Abstract
This article reports on how two teacher educators navigated their way through the challenges of a newly established university in democratic South Africa after the demise of apartheid. The teacher educators, although both Christian, hail from diverse backgrounds in terms of race, culture, gender, upbringing, and lived experiences. They were raised, schooled, and socialised in apartheid South Africa on opposite sides of the political divide. The researchers report on how they had to first wrestle with their own prejudices and stereotyping, before being able to make sense of the transformed university environment. One of the researchers reports on her lived experiences as a white female, while the other reports on his lived experiences as a male and person of colour in a pre-democratic South Africa. Both teacher educators have many years of teaching experience in high schools that provided schooling exclusively for whites, and people of colour respectively.
The research for this article took place as a result of the concern to provide equitable teacher education to a diverse student population in a transformed university space. The research was further motivated by the researchers’ concern that they would transfer their own respective historical backgrounds and biases into the newly established transformed university space. The researchers premised their analysis on Mezirow’s work on transformative teaching and learning, as well as the theoretical framework of Wenger’s communities of practice (CoP).
Transformative teaching and learning, as a shift in consciousness, allows individuals to alter their way of being in the world dramatically and irreversibly (Kroth and Cranton 2014). It is important to mention that it has been commonly accepted that Teaching and Learning theory is uniquely adult, due to the assumption that “adults have acquired a coherent body of experience – assumptions, concepts, values, feelings, conditional responses – frames of reference that define their world” (Mezirow 1991: 5). CoPs, on the other hand, are “groups of people who share a concern”. Wenger developed the concept of CoP further by presenting it as an approach to knowing and learning that is applicable to various contexts, including business, organizational design, government, education, and civic life (Wenger 2009).
The research is guided by the following primary research question: How do the reflexive skills of teacher educators in higher education contribute to their transformative practices? The research further aligns with the components of self-study as it recognises the “lived, embodied practice and that teachers’ beliefs, values, motivations, experiences, and identity are central to their teaching” (Saito, Osaka and Watanabe 2022:6).
Data were collected by way of autoethnography. Autoethnography uses personal experiences (auto-) to describe practices, cultural texts, and experiences (-ethno-), and to interpret these (-graphy). Through self-reflection, the interconnection between the self and social life is identified and investigated (Adams, Ellis and Jones 2017). The two teacher educators each had to write a narrative of their own personal experiences as teacher educators at the university. It is through these narratives that these teacher educators relived their experiences at the university during the prior eight years. Narratives give researchers an opportunity to present rich descriptions of their experiences, while analysing the stories may bring certain meaning to the fore (Wang and Geale 2015). As critical friends, the two teacher educators read and critiqued each other’s narratives. As they reveal their stories to the public, they also realise that readers will judge the trustworthiness of their experiences and practices (Hordvik, MacPhail and Ronglan 2017). An inductive thematic analysis was used to identify themes in the reflexive exercises, which presents certain patterns in the data (Braun and Clark 2006).
The findings reveal that the teacher educators experienced the university environment as challenging, despite being founded on democratic and social justice principles, given their lived experiences in a racially divided South Africa. The white teacher educator states that during the apartheid years, her whiteness ensured access to institutions. She had a limited first-hand knowledge and understanding of other racial groups. As a high school teacher in a new democratic South Africa, she had to find ways to teach in a multicultural classroom. The teacher educator of colour, for example, indicated that he grew up and was schooled in a residential area which was reserved for people of colour only, as prescribed by the apartheid government. The institution where he embarked on his higher education also only catered for people of colour, and so did the high school at which he taught for many years. This meant that most of his personal and institutional socialisation took place in a racially confined space, and that is the lens through which he mostly viewed the world.
The findings further demonstrate the value of critical reflection for teacher educators to navigate a diverse university environment positively, enabling them to embrace a transformed teaching approach. The latter point is highlighted by one of the teacher educators’ narratives that acknowledges that in this higher education context, her thoughts and feelings were constantly challenged. She mentions that she had to acquire the skills of reflection and metacognitive thinking. She subsequently began to reflect on her own thoughts and had to constantly question and evaluate her teaching. Since she joined the university in 2014, the stories of students and staff shaped who she became. With her white privilege deeply embedded in her, she believes that understanding otherness is a daily journey.
The other teacher educator indicates that the collegial and student diversity, together with the transformative learning experiences gained through CoP and his teaching, encouraged reflexivity practices. This enabled him to place himself in the shoes of his students by trying to understand the lens through which they viewed the world better. He would constantly remind himself that the lens was influenced by a multitude of aspects such as language, culture, socialisation, upbringing, and lived experiences. The new insights he gained from engaging in reflexivity resulted in his being less judgemental and more accepting of differences and opposing viewpoints.
Keywords: autoethnography; communities of practice; newly established university; reflexive journey; teacher educators
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Die refleksiewe reis van onderwyseropleiers aan ’n nuutgestigte universiteit