Aspectos institucionales

One of the biggest challenges for NQTs in Malaysia is that they are treated as if they were fully qualified and experienced from the very beginning of their teaching lives. Erni and the other participants were given ‘massive’ responsibilities at the start of

10 _{NILAM is an intensive reading program planned for all students in the school and it is} carried out in collaboration with the school library.

their teaching. Apart from teaching three different subjects, i.e. English Language, Science and Physical Education, Erni was given the roles of class teacher and assistant secretary for LINUS, and was given responsibility for the media room, netball club, ‘Sports House’ club, the school book shop and the book loan scheme committee. In 2016, she held the posts of assistant secretary for LINUS, co-ordinator for Year 1 transition, media room teacher and prefectural board committee. She said that she was no longer a class teacher since she already held several administrative posts. Apart from the huge range of roles and responsibilities, Erni seemed frustrated with the training that she had to go to. She reported that within six months she had to attend three different training sessions. It was a challenge for her since she had to leave her students, replace missing lessons and catch up with the syllabus afterwards since otherwise the students would be left behind compared to other classes (SRI5, L180-184).

She shared that throughout her first few weeks of teaching, she was able to prepare teaching materials for her lesson. However, during my first meeting with her, she said that she spent less time for lesson preparation due to the workload. She mentioned that she was busy accompanying students for netball training and tournaments after school. Hence, she did not have time to prepare for the lessons that I was going to observe. Erni was busy planning and preparing the lesson on the spot when I came. She was busy finding sentences and vocabulary on ‘Sea creatures’, the topic for that day, and we discussed the topic and materials that she planned to use. She said, “Not enough time”, “Too busy” and at times, she jokingly used “lazy” to describe her inability to prepare teaching materials for her class. Erni also mentioned that she was still adapting to the school environment and followed the syllabus strictly during the first classroom observation. In addition, she kept on repeating “typical teacher” during the interview. She stated that being a ‘typical’ teacher was what she experienced, being too busy with other unrelated teaching practices, and the ethos was to survive and not make too much effort. She seemed to see this ‘typical teacher’ as just a survivor. She said that there is a ‘good’ English teacher in her school who was able to prepare her lessons well. When asked, “Why aren’t you the same?” She replied “Entah” (I don’t know). In addition, I asked, “Do you have LCD projector in the classroom?” “Entah. Tak perasan” (I don’t know. I didn’t realise). Her response seemed to imply that she was not bothered or did not have the motivation to prepare well for her lesson. Since she was teaching a class with students that performed poorly academically, she said that she needed to make extra effort, especially in implementing the LINUS programme to ensure that the students could read and write.

Erni said that she could not use English at all because the students could not understand or she would use English but have to code-switch to Bahasa Malaysia. This scenario happened most of the time because her students could not understand even one full sentence (SI1, L97-99). Erni suggested that this was because they did not see the purpose of using English language in their daily life.

She told me that, as an NQT, she was given a mentor. The head of the English panel was her mentor at that time and she would have a mentor for three years until ‘Sah jawatan’ (Confirmation status as a teacher). Erni said that one of the roles of mentoring an NQT is to discuss the lesson plans and, only if she had time, she would discuss her lesson plan with her mentor. For the first observation, she managed to seek advice from her head of panel only a few minutes before the lesson started.

All in all, although she seemed frustrated with the training sessions that she had to attend, she shared that she was happy with her current condition and the challenge was not really a big deal for her. Erni complimented the school as she felt that all teachers were given a fair distribution of work. Generally, the basic practice in school was that it did not matter if one is an experienced or inexperienced teacher; everyone was allocated with their own roles and responsibilities fairly. She continued by saying, she was ‘okay’ with the school environment and with the students.