UN PLAN DE MEJORA
A. De qué cantidad de GEI soy responsable?
The primary maths in-service teacher education professional development programme, called the Numeracy Inquiry Community of Leader Educators (NICLE) forms the empirical field of research to this study. The NICLE initiative focuses on numeracy teacher development in the critical transition from foundation to intermediate phase (that is Grade 3 and 4)27 in selected primary schools in the Grahamstown greater area (SANC, 2013; SANC, 2012; SANC, 2011). This numeracy teacher professional development programme was developed by the South
27 The rationale for focusing on Grade 3 and 4 teachers is meant to improve interaction between teachers in these phases as pre-service education is structured around phase specialisation (SANC, 2011; SANC, 2012).
African Numeracy Chair, at Rhodes University and is part of the six FirstRand Foundation Numeracy and Mathematics Chairs initiatives that are tasked with searching for sustainable ways forward in navigating the many challenges of mathematics education in South Africa (Graven, 2011a).
NICLE is articulated and conceptualised as a long-term partnership between in-service teachers and the Chair and partners of the Chair, and aims to improve numeracy education and finding solutions to the challenges faced in numeracy education (Graven & Schafer, 2011; Graven, 2010). The intended duration of the NICLE programme is five years, which is from 2011 to 2015. At the start of its first year, NICLE had 57 Foundation and Intermediate phase teachers from 15 participating schools who attended NICLE’s fortnightly seminars and inquiry sessions (SANC, 2011). In 2012, 45 of these continued as regularly participating teachers from 12 core participating schools (SANC, 2012; SANC 2013). I gathered data and carried out research in NICLE, during these first two years (from 26 March 2011 to 9 October 2012). Of a total of 25 NICLE sessions (excluding end of year celebration sessions) in 2011 and 2012 I attended and observed 23 sessions. (Thus I missed only two sessions when I attended the SAARMSTE Research School and a Department of Higher Education, Teacher Education Conference). I also attended other NICLE-related events such as a maths family event. In addition I attended two ‘Teacher Relays’ alongside several NICLE teachers during the National Maths week and three local and regional teacher conferences. Several NICLE teachers attended and participated in these mathematical activities, conferences and events as these are part of on-going opportunities supported by the SANC. Thus the primary maths professional development initiative’s core programmes and activities includes teachers attending NICLE’s fortnightly sessions and additional participation in overlapping communities of practice such as local, regional and national conferences (Graven 2010; SANC, 2011).
Since NICLE is the empirical field in which teacher learning and teacher identity is explored it is important to analyse and describe in detail the nature of the NICLE Community of Practice and the promoted and projected Primary Maths Teacher Identity, as this will inform data gathered from teacher interactive interviews. This is provided in the following chapter. Below I engage with my positioning in the research.
5.2.1 My role in NICLE and in the SANC research community
The Chair’s project work is conceptualised as two overlapping CoPs of NICLE and post graduate researchers. Thus besides NICLE, the Chair also focuses on the establishment and the growing of a numeracy/primary maths education research community, which has been developed in parallel with the teacher community (Graven, 2010; SANC, 2011; SANC, 2012; SANC, 2013). To this effect I applied and was recruited as a full time PhD fellow, in January 2011, by the Chair, Professor Mellony Graven who is also my Supervisor. I was interested in the research initiatives of the Chair because her work draws from Communities of Practice theory and interpretive methodology. As a PhD fellow in the project, my doctoral research focuses on primary maths teacher learning within the NICLE program.
I am a Zimbabwean citizen, and have taught mainly Humanities and Languages at Secondary level in my home country for seven years. I migrated into South Africa in 2007 and briefly taught at an Independent private college in Johannesburg’s inner city, before enrolling as a full-time student for a Bachelor of Education Honours degree and thereafter a Masters in Curriculum Studies at the Wits School of Education. I also taught curriculum studies, professional studies and the school in context courses to full-time undergraduate and in- service teacher education students at Wits. I speak English, and during my six years in South Africa I have learned the two main indigenous languages: isiZulu and isiXhosa. Some of the sampled participants speak and teach in isiXhosa, Afrikaans or English but all the NICLE sessions were conducted in English, as were the interviews. All the NICLE teachers and the sampled teachers speak and understand English. In this research the language of interviewing, which is English, did not emerge as a source of problem or tension with the participants, although it should still be noted that for some of the sampled teachers English was not their home language.
I have participated in NICLE for the purposes of carrying out research. I thus attended the NICLE sessions as a participant observer, who also sat with the teachers and participated in the NICLE activities as a learner alongside the primary maths teachers. I would jointly work out mathematical problems with the teachers as I sat amongst them. I do not have post school mathematics training and so was a learner alongside teachers. The NICLE participant observations are one of my data collection methods for my PhD research. Activities and events I observed in NICLE were written in my field work notes, which were compiled from 26 March 2011 to 9 October 2012. I audio-recorded several of the NICLE sessions for further
analysis to understand the nature of teacher learning and the projected NICLE primary maths teacher identity. I also collected NICLE teacher hand-outs which were given by presenters to participating teachers. Alongside other Chair team members we would jointly arrange the logistics (e.g. seating, compilation of hand-outs) in preparation for sessions and help in distributing NICLE teacher hand-outs and resources.
From the NICLE teachers in 2011 I purposively sampled ten teachers, whom I interviewed twice (once in 2011 and once in 2012). These interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. However during the interviews carried out in 2012, the sample size came down to 8 after 2 of the participants withdrew from the programme because of other commitments and challenges28. I elaborate below on my interpretive research methodology.