DEDICATION
4.5 CONCLUSION
5.1.5 The Rhetoric of Administrative Work
Having support from all structures of the school enables the teacher to get through all the obstacles. Kadesh suggests that the working together of all the structures of school governance allows the teachers to have positive experiences in their work environments.
However, Noah talks about the visibility of the leaders and managers as an attempt to ensure that teaching and learning processes run smoothly. When the leaders are seen to be active in their role, it may be experienced differently by teachers. For instance, the leaders or managers in Noah’s school, whilst they were visibly active in some of the work, by physically searching or tracking the teachers’ whereabouts, they were equally jeopardising their core administrative responsibilities. The rhetoric seems to indicate that active leadership to a large extent yields positive experiences for some teachers and that leaders and managers should lead by example and be accountable.
Leadership and management is seen to have a negative role when the people (leaders and managers) are unable to assist because they are hesitant to make unpopular decisions because they want to be loved by those whom they are leading. It can be positive when the people are vigilant and assertive in their decision-making.
Leadership can be identified as an empty signifier since it is explained differently depending on teachers’ experiences in their schools. For example, for some teachers,
‘leadership’ refers to the principal while for other teachers, it refers to the nameless person, the ‘management’.
Faith: You find the post level one teacher being tasked to deal with registering grade 12. That is admin work, but the management delegate that work to class teachers. Why (FT 53)?
What these teachers are saying is that they do some kinds of work as a way of satisfying the power of the principal or the management, like “collection of fees” and “registering Grade 12” learners which are not part of the formal elements of teachers’ work. On the one hand, Mercy talks about the collection of fees which becomes an administrative task which gets pulled out throughout the year if the learners are dwindling behind on their payments. On the other hand, Faith talks about the registration task which happens at the beginning of the year when the teachers would have just received their workloads and would want to start right away with the core business of teaching. Rather, they are burdened with administrative work.
Therefore, the rhetoric is that teachers are frustrated by the imposed or added administrative work which often detracts them from their work. What it implies as far as dominant and marginal discourses are concerned, is that one witnesses a marginal discourse of ‘resistance’ manifesting itself in these teachers’ rhetoric. It is one that no longer merely measures the actions of teachers or management against the normative implications of the hegemonic discourse (although it includes this, in negative terms), but goes further insofar as, through the articulations of the teachers concerned, it betrays the activation of elements or floating signifiers located in the discursive field, thereby organising them into an emerging discourse of ‘resistance’. Perhaps one should rather describe it as a discourse of ‘dissatisfaction’, which may or may not, develop into a full- fledged discourse of resistance.
Kadesh talks about a different aspect of administrative work such as documenting the incidents as they occur in school,
Kadesh: Admin is a nightmare.... If an incident takes place in a classroom, you have to do a report and you have to send it to the principal’s office.
Let’s say that, maybe learners were fighting in class, a teacher has to write an incident report. That report has to be photocopied and kept in a learner’s file and then a letter must be sent to the parents informing them of the incident that took place. So, all of this takes time. It takes away
teaching and learning time because if you have to leave the classroom to write that report, it takes away teaching and learning time (KT 32).
Whilst on the one hand, it is necessary for teachers to do the incident reports if the school is to make follow-ups on the cases it has, on the other hand, it becomes frustrating for teachers who finds this to be an additional burden, that not only do they have to deal with discipline issues in the classroom but they also have to write these interim reports which have to be filed and kept for future references. Kadesh suggests that although the writing of the incident reports may not be a mammoth task, it takes a lot of time.
Kadesh seems to be suggesting that administrative work may cause anxiety for teachers because of all the procedures that they have to follow when reporting incidents, which teachers have to do right away at the expense of the teaching and learning processes which, in most cases, have to come to a halt. The rhetoric here is about the insidious way in which administrative work steals the teaching time which may not be possible to recover. The rhetoric seems to be about the professional aspect of teaching work which is compromised by the laborious administrative work.
Not all administrative work is forced work. Some administrative work such as assessing learners’ work or capturing assessment marks is a necessary component of teaching work.
However, sometimes some teachers may overlook this critical component of teaching.
This is shown by Mercy in her comment below.
Mercy: There is a lot of paperwork. We are expected to prepare; we are expected to have a file. A file with everything e.g. registers and all other documents and we are also expected to mark (MT 25).
There is no way that teachers’ work can be complete without marking learners’ work or keeping important records or policy documents for reference when needed. Yet, in this case, Mercy presents her statement in a manner which suggests that doing the administrative work she enumerates is burdensome and maybe, not even necessary. The rhetoric is really about administrative work or paperwork adding to the many expectations that teachers already have. However, administrative work as a necessary component of teaching seems to be well understood by Kadesh, who explained that:
Kadesh: Teachers should teach at all times and they need to make sure that the files are up-to-date and lesson plans are in the files. They should have
a daily journal where they record what they did in every lesson. They should have an IQMS file. There should be assessment files, there should be workshop files. So, they need to have those files. As a professional, you should always have paperwork because sometimes you need paperwork to protect yourself (KT 14).
In this case, there seems to be an understanding that teachers are expected to do administrative work as part of their work. The rhetoric indicates indirectly that a professional teacher has to be well-organised, be conscientious about keeping records, be well-prepared for lessons, and be enthusiastic about attending professional development workshops. When all of these are considered, then administrative work is seen as something positive and a necessity. However, considering the other participants’ views on administrative work, there may be other issues which make administrative work seem onerous. Perhaps the issues are systemic rather than institutional and exert a lot of pressure on the teachers.