Durban - Teachers are not being sufficiently equipped for the harsh realities they may face at rural schools in KwaZulu-Natal and are leaving the profession en masse for greener pastures, a researcher has found.
The doctorate paper, “The concepts of teacher resilience: a contribution towards teacher development”, written by international student Walters Doh-Nubia, an education researcher at the University of Zululand, has found that universities are not adequately equipping novice teachers for the harsh realities that they face at rural schools.
Speaking to the Daily News at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Edgewood campus after he had presented his paper to fellow students at the Annual Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Conference, Doh-Nubia interviewed five teachers who had stayed in the system for a minimum of nine years, and said it was these teachers’ commitment to their profession that had led them to remain in the system.
Commitment was defined as having a sense of purpose in their teaching career and the pupils’ achievement.
If 38 pupils were taught by one teacher, South Africa needed 20 000 new teachers a year to meet its demand. Only 6 000 teachers were being produced annually and, according to a previous study, shortages could be between 15 000 and 22 000 teachers by next year.
Doh-Nubia’s study suggested that teacher attrition was a global problem and argued that with the introduction of resilience into the teacher development programmes, teachers would be better prepared for the teaching environment.
Low salaries, high workload, professional incapacity to cope with curriculum change, stress, poor working conditions, student discipline problems and lack of development support were the leading reasons why teachers were leaving the profession.
Doh-Nubia said the issue of teacher resilience was complex, as nobody cared about it. Stakeholders only cared about producing teachers en masse. He said student teachers were not being prepared for reality, and the government’s plan of addressing teacher shortages was to double new graduates, but was thus failing to equip teachers with the content knowledge so essential for the field.
“This approach does not solve the problem of teachers leaving the profession a couple of years after their professional preparation,” he said.
Doh-Nubia said student teachers in the rural areas were suffering, and some did not even have transport to get to the schools. Their goal was to pass and provide for their families, and the pressures they faced affected them when they were to be assessed, further discouraging them.
“The challenge is that they are not being trained to respond to the issues of resilience. Universities must prepare student teachers for these realities - like if you go to the military, resilience and commanding respect is taught. Education needs that, too; we need to learn to develop the person, too,” he said.
Doh-Nubia said the education system was only as good as its teachers, and said teacher resilience needed to be included in the curriculum.
Provincial education spokesman Muzi Mahlambi said the department did not produce teachers, but hired them from the universities that produced them. Mahlambi said these realities could be seen by the student teachers when they did their practical experience and that it was the university lecturers’ role to use the data that the student teachers returned with to improve their programmes.
“There is a module called Teaching Practice in Education - this is where the students experience the hard-core realities of their work. This issue must be raised within the universities because it is their role to ensure they are fit for the realities and use the data,” he said.
Mahlambi rejected claims that young teachers were leaving the profession, and said it was older teachers in their fifties who were leaving.
He said students had not been naive about the conditions and that they entered the system coming from similar backgrounds but had a passion for teaching.
Conditions were improving in rural schools, but he admitted that much more needed to be done.
Daily News