies, money and free sex. I want to change their attitudes so they can make the right choices. I encourage learners to talk out, be more open and question every aspect about sexuality. I tell learners that HIV and AIDS
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affects everyone, they make individual choices and the power is in their
hands. (Mary-Ann, Interview)
I would counsel Thabo regularly and help him to build up his self-esteem and confidence, educate himon how to deal with the teasing and bullying
(Mary-Ann, Scenario one, question 1)
Mary-Ann qualified and trained as a psychologist and has attended many HIV and AIDS workshops, both as a psychologist, and as a facilitator. Additionally, she constituted a
‘pacifier’ subject position and contends that if teachers are dedicated and supportive, they can do so much more about HIV and AIDS education. She echoed the need for good, positive relationships with learners, and summed up her ‘supportive’ role by saying: If I can help learners and parents by giving them correct information about HIV and AIDS, and influence their choices, then I am happy that I have done my job and achieved my purpose. According to Riessman (1993), these narratives represent teachers’ understanding of their classroom practices and actions with regard to counselling learners and being supportive.
Although Andrew draws attention to his ‘supportive’ subjectivity, a conflicting counter- narrative emerged in conversations with him. While he acknowledged that he has good, open relationships with learners and guides and counsels them, he nevertheless displayed a negative positioning to this ‘counsellor’ subject position and ‘supportive’ subjectivity, when he said:
Teachers have their own everyday problems and are dealing with their own feelings. Therefore, I think that there should be someone in the school, like a counsellor or social worker, who teachers and learners can talk to. Two or three schools or a cluster of schools can also share a counsellor or social worker, who would deal with sensitive issues like HIV and AIDS, and death.
The above extract suggests that Andrew believed that guidance and counselling of learners is not only his responsibility and should be conducted by someone else, such as counsellors or social workers as well. However, inherent in this conversation, is his own challenge to address his sexuality and feelings, and maybe his need for a counsellor or social worker to support and help him deal with his sexuality issues. This could have resulted in his
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conflicting subjectivities. However, there were no distinct boundaries between Andrew’s counter-narratives, since his ‘supportive’ subjectivity fluctuated, demonstrating multiple subjectivities and differential power relations, as he travels between conflicting subjectivities.
Andrew’s conflicting subjectivities demonstrate Kraus’s (2006) notion of ‘multiplicity of meanings’ and ‘fragmented experiences’. According to Kraus (2006), Andrew’s narrative can be viewed as a multifaceted resource which enables us to understand how he constructs multiple subjectivities. Moreover, Andrew’s conflicting subjectivities illustrates Gilbert’s (2002) assertion that narratives represent lived experiences and could change, evolve and be reinterpreted.
All narrative collaborators associated performing this ‘supportive’ subjectivity with having sound knowledge of HIV and AIDS. The following discussion examines this ‘knowledgeable teacher’ subjectivity, although later in this chapter, I expand further on this ‘knowledgeable teacher’ subjectivity and examine teachers HIV and AIDS knowledge in relation to their teaching in the spaces of the HIV and AIDS classroom.