A literature review conducted by the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment, Faculty of Education and the University of Pretoria on behalf of the Shuttleworth Foundation paints a disturbing, yet sobering picture about the state of South Africa’s teacher education system and how it can be transformed to facilitate change in the teaching practice.
The aim of the report was to review the global literature on teacher education with a view to gain a better understanding of the current situation in South Africa, to provide best practice guidelines relating to teacher education and serves as a basis for the Foundation’s education funding projects.
The report states that South Africans have seen numerous intervention strategies for learners being implemented as well as a number of curriculum changes that have been initiated to address poor learner performance, with few conclusive results. Internationally, our learners are performing well below average in core learning areas and even national systemic evaluation does not highlight a bright future.
The report states that if we are to break or at least indent this cycle, we need to consider including professional development of teachers as core components of current and future interventions. Language barriers on the teachers’ part, learners’ language incompetence, low salary brackets in the public education sector, as well as the HIV/Aids pandemic among teachers are cited as key factors impacting learner development.
Teacher education should address ‘pre-service’ as well as ‘in-service’ development. Teachers learn implicitly during their own schooling experiences, their pre-service training and through their own experience in practice, which has a dramatic impact on how they convey their subject matter knowledge. They need to engage in teacher induction programmes as well as reflective activities about their past positive and negative experiences and essentially focus on transforming the teaching practice that is modeled to successful teachers.
Another important aspect of teacher upliftment and learner engagement is meaningful open education curriculum materials to support their transformation as tutors and how to accommodate learners from various cultural and language groups.
The report states that access to high quality multimedia information and communication resources is imperative but should use teachers’ own languages and integrated exemplars that reflect local culture, education and practices. Importantly, teachers should have access to well-managed online environments for the collaborative development of professional knowledge and that fosters quality control.
Teachers are also valuable sources in providing open source material and encouraging the promotion thereof amongst the learners and peers. They are most likely to use, promote and support open learning though if they firstly know how to use it confidently, and secondly can see the value in it for their own purposes of teaching and learning.
Overall, The Shuttleworth Foundation believes that the literature review will enhance and suggest new ideas for its funding projects that will continue to contribute to the quality of education in South Africa. The Foundation believes that improved and learner achievement in our country will need to be underpinned by a radical improvement in the quality of our teachers, within whose hands rest the implementation of a curriculum built on ideals set to produce critical, reflective life-long learners.
The attached report outlines the findings to date and provides conclusions and implications of those findings and offers recommendations on how the teacher education system can be revolutionised.
This Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License