Metodologia d’intervenció: personalització

The first day in this post is one that I remember very clearly. After a gruelling process, the appointment was done merely weeks before 1 April 1996. This was the first round of a democratic process in which teachers’ organisations were also involved. I applied for a post in Cape Town, Bellville and Worcester. All the respective posts that were advertised received approximately one thousand applications.

The week before our commencement we were informed to report to the Worcester regional office. On our arrival we realised that nobody there had been expecting us. Most of the new appointees were from outside Worcester and we did not know one another. Needless to say, our “orientation was not very comforting” or helpful. There was resistance towards those of us who were not from Worcester. Furthermore, there were many women and the director, Mr. Johnson, could not understand why we would leave our husbands and families to go to work there.

In the meeting we were briefed about our areas of operation. I was appointed to work in the western part of the region and my colleague, Christopher Banda, in the eastern part. Only advisers for English and Afrikaans were divided in this way – all the other subjects had only one adviser for the entire region. The director indicated that one of us was to be stationed in George. I objected, as this had not been raised as an expectation by either the advertisement or during the interview. This challenge of the director was frowned upon for two reasons. Firstly, I was not expected to say anything in the meeting as I had only just started and therefore was not ‘senior’ enough. Secondly, women were not expected to speak in meetings. Of course, things were never the same again in the Worcester region again.

This appointment in the rural areas of the Western Cape was an enormous and pleasing working as well as living experience. I had found a place to board with a friend of my husband’s, Sabina Rhodes, for those times that I needed to stay over in Worcester. This

grounded me as I was not at all familiar with the town and its people. The territory was new for all involved.

Initially, the work I did as curriculum adviser had one main focus, namely the

maintenance and development of the existing curriculum of 1992, when the syllabus of language teaching had been changed to the communicative approach. In this regard I did workshops with teachers on the different language skills, like reading, writing, speaking and listening. The developments within these areas also took me on a road of

development outside my previous experiences.

The different apartheid education departments had been amalgamated into the WCED. I worked in all the secondary and high schools. During those days, the old South African flag was still being displayed in the principals’ offices in the former Cape Provincial schools, and was accompanied by a superior attitude among the staff. One comment that a principal made about two years into my term summarises the attitude: “The teachers here thought that you are an affirmative action appointment, but you actually know what you are doing.”

Then there was the attitude towards me as a woman which included all previous pre- Apartheid departmental divisions. Apart from some women appointed in the former Department of Education and Training (DET) and in subjects like Home Economics and Physical Education for girls, this was virgin territory for women. The prejudice came mostly from principals and male heads of department. Not many questioned my competence in my subject field, but I always had to explain how my husband and children survived in my absence.

Another point of view that was conveyed very subtly was that women were not regarded as “strong enough” to occupy management positions in the departmental top structures. In 2000, the restructuring of the department included very few and mostly white women in top and middle management. This exclusion of women in the management structures had a greater impact than the WCED would ever care to recognise. “The exclusion of

women and their point of view is not just a political omission and a moral blind spot but constitutes an epistemological deficit as well” (Benhabib, 1992: 13).

Despite all this, the learning experience as an official of the WCED proved to be

invaluable in my development as an educator. I played a leading role in establishing the Letterkunde Ondersteuningskomitee (LOK) set up to support grade 12 teachers in the teaching of Afrikaans literature. This committee was composed of representatives of the WCED, and the departments of Didactics in the Education Faculty as well as Afrikaans and Nederlands Literature in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the following institutions: the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University and the University of the Western Cape. This was a unique and novel exercise in which teachers from all the schools and tertiary institutions in the province would gather and learn from one another about the latest developments in literature and didactics.

The other two areas in which I made a contribution was in developing learning and teaching material in language variants of Afrikaans, as well as material for developing listening skills. The material regarding variants of Afrikaans was done in the form of an audio package, called Afrikaans taalverskeidenheid, with an audio cassette and resource book. The listening material, Spits die ore, was audio visual, with a DVD and resource book. Both packages included some theoretical background on the communication skills and teaching and learning material for classroom activity.

Apart from presenting workshops and developing teaching and learning material, the other aspects of my job were school visitations and the moderation of final marks. During the school visitations one of the things I learned very quickly was that teachers were not used to learning about teaching. The new phase of arranging workshops about the

curriculum was fairly new. Although the Cape Provincial Education Department did their development through the Teachers’ Centres, the other departments had no tradition of training and development. Therefore a great deal of work had to be done to get teachers to attend. Building relationships lay at the heart of these efforts.

In building relationships I had to work hard during the school visitations to listen to the teachers’ needs and accommodate them in the development programme. What I also found was that much of my work during these school visitation sessions had to do with mentoring. Teachers distrusted departmental officials, so this had to be dealt with at the same time as building their confidence in themselves and the learners. I took great pains in my report writing after school visitations and moderation sessions to carefully combine some critique of developmental issues in the teaching with encouragement. It took about two years for teachers to feel comfortable enough to invite me into their classrooms for observation – although some never did. These experiences led me to believe that much needs to be done to build hope in teachers in order for them to become agents of hope for their learners.

The moderation of literature and oral internal assessment brought me into contact with the learners as well. It was during these interactions that I came to realise that, generally speaking very little of what teachers learned at workshops and symposia found their way back into the classroom. What found its way to learners was mostly in the form of notes and very little in terms of methodology. Rote learning was still the dominant learning strategy in most classrooms.

I was also a member of the provincial training team for the orientation of grade one teachers in preparation for Curriculum 2005 (C2005). The decision for outcomes-based education (OBE) came quite suddenly and the curriculum was developed in a short period of time. At provincial level, we were trained by the members of the writing team who had also participated at a national level. There was much debate on many different levels about OBE, but the decisions had already been taken elsewhere. The process of decision-making could be described as inclusive because there was participation by all the different role players in education. However, the actual decision in favour of OBE as an approach to the transformation of education in South Africa was not done on a broad enough scale to include all levels of participation. The implementation of OBE was consequently experienced as top down, and we as officials experienced great resistance during the training sessions.

The period of training the grade one teachers was oddly both empowering as well as disempowering. It was empowering because I had to rise to the challenge of making sense of OBE, which was not easy, since my education and training did not prepare me for this approach. What I had to do was to use my theoretical framework as point of departure, develop my understanding of what was needed to transform education in South Africa, and use the opportunities granted to make sense of the direction the Department of Education (DOE) had taken with education in schools. The decision to implement OBE as opposed to other approaches was not adequately dealt with on a broad enough scale.

My attitude was that the DOE had taken its decisions democratically and that whatever system of education it had adopted would have encountered resistance. I saw my role as being to support teachers to the best of my ability, to be able to implement Curriculum 2005. This was a period in my career that I neglected to reflect effectively in order to be able to develop my practice as support agent for teachers. The day-to-day practice of the WCED was not conducive to reflexive praxis and, as always in my career, I had to take personal responsibility for my development. My most productive reflexive period had always been during the formal learning process and I realised that I would have to consider enrolling for my PhD. I did this in 1998, with values education as the main theme of inquiry. I was delegated to be part of the national values education programme for a short while. My participation there did not encourage me, because my reading of values education did not connect with what the committee was discussing and the programmes on which they embarked. Not at any point did the committee even consider different approaches to values education, nor attempt to create a definition that could be adopted. I raised this as a concern, but was never again sent to represent the WCED. The programmes embarked on were mostly related to History, and schools were involved on the basis of a competition with no real impact on the broader system of education.

My studies did not progress well at all, with one of the major obstacles being the very demanding programme of training and support for Curriculum 2005 while maintaining

the old syllabus. Traveling in the region also became taxing and consequently, in 2000, I applied for a transfer to the Bellville region. The WCED was restructured during that same year and, at the end of the year, I was appointed as curriculum planner. In January 2001, I started at the head office of the WCED.