Mala: Firstly, when I look at myself before getting into this profession, I honestly thought it was something you would establish yourself and you would have to do the same thing for ever. But with all the curriculum changes it is definitely not that. It is rather frustrating as you get older and you think you settled in your job and here comes something new.
Mala: I was never resistant to change. I embraced the change.
Mala shows inconsistency when speaking about change. Mala is entrenching the point made previously about the reason people get into this profession. She now also talks about frustration and getting older. So in a sense she is also going through time and over time changes have to take place. Ironically, she says she was never resistant to change and she embraced the change.
However, she never expected change that is so frequent. Perhaps it is harder for her to actually change. It suggests that she was trying to be politically correct in saying that she was never resistant to change. The fact seems to be that Mala likes things not to change, and in order to project herself as not opposing change, she has to take that into account, which makes her work more difficult.
Even though Mala struggles to make the change, she does so because she wants to show conformity. She does not want to be seen as different from the others. In so doing she conforms to shows symptoms of conforming to Foucault’s (1980a) 'governmentality'. So, although she shows resistance to change by complaining about it, she still says she embraces change as she wants to follow societal norms and does not want to be seen as different from other teachers who adapt to curriculum change. Gregoire (2003) believes that teachers’ subject knowledge
156 beliefs and the way they implement such subjects may limit them from adopting new practices that clash with their beliefs. So, in Mala’s case, she struggles to make the changes because she may believe that mathematics should be taught in a certain way and with curriculum change introducing student centred methods, these clash with her beliefs. Mala’s assertion of wanting to embrace change may mean that she hopes to integrate the new knowledge with her previous knowledge. Gregoire (2003) challenges such an approach, as he believes that such integration will prevent a proper conceptual understanding of the new knowledge; the previous knowledge will bias the understanding and will fail to lead to true change in attitudes and beliefs. Guskey (2002) found that change can only occur if teachers find that a new instructional approach actually works. He established from his study that teachers believe that such an approach actually works only if students’ results improve (Guskey, 2002). Participants have indicated that they have had little training in the new curricula and may have not experienced that they work in their classes, so will resort to practices that they have found, do work for them but maybe are not reflected in the outcomes which are students’ results. Guskey (2002) points out that educating oneself to be adept in something new requires time and effort which participants do not seem to have. Therefore, change for Mala may only occur if she has enough time and effort to make the change. This will exacerbate her work demands in making the change to a new curriculum. With her resistance to change, the resultant biases that she has will not result in a true conceptual understanding and will impair the implementation of a new curriculum.
Association of geometry with critical thinking and work burdens
Sagie: Geometry was removed and the reason they brought geometry back is this whole question of critical thinking. When you do geometry automatically you are becoming a critical thinker and universities complain how this can be left out of the school syllabus when engineers and those that can think at another level have to be produced.
Sagie: We questioned why geometry was removed but I must be honest as teachers we were happy that it was removed because it made our job easier.
Sagie shows inconsistency when talking about geometry as a content area. On the one hand, Sagie connects geometry to critical thinking and sees the value of it. Yet, he is happy that it was removed as it made his job easier. He sees curriculum as either easing the burden of a teacher or increasing it. If you take out some sections of the mathematics curriculum, that
157 appears difficult to teach, even if it is important, it makes Sagie’s work easier. Because it was brought back, it does make it more difficult for him to implement geometry in his classroom.
Although Sagie sees the value in reintroducing geometry into the curriculum, he actually welcomed the removal of geometry from the curriculum as it made his work easier. Leong and Chick (2011) determined that teachers are also faced with other challenges such as time;
context (Brodie, 2010) and resources (Reddy, 2006; Vithal & Volmink, 2005). These challenges impact on teachers’ work and policy implementation. Such challenges that Sagie faces in his classroom make teaching a content area such as geometry, which is thought of as an abstract subject, difficult to teach. Moreover, Slonimsky and Brodie (2006) posit that curriculum innovations require teachers to co-ordinate contextual and knowledge structures which takes a long time to develop (Slonimsky & Brodie, 2006). Therefore Sagie, finds teaching geometry difficult as he has to overcome other challenges that he finds in his classroom to bring about conceptual understanding in geometry. The concepts of context, ideology, experience and cultural capital is pertinent to understand why Sagie welcomed the removal of geometry from the syllabus, yet he sees the benefits that geometry has for students.
It has to do with meeting the needs of the diverse students within the context that he teaches in. It seems that ideology does not consider the individual, their differences in cultural capital as well as differences in their intelligence. Sagie finds trying to meet the needs of all the students an overwhelming task. To teach geometry to these diverse students is almost impossible as the teacher has to integrate the experiences of these students with the present task of teaching an abstract content area such as geometry.
Context and implementation
Patricia: Well I am very patient with students because I know they cannot afford the ruler, calculator, we have a problem with that as well so we allow them to borrow. And language is a problem. I think most of them are unable to interpret the questions so I have to explain to them.
Patricia: It is very difficult for us. Many students don’t complete their homework.
As a result our syllabus is not completed timeously. So we have to have afternoon classes for matriculants. Because students come from poorer backgrounds we have to prepare more worksheets to meet their needs.
158 Patricia shows inconsistency as if you look at the dimensions, she has patience when students do not have something and cannot speak the language. However, she has great difficulty when homework is not complete and she is unable to complete the syllabus. So she has to do extra teaching. She seems to be frustrated by the extra work such as drawing up more worksheets and trying to complete the syllabus. Then again, she says the extra work is because of the students being poor rather than with preparation for the mathematics curriculum.
With Patricia, there is a clear indication that she is frustrated with the work demands of trying to implement a new curriculum in the context she teaches in. Although she says she is patient, the work demands are burdensome to her. Context, therefore, causes more work demands on a teacher who is trying to implement a new curriculum. There are wide -ranging demands on resources, as students come from different social backgrounds, have different achievement level and even the level of pastoral care varies from school to school (Klusmann et al., 2008).
Patricia struggles with the work demands and her own beliefs. While she may be patient with the students, the challenges of the context that she works in, causes frustration. Teachers are now faced with such dilemmas and that causes difficulties as they have to, as Psycharis (2015) discusses, negotiate their external and internal (own beliefs and attitudes) when dealing with contextual factors. There seems to be a clash between the cultural capital of the teacher and the students. The teacher, in trying to ensure achievement by turning out more worksheets and having afternoon classes, struggles with what she believes is lack of mathematical knowledge in her students due to poverty. It could be the case, however that township children's lives are rich in African cultural capital and the corresponding habitus, but then a conflict is bound to occur between their habitus and the privileged western cultural capital and corresponding habitus of school knowledge.