DA0. Iniciar sesi´ on

As noted in Chapter One, before 1994 the South African education system was fractured along a number of lines. Since the democratic election, enormous efforts have been made to transform this fractured system into a coherent whole which will provide an education of quality for all. In spite of these efforts, the system continues to be plagued by levels of dysfunction (Chisholm, 2003), which means that the goals of transformation is far from being achieved. In South African society, evidence of discourses constructing the new single education system as dysfunctional abound. In many respects, some of these discourses are racist in that they are tinged with the idea that the dysfunction is related to the assumption of power by black educationalists. In the following extract, the educator refers to “state”

workshops intended to prepare educators for portfolio assessment. By implication, these are to be compared to the training offered by bodies such as the Independent Examining Board referred to in Chapter One of this thesis.

Barbara: Were the trainings helpful?

Educator-T/A: I found the workshops irritating in the extreme. They were the state ones were autocratic and insulting, often, and they would have so-called experts in the various learning areas who would come and read to you from the booklets that you’d already received, offered no guidance as to implementation. At times, you would learn from your peers, you know, good ideas would come up and you’d realise that at such-and-such a school they were doing this, that was the only value. But the irritation levels were so high that you were often frustrated and didn’t really get the full benefit.

Topicalised phrases such as “irritating in the extreme” “autocratic”, “insulting”, “offered no guidance”, “irritation levels were so high”, “often frustrated” are indicative of this educator’s construction of the training offered by the Department of Education which, as Chisholm (2003) explains, was not particularly well conceptualised and was often offered by trainers who themselves were not always experienced in or particularly well theoretically informed on portfolio assessment. For this educator, then, the only “value” gleaned from the training was from the colleagues at other schools. The discourse of dysfunction evident in constructing South African education more generally since 1994 is therefore also evident in the way this educator constructs her experience of being required to work with portfolio assessment. The following extract from an interview with another educator attests to a similar experience and is evidence of the same discursive construction of that experience:

Educator-T/-B: I get very little training, but the bit I've been to have not, I've worked it out for myself…Sitting reading for hours, poring over, seeing what was required, um and often when I ask questions an ordinary educator like the rest of us, they've had more training than us, and they often can not answer the questions, so um, a couple of times I've

phoned the regional office to speak to someone to bring it to their attention and they've put me on to someone else and…

The pronoun “us” is used inclusively and exclusively in the text. When the educator is speaking of colleagues within her own (private) school she is speaking in an inclusive manner. However, when she speaks of others, who she feels has had more opportunity for training, she refers to them in an exclusionary manner. The effect of the portfolio on this educator has been to destabilise her and her colleagues as professionals and to locate them in spaces with no possibility of finding direction.

As already noted in Chapters Two and Four, the Department Of Education (DoE)

established a review committee to examine the new outcomes-based curriculum, C2005 (Chisholm, 2000). The committee found that C2005 was cumbersome for educators and lacked clarity, that the curriculum itself was described using such complex and confusing language that teachers could not engage with it and that instructions to teachers were often ambiguous or unclear (Chisholm, 2003). As also noted, the result of this inquiry into C2005 was a recommendation that the curriculum should be simplified. In spite of this, educators continue to be unhappy with the shift to outcomes-based approaches.

In the following extract, an educator responds to a question regarding the documents related to the introduction of portfolio assessment in the following way:

Educator - K/T: We have no input into them. They are somebody else’s creation, in somebody else’s terminology, in somebody else’s topic and I find it difficult reading my way into that.

Differentiation between the educators and the government is apparent in this extract from the interviews. The use of the inclusive pronoun “we” and the exclusive pronoun phrase, “somebody else’s” which is representing the government is an example of how the educator above considers himself powerless in the process. Agency in this passage is assigned to the Department of Education which is viewed as exercising power over the educators.

Nominalisation is present also in phrases such as “somebody else’s creation”, “somebody else’s terminology”, “somebody else’s topic”. For some educators in the study, therefore, the introduction of portfolio assessment was constructed as part of the general dysfunction characterising the entire system since the shift to democracy.