Tipos de sensores para aplicación en el IoT

I now review teachers’ personal and professional identities, to further address my interest in teachers’ experiences with the implementation of the AIDS curriculum.

The experiences relate to opportunities for successful implementation, as well as major challenges that teachers face as they implement the HIV/AIDS curriculum. I briefly review teachers’ personal and professional identities as critical cognitive and emotional dimensions that affect their engagement in the curriculum reform agenda.

The emotional dimension of educational change that the phenomenological approach underlines has been documented as an important yet unexplored aspect in the teaching and learning of HIV/AIDS (Lesko et al., 2010:823).

Scholarly accounts have detailed the emotional effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis on teachers, at both a personal level and a professional level, and they have highlighted how these aspects impact their functioning, both as ordinary persons and as professional HIV/AIDS teachers. The challenges, ambiguities, uncertainties, and paradoxes associated with successfully implementing an emotive educational change such as the HIV/AIDS curriculum require serious recognition of the fact that teachers do not objectively engage in interventions, devoid of feelings, emotions, values, beliefs, and sensitivities (Branson, 2010:14). Fullan’s (2001:1) portrayal of a balanced perception of the emotional effects of educational change illustrates the inevitable subjective nature of educational change, which is consistent with the phenomenological lens which I utilise in this study.

Fullan (2001:1 states that:

[c]hange is a double-edged sword. On the one side, exhilaration, risk-taking, excitement, improvements, energising; on the other side, fear, anxiety, loss, danger, panic.

However, research indicates that the HIV/AIDS crisis, in general, and, in particular, HIV/AIDS education and sexuality domains, largely evoke in teachers negative

Wood and Theron (2010:27) decry the lack of mention in statistical studies of the psychological trauma that teachers and learners suffer from the pandemic. These studies also say little about the associated emotional, social and pedagogical challenges that teachers have to contend with in their teaching about HIV/AIDS in schools in South Africa. Ntaote (2011:90) and Theron (2008:89) also note that the HIV/AIDS crisis has made teachers less well-functioning as individuals. Theron (2008:89) further observes that many teachers have reported constant grief and mood disturbances from frequent AIDS-related deaths and illnesses among their learners, relatives, and colleagues. On a professional level, current theory and research on the effects of the pandemic indicates that teachers are rendered less well-functioning professionally. Some of them have reported weakened professional morale and occupational stress (UNESCO, 2011:17; Theron, 2008:89).

According to UNESCO (2011:17), in Lesotho some teachers have reported “identity ambivalence”, citing incongruence between their personal way of living and what the community expects of them as professional teachers. Consequently, some teachers who knew that they, themselves, were HIV-positive, or who suspected that they could be HIV-positive, demonstrated reluctance to teach youth about HIV/AIDS.

The above examples point to the emotional and psychological challenges that are brought to bear on teachers’ personal and professional identities in a world where the HIV/AIDS crisis has reached pandemic proportions. When these challenges are viewed through the phenomenological lens applied to Honig’s (2006:14) model and cognition, the need to move away from a purely cognitive account to consider how teachers’ motivation and affect (Branson, 2010:14) influence their mediation efforts becomes relevant.

Yet another point to learn from this review is the fact that teachers have to contend with a complex array of changed skills and beliefs, which, in turn, demand more effort. In Honig’s terms, these teachers have to grapple with policy and policy goals that demand of them deeper levels of cognitive competency, and even emotional intelligence.

Drawing from Fullan’s (2001:1) example cited earlier in this section, I pointed out the positive side of implementation challenges and the positive emotions teachers can experience. I find that this optimistic perception of change fits well with Wood and

Theron’s (2010:14) concept of reflexivity, which holds promise for teachers’ ability to countervail the host of challenges they are faced with and enact the HIV/AIDS curricula more effectively. Reflexivity, or reflection, is a teacher’s quest for self-knowledge about who he or she is as an HIV/AIDS teacher in a world of HIV/AIDS crisis (Wood and Theron, 2010:16).

Emphasising the value of developing sound personal and professional identities of teachers in relation to HIV/AIDS through reflexivity, or self-reflection, Wood and Theron (2010:18) state that:

[t]eachers need to be clear about their personal (including sexual) and professional identities, since these determine the lens through which they filter what they teach and how they teach it, and how comfortable they are with what they teach.

What justifies HIV/AIDS teachers’ possession of self-reflection is the fact that the quest for self-knowledge also appeals to cognition. As they engage in a process of exploring their own personal attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and assumptions, the influence of their own HIV status, and social behaviour, teachers are cognitively making sense of possibilities and limitations that confront them in their teaching task.

Wood and Theron (2010:18) further argue that by holding up to critical scrutiny their views and beliefs about HIV/AIDS and their assumptions regarding teaching about HIV/AIDS, teachers get to understand themselves better. These authors believe that such a soul-searching endeavour can be situated in schools in what they term

“reflexive groups”. I agree with Wood and Theron’s scheme for a number of reasons.

Firstly, in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis, it is incumbent upon teachers to acquire opportunities to navigate their own cognitive and affective domains of being in communities of practice. In these reflexive groups, teachers can share experiences and collegially appreciate the hard realities that they face in their mediation efforts. It is in such gatherings that teachers are able not only to eliminate misunderstandings and misconceptions that they hold about HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS teaching, but also to ameliorate what Wood and Theron (2010:18) refer to as “cognitive discomfort”.

Secondly, the multiple pedagogical and social responsibilities that HIV/AIDS teachers have can lead to personal and professional identity confusion. This psychological condition requires synergistic collegiality, such as mutually supportive staff members, if it is to be overcome.

It can thus be argued that for many teachers, the occurrence of HIV/AIDS has brought with it unprecedented and hitherto unfamiliar pedagogical and social demands on practising teachers in schools. Open-mindedness on the part of teachers can only be nurtured by reflecting on the challenges as deliberative groups.

I find the similarity in logic between Wood and Theron’s (2010:17) construct of teacher reflexivity and the broader Adaptation approach to change and the phenomenological approach, which incorporates Honig’s model, relevant to my scheme. Reflexivity has the promise of encouraging individual teachers to restructure their knowledge of themselves and of HIV/AIDS teaching to transformatory planes of abstraction about what it means to be human and to be a humane HIV/AIDS teacher.

Another important but often neglected construct that is relevant to the impact that teaching of HIV/AIDS has on teachers’ personal and professional identities is resilience. I believe in an exploration of HIV/AIDS teachers’ identity-related challenges which assess not only teachers’ reflexivity, but their resilience.

Resilience is the ability to live and function positively under negative conditions (Theron, 2008:92). It seems that all too often authors and researchers are oblivious of the fact that not all teachers fail to cope with the challenges of HIV/AIDS and the teaching of the subject as individuals and professionals. In the literature, there are cases documented of teachers who have demonstrated resilience, through being self-reflective and open-minded. Theron (2008:95) reports on a study conducted in some schools in South Africa, where some teachers had learned to cope with their adversities through the use of intrapersonal and interpersonal resources. Lesko et al. (2010:827) cite a study undertaken in some schools in the US, where teachers became more open-minded in their perceptions and more confident and resilient to confront teaching challenges by using the interpersonal resource of referring some of the learners’ HIV/AIDS-related questions to parents and nurses.

In conclusion, the constructs of teacher reflexivity and resilience appear to be sound strategies for dealing with teachers’ personal and professional challenges in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis and the teaching of HIV/AIDS-related issues. However, the reality is that in most sub-Saharan countries, several constraints undermine the development of such constructs in teachers. Research has shown that teachers have complained that the HIV/AIDS curriculum is an additional load to the already overloaded school curriculum (Hordzi, 2008:331; UNESCO, 2005:203). Teachers in most Third World countries usually handle very large classes (UNESCO, 2005:203).

It is therefore doubtful, in the light of the pressures that teachers face, whether adequate time and resources can be found to foster in teachers these useful constructs.