Learning To Teach In Post Apartheid South Africa

Teacher education programmes seek to provide student teachers with the knowledge and expertise to provide qualtiy teaching and learning in a diverse and challenging school context. Learning to Teach in post-apartheid South Africa: Student Teachers' Encounters with Initial Teacher Education addresses the complexities of teacher education programmes in preparing students to teach. It adds to the knowledge about teacher education, contributing critical understanding of education and the schooling system. The book provides important insights to deepen researchers, academics, teacher education providers, policy-makers, and students' understanding of the importance to address equity, redress, and quality in South African educaiton in a post-apartheid era. This book further helps to build student teachers' capacities to work creatively and to become active and critical agents of transformation. It ultimately outlines the challenges face in designing and delivering successful Inital Teacher Education programmes, and the impact this has on delivering equitable and qualtiy education.

The main purpose of this book is to provide a concise overview of educational transition – to document, discuss and analyse key changes (and continuities) in South African education since the end of apartheid. What makes this period particularly fascinating for educationalists is that the legacy of apartheid and the years of international isolation meant that educational reform had to be fundamental and wide ranging if South Africa was to become a modern, democratic state participating in the global political economy of the twenty-first century. The result was that in the final five years of the twentieth century South Africa became something of a laboratory or crucible for educational innovation. From 1948 to the early 1990s South African government was based on an institutionalised system of ‘racial’ separation and inequality formally known as apartheid. A white minority dominated a black majority in a context of stark social, political and economic differentiation. While the apartheid state used force to maintain this system, formal education was also used to try to make the basic tenets of apartheid ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ in the minds of South Africans. From the apartheid government’s point of view, the role of education was to help to perpetuate and reproduce a racist system and to encourage obedience and conformity to that system. It is not therefore surprising that in the 1970s and 1980s education also became a key site in the struggle against apartheid or that educational reform was high on the agenda of the first democratically elected government after April 1994. However, while the direction of educational reform has inevitably been strongly influenced by the nature and history of the anti-apartheid struggle inside South Africa, the global political and economic context has also played its part in shaping educational debate and policy outside South Africa. Clive Harber’s book recognises that there is a difference between planned reform and the actual nature of educational change on the ground and tries, where possible, to set reform in the contextual realities of South African education as they presently exist. It aims to understand the difficulties and ambiguities of transition as well as the overt aims and goals as enshrined in policy documents and legislation.

"This book considers these issues by reviewing selected large-scale interventions to improve education quality in South African schools. These interventions include the District Development Support Programme (DDSP), the Education Quality Improvement Partnership Programme (EQUIP), the IMBEWU programme, the Integrated Education Program (IEP), the Khanyisa School Programme, the Learning for Living (LFL) Project, and the Quality Learning Project (QLP). It locates these interventions by providing a chronology of education policy development in South Africa since 1994 as well as engaging with key debates about the notion of education quality. Furthermore, it invites policy-makers to critically review and reflect on the changes to improve education quality in South Africa since 1994. By bringing together academics, policy-makers and practitioners to reflect on education development the book sheds light on the continuous but elusive search for quality education for all. In so doing, the book provides a basis for a critical conversation about the history of education change in post-apartheid South Africa, and the implications for interventions aimed at improving education quality."--Publisher's note

Learning to Teach in South Africa is a collection of essays by one of South Africa's most respected thinkers in education. These essays span the crucial years of democratic transition in South Africa and show the consistency of Morrow's thinking over this period. He argues for the retrieval of the primacy of the practice of professional teaching in our thinking about the transformation of schooling and education in our country, reveals the emergence of his seminal distinction between formal and epistemological access, puts forward some definite views about teacher education, and continues to struggle with relativism, one of the strands of the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid. These essays are an essential read for anyone interested in the transformation of education, and especially those who have a role in shaping its future.

This title was first published in 2002: Has the South African post-apartheid state been able to achieve its stated goals? What has been the relationship between the process of educational reform and the impact on the state of the Constitution and other laws? This seminal book responds to these questions by examining the development and implementation of social policy in South Africa during the first years of democratic government, particularly in relation to education. The post-apartheid state was immediately faced with a broad spectrum of political, social, economic and human rights issues. The research analyzes whether the aims and objectives of the new administration were achieved; no other single collection of research in South Africa collectively explores the issues raised in this endeavour. The book will appeal to a wide range of professionals including researchers, academics, planners, policy makers, public servants and postgraduate students.

The book will focus on the emergence of a racially-divided system of teacher preparation and its dismantling post-apartheid. It will explore the policies and politics of discrepant pathways to teacher preparation within the context of international and comparative trends.

School Leadership for Democratic Education in South Africa explores the democratization and modernization of education in South Africa, analyzing the state of school leadership in South African schools from the time of the new democratic education dispensation in 1994 to the present day. The book maps out what the future of education in South Africa could look like and explores the most conducive educational environments for change in South African schools. It adopts a critical approach to analyzing leadership and management in the context of school governance, school effectiveness, teacher development, multiculturalism and equity in education. Contributions explore the democratization and modernization of education in South Africa through examining different perspectives, achievements and challenges, and also consider issues around access to technology, language policy and the curriculum along with new literature on selected aspects of leadership. This book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars, and students in the fields of educational leadership, sociology of education, and teacher education.