Friendship, Collegiality and Community in South African Teachers Lives and Careers

Friendship, collegiality and community in South African teachers’ lives and careers.

Volker Wedekind

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September 2000

School of Education, Training and Development

University of Natal

P/Bag X01

Scottsville 3209

South Africa

and

Department of Sociology

University of Manchester

Williamson Building

Oxford Road

Manchester

M13 9PL

E-mail:

Introduction

South African teachers have experienced a sea change in their places of work over the last decade and the pressure for greater reform and development in the education system is likely to see changes continue for some time yet[1]. As elsewhere the changes, and the failure to change, generate many debates on the best ways of tansforming schools and teachers. Politicians have attacked teachers for their lack of commitment, teachers express frustrations at the levels of interference, and universities and non-governmental organisations seek out models for effective school and teacher development.

Within the latter area there is an increasing array of models of school development - be they school-based, whole-school or leadership oriented - being imported, modified or developed afresh in the South African context. One of the central concepts within these models is ‘community’. Reference is made to professional communities, school communities or any number of other variations. This paper is primarily concerned with how teachers experience community. By drawing on data from a series of life history interviews, coupled with observation and survey data, the paper seeks to explore the role that friendship networks can play in the development of a sense of community. It will be suggested that friendships amongst colleagues can play a central role in the development of a teacher’s sense of identification with an institution and his or her colleagues.

Teacher Development and School Communities

There has been a widespread interest in South Africa in developing strategies that can assist schools and teachers to cope with and embrace change[2]. While state sponsored trickle-down initiatives have largely foundered due to limited resources and conceptual difficulties, there has been much activity in the non-governmental sector attempting to implement smaller scale and school-based initiatives, drawing on models of school development and school reform from Britain and North America. These models have tended to emphasise the need for whole-school approaches, stressing the role of management in catalysing a new school culture that embraces change (Christie and Potterton 1997).

Notions of school consensus, school culture and school communities abound in both the South African and international literature (see Guskey and Huberman 1995; School of Education 1998; Westheimer 1998). In summarising much of the literature on school communities, Westheimer lists five constitutive features of community: 1) interaction and participation; 2) interdependence; 3) shared interests and beliefs; 4) concern for individual and minority views; and 5) meaningful relationships (Westheimer 1998: 17). One of the difficulties with much of the literature on school communities is that it fails to adequately distinguish between the notion of community as a bounded grouping “with specific modes of behaviour to one another” (Gluckman 1940/1958: 9) and the more complex notion of community that is concerned with matters of identity. The former can be employed as an external descriptor (interaction, participation and interdependence exist) while the latter is concerned with the quality of the relationships (what meaning is attached to the relationships internally). Westheimer’s summary illustrates the two dimensions well. Points one and two link to Gluckman’s notion of community, usually defined in terms of some spatial metaphor[3]. However, sharing a bounded space such as a school, and interacting within that space in some interdependent form, does not imply that the members of the community have meaningful relationships, shared interests and beliefs and a concern for individual and minority views. This latter qualitative dimension can be better defined as something akin to having a ‘sense of community’, those ‘empathetic connections’ between people (Dominelli 1999: 442), or the concept communitas which Turner employs (Turner 1969: 96).

Westheimer’s recent study showed how much of the literature on school communities failed to adequately distinguish between different types of communities and he develops a model that differentiates between liberal and collective communities[4]. However, Westheimer’s study was based on case studies of two schools that had been reorganised with a strong commitment to building a community[5]. Other cases of strong school-wide teacher communities tend to be those schools that have a specific focus, be they religious, ideologically or pedagogically distinctive, or defined in terms of their curriculum (see Talbert 1993). The reality of most schools, if personal experience and a wealth of international ethnographic data is to be believed, is that they are highly divided places (see Woods 1979 for the classic study). Teachers, particularly in secondary schools, tend to identify with their subject specialisation rather than the school staff as a whole (Little 1993).

A growing area of consensus in debates about school communities is the crucial role that leadership plays in creating the conditions for the sense of community to develop as well as actively managing change processes (see for instance Gray 1998). Schools with good leadership are generally more resilient (Christie 1997) and more likely to create an enabling environment for school development and change (Fullan 1999). But what are the implications for schools where these conditions don’t exist? Do other forms of community emerge or do teachers operate in isolation? It is these questions which I intend to explore in relation to one specific case study.

Methodology

The methodology employed is that of life history or biographical interview and career data, coupled with focused interviews on specific aspects of curriculum change and social change. The life history data was collected in late 1999 and early 2000, while additional background data are drawn from earlier studies (Penny, Appel et al. 1993; Wedekind, Lubisi et al. 1996; Wedekind and Sader 1998; Harley and Wedekind 1999; Randall 1999; Sader 1999) carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Natal.

The particular advantage of drawing on life histories is that the discussion of the significance of friendships emerged from the participants’ accounts of their lives and careers as teachers. The broader study for which the life histories were collected did not have this dimension as an explicit focus. Work is understood by the participants in the interview to be one dimension of a broader life and thus tends to overcome the difficulties of reifying the work and organisational dimensions of people’s lives (Newton 1999).

The interviews varied in length between 1 hour and 3 hours. They were fully transcribed and then managed and coded using Atlas/ti. All references refer to the document number and line numbers within the Atlas/ti Hermeneutic Unit.

Before examining in some detail the friendship network, it is important to provide some background to the school.

Forest View High[6]

Forest View High School lies on the suburban outskirts of a secondary city in South Africa. Its buildings are located in fairly large grounds on the edge of a large commercial forestry plantation. The architecture is typical of most schools built from the middle of the last century – multiple storeys of long corridors of classrooms. The entrance foyer is adorned with plaques listing the achievements of pupils at the school as well as the names of the head prefects and captains of the First XV Rugby team. A more recent addition includes the names of those who have been awarded school colours for cultural activities.

The corridors are crowded during breaks between lessons as large numbers of pupils attempt to move from one class to the next. The school was designed for 850 pupils, but now has over 1000 and the intake is due to increase again in 2001. Large signs in English and Afrikaans have been mounted on the building walls extolling the virtues of being quiet!

Historically, Forest View was administered by the Natal Education Department (NED)[7] and was until the early 1990s reserved for white children. It is thus well resourced when compared to the majority of schools in South Africa, although in comparison to other ex-NED schools in the city it is not the most affluent[8]. All classrooms have sufficient desks and chairs, electricity and usually an overhead projector.

The school’s original feeder community was primarily the white working class community in the surrounding suburbs. Partly because of the community it served, the school’s orientation was towards technical and vocational subjects rather than academic ones. Indeed, it was the only NED school in the city that offered a technical qualification as well as the conventional academic curriculum, and this resulted in it attracting children who were struggling with the academic orientation of the majority of other schools. It therefore tended to have a disproportionate number of children who were perceived to have minor learning difficulties and it developed a reputation for being somewhat ‘rough’. The school also has a boarding establishment which results in it attracting children from rural areas as well as many from broken homes or foster families (Randall 1999).

Besides the comprehensive curriculum, Forest View was also the only school in the city which was (and remains) designated as dual medium[9]. Thus, even before desegregation there were two distinct groups of pupils divided along language lines and, to some extent, the teachers were also divided along these lines. With desegregation in the 1990s, the school’s learners became more diverse, with an increasing number of children commuting from the black African townships in order to benefit from better-equipped and more stable learning environments[10]. Because both the traditional community and the new intake were relatively poor, the school was unable to increase the school fees sufficiently to compensate for the cutbacks in teachers, equipment and the increase in legislated pupil-teacher ratios[11]. Thus teachers have been faced with an effective reduction in staff by almost 50% while the learner numbers have risen by over 30%.

A divided school?

It is already evident from the background to the school that it is potentially a highly divided place. An initial reading of the interview data would lend support to this interpretation. In this section I will examine the ways in which the school is actually and potentially divided. The divisions appear to cut across each other in a range of ways: amongst management, teachers, and learners, and between them in complex ways.

The divisions amongst learners are of less relevance here, but do provide a further sense of the nature of the difficulties faced by teachers at the school. The most obvious to an outside observer are the divisions between black African and white children. Given South Africa’s recent history, and the fact that the racial divisions are further marked by linguistic divisions, it is little wonder that the school has experienced open tensions amongst its learners, flaring up in early April 1998 into violent confrontation between black African and white learners (see Wedekind, 2001 for a detailed analysis of this and similar incidents).

However, like most schools, the divisions amongst the learners are more complex and include: divisions between those learners in the dominant English stream and those in the Afrikaans stream (which is entirely white); divisions around curriculum and status attached to subject; and divisions between age cohorts, gender and sporting interests. By and large these factors can be regarded as relatively normal in most schools and will not be discussed further here.

The teachers also appear highly divided. In part this is a consequence of institutional features of the school such as the academic and vocational streams and the dual medium streams. The differences that exist between teachers of core academic subjects and vocational and technical subjects are widely documented in the literature and Forest View is no different (see Little 1993). In a number of interviews, teachers spoke about the hostilities that surfaced regarding status, timetabling and academic elitism. One teacher described her attitudes towards technical teachers when differences arose as follows:

…we're patronising towards them! Because we think well, you know, you aren't very academic, you don't even know what you're doing. So we don't actually want to associate with you… (P8: 0918-0922)

A description of the staff room by one of the teachers highlights further divisions:

Well, I think if you just walk into the staff room first thing in the morning, you'll be quite amused, because you'll find mainly the men sort of sit on the one side of the staff room and the women sit on the other side. Um, and that's something that just always existed at this school, right from when I started here. The men here tend to be of the old guard, you know. Still a lot of them hanker after the cane and ... very staunch, sort of Afrikaans backgrounds, you know. (P7: 0311-0318)

The divisions outlined above take on pedagogic and broad ideological dimensions too. Many of the teachers interviewed expressed frustration at the divisions in terms of its impact on the classroom:

the one thing that really gets to me is (…) how many different groups there are in the staff that are almost pulling in totally different directions. So if… I feel if we all had a similar direction, we'd actually get somewhere. So it's very difficult for me, when I've got a class, for instance, like a Grade X class that's really struggling, in appropriate behaviour, all of that kind of thing, and I try every lesson to deal with that, but when they go elsewhere they're being treated like dirt. (…) So that's a big frustration for me! (P8: 0830-0853)

Other teachers describe the divisions between themselves and ‘the civil servants’: those who “clock in, clock out, do the minimum” (P11: 0856). Not only does this ‘civil servant’ mentality resist change and disruption, but it also results in a smaller grouping of teachers who are prepared to do extra work that might benefit the school or its learners. The teachers who are committed to change and improvement are thus burdened with additional tasks that add to the stress of an increasing general workload.

Given the social context of major political upheaval and its direct impact on the identity of the school’s learners through the process of desegregation, it is little wonder that broader ideological cleavages are found at the school. André, a teacher at another local school who taught at Forest View for a year remembers the polarities:

it was an interesting school because it had all the poles - we had an AWB[12] member, and we had Fiona as well, (laughs) and we had a very verkrampte[13] headmaster. (P1: 0346-0348)

It is likely that the AWB member was a teacher we interviewed in 1997 who talked at length about his separatist views on South Africa’s races, arguing strongly against social mixing (Sader 1999). On the other hand, Fiona, the teacher mentioned by André above, was a supporter of the ANC led government and a member of the ANC aligned South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU). The teaching staff thus included the full spectrum of political opinion in South Africa at the time, with dramatically antagonistic positions.

André’s comment also mentions the school’s principal, Mr Firth. In fact, few of the teachers at the school described him as politically conservative, although our interviews with him did tend to suggest that his educational beliefs could be viewed as such (see Penny, Appel et al. 1993; Sader 1999). The dominant impression from members of the current staff was that leadership at the school was somewhat erratic and inconsistent. The picture painted by the teachers interviewed for this study is of a man approaching retirement who has become disillusioned. The turning point seems to have been the perceived lack of support he received from the provincial Department of Education when the school was attempting to clamp down on discipline. Having been instated as principal because he was perceived to be able to manage a difficult school, he has now given up because there are too many external constraints on schools[14]. Here, Fiona, describes the consequences:

(He’s) not a particularly theoretical philosophical kind of guy, but he was very popular because he was good at the discipline and whatever. I don't know what happened, I seriously don't. I mean I never particularly liked him but I certainly liked him more before. (…) He's all bluster and he's very rarely effective. He, he can be, and I mean on a good day he's perfectly pleasant and perfectly intelligent and whatever but I mean there're so many rumours about him it's, it's quite terrifying. And the support for him has declined so there are few people who only sort of say "yes, hear hear". (P11: 1084-1095)

The general lack of support for the principal includes members of the senior management who are reported to come and ‘bitch’ to teachers about the leadership in the school. Most teachers interviewed referred to the two Deputy Principals as the people who’ know what’s going on’ and effectively run the school. Clearly, the school at best lacks adequate direction and leadership from the principal and, at worst, is being mismanaged.