Download The value of Teacher Education in the South

Address to Staff at Faculty Opening: (31 January 2014, Potchefstroom Campus, NWU)
The value of Teacher Education in the South African knowledge economy: bubble or bust?
Robert J. Balfour, Dean of Education Sciences, North-West University
Good morning everyone. It is a privilege to be able to welcome you to our beginning of a new year, filled with
new aspirations and opportunities as Faculty. I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the Directors of
the Faculty, Professors, Richter, Mentz and Roux, and Dr van Vuuren, as well as our Coordinator for Open
and Distance Learning, Professor van Vollenhoven, the Subject Group Chairpersons, Programme Leaders,
our Administrative Managers, Ms Augusta Cloete, Mr Johan Liebenberg, and the various administrative and
support staff in the Faculty. For all our academic colleagues, administrators and students alike, I wish a
generative, energetic, and yet also a calm year ahead. I want to welcome newly appointed colleagues to the
Faculty. I believe you will find in this environment the opportunities to be your best selves, but I ask that you
look for what you seek, and work to create what you need, rather than imagine delivery. If its community you
need; create it, if excellence you wish to achieve; then practice it; if its leadership you require; then lead; and if
it’s the cooperation of colleagues you seek, then be mindful of each other. In this Faculty all these possibilities
exist today, provided you enable them. In this Opening I wish first to begin, as I sometimes do, with the bigger
picture in which Education is situated in South Africa, and then to focus more carefully on our plans and
challenges for the year ahead. Earlier this week the Faculty’s leadership has participated in a strategic
planning workshop with Prof Willie Coetzee, about which I will tell you more, and also in the week we have
received an invitation from the Department of Basic Education to participate in a round table discussion on the
value of schooling as revealed in the ANA (2013) and NSC (2013) results. Both these events signal our
readiness to engage in issues of institutional and national importance. We are ready also to align ourselves
with the Campus Vision and Mission in which research is valued as the driver in innovation in both teaching
and learning, and in which teaching and learning is recognised not as training, but as that critical reflexive
space in which research questions arise, are formulated and explored with students and colleagues alike. In
this Faculty we have defined this as “education as praxis”.
In relation to the role of the Faculty of Education Sciences at NWU and more widely, one of the questions
posed by Willie Coetzee to us this week was: “how do we understand the changing status of education in
South Africa and the low status of education specifically in higher education?” Conventionally, in our Faculty
we have defended the high quality of our work with teachers, but as academics we accept that high quality in
an intellectual space is not an achieved state, and in the wider context of an education crisis, begs critique and
reconsideration. I want to illustrate this in relation to a metaphor of education (both as practice, research and
profession) as an economy. I am not an economist, but my work on culture, capital and representation
(Balfour, 2010) in relation to the financial crisis of 2005 leads me to agree with Yusef Waghid, our guest last
week, to believe that education is a situated, enculturated, dialogical and disruptive process. Additionally,
education is also a form of symbolic value. The “knowledge economy concept” was popularised by Drucker in
1969 as a system of consumption and production that is based on intellectual capital. The knowledge
economy commonly makes up a large share of all economic activity in developed countries. In a knowledge
economy, a significant part of a company's value may consist of intangible assets, such as the value of its
workers' knowledge (intellectual capital)”. Education is a key component of the knowledge economy insofar as
it is the mandated process by which intellectual capital is produced. In this economy, the currency in which we
trade as academics is education qualifications. Qualifications represent the intellectual capital contained in a
student’s or academic’s education. So, for example, the PGCE and the BEd have been that currency which
assured the quality of our school system since these are basic teacher education qualifications. Our
certificates and higher education qualifications are similar the currency to assure the continuing relevance of
teacher education a teacher’s initial graduation.
Part of the legacy of apartheid is that education as a currency was provided with different capital values
depending on which group of people you belonged to. This could be seen by the fact that the regime in those
years spent much more on the education of white children, and much less on the education of black children.
The same was true for higher education, and teacher education within higher education. The consequence of
this approach, was that capital could be accumulated in the universities (what Paulo Freire, 1970, referred to
as banking), but that capital could only be used for specific labour purposes. Typical historically white
universities offered a more enabling education (enabling both in terms of curriculum quality and enabling in
terms of range, choice and opportunity).
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In historically black universities, because of the very different values ascribed to this education (some able to
access a basic education for high demand low status professions such as teaching and nursing), the value
associated with these professions has declined as more choices became available to education. This is not to
suggest that teaching and nursing were low status professions in the 1970s. On the contrary, because they
were the only choices for people of colour, the professions (despite low curriculum quality) enjoyed high
status. In formerly white institutions teacher education also enjoyed higher status than it does now. Why is that
teacher education, despite these differentials enjoyed high, but false, values in the past in South Africa?
i) in part because teacher education was recognised as the primary capital to be used to gain access to the
middle class and a variety of high status professions; so the better the schooling system, the greater the
chances for children to access decent work within professional career choices;
ii) and, teacher education enjoyed high status in part because within universities it was recognised that
education qualifications assured the continuation of a quality education system and quality teaching.
iii) and, in part because the race hierarchies of the time enabled people to recognise that irrespective of the
actual profession or direction, that the quality of the training at university level would always replicate the
differentials in quality associated with the schooling system.
The above three points suggest that teacher education as currency enjoyed an inflated and false value: it was
a bubble. It came to be seen in the period between 1960-1990 as the means for many otherwise mediocre
students to enter a profession in order to secure work, or to access other forms of work. In other words, even
while demand was high, access was low, retention was still problematic, and the real relationship between the
value of teacher education, and the qualifications issued by universities and colleges, was already in serious
dispute.
As regards Point iii: The internal racialised value system was a political and economic construct. Once the
transformation of education occurred, education risked losing its association with valued professions, and it
would thus lose status. As regards Point ii in which I described education as proxy for quality: as access to the
schooling system was massified after 1994, through curriculum reform, and through normalised teacher
provisioning norms; the quality dimension of education in schools, would be diluted. And, finally, as regards
Point i: stripped of the credibility of consensus as regards to the quality of the qualifications, the value of
education qualifications has suffered from a loss of value. In other words, the currency (or qualifications) can
no longer be trusted proxy for quality. In order to deal with this possible deflationary situation, the State
provided teacher education loans and rationalised the teacher corps under Minister Sibusiso Bhengu. Thus by
fuelling the knowledge economy with credit (loans and bursaries), to keep supply up, and rationalising
teachers, to keep demand high, the State has attempted to forestall currency inflation in education. But, the
inherent issue of quality and low throughput rates slow down this economy, and as confidence reduces and
velocity weakens, we risk a consequent loss of trust in what can be enabled by a university-based education.
This analogy explains why it is that the private sector regards professional qualifications issued by universities
(whether in engineering, accounting, or education) with suspicion, and why professional bodies such as the
HPCSA, SAICA exert such rigorous control over universities through the conferral or withdrawal of
accreditation. SACE should similarly be mandated to exert such quality control on behalf of the education
profession. And, even though NWU qualifications might be of dependable (though not necessarily excellent)
currency, the value associated with teacher education in a knowledge economy is low. Demand cannot be
met, because throughput remains low in higher education, and the quality of research on teaching and
learning, and the quality of teaching and learning itself is patchy and problematic. At this stage in South Africa,
teacher education is part of a knowledge economy in a state serious inflation (as defined by Beaudreau,
1996).
In any economy when doubt concerning the value of the currency occurs, speculation and instability follow: in
other words, that correspondence between signified value (or the qualification) and quality occurs, instability in
that market ensues, and speculation as regards the currency itself (ie a multitude of qualifications each
claiming to add value) follows. The currency value is driven down not only by instability, but also by
speculation. Thus, whilst we might claim high value, the profession itself, and the perceptions as regards its
value (internal to the profession as well as external) affect the real value of the qualifications we issue.
As Faculty how are we to respond to this? I have three points to make. First, Willie Coetzee suggests that we
ought to spend more time and effort into raising the profile of education through interaction with stakeholders
external to the NWU (the press, the DBE, the DHET, unions and employers). In effect this reaffirms my belief
that academics need to engage with the press as public intellectuals, with communities as researchers, and
with schools by providing quality teachers. This latter dimension suffers from the strongest doubt among our
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partners. How do we address this challenge? Globally, education research associations have become more
pro-active in dealing with this perception by undertaking research and demonstrate how research plays a key
role in changing the quality of teacher education, and how quality teacher education can change a society by
adding value and employment opportunity: The BERA Report released in 2013 is one such example. In South
Africa, few high impact meta-data studies on education research exist (with exception of the PPER Project,
Balfour, Moletsane and Karlsson, 2011). We need more team-based high impact research.
Another way of intervening to add value to the currency, is for teacher education to become the leading
profession in developing and demonstrating the impact of technology on learning. Technology enjoys high
currency, and in a knowledge economy, is seen as the forerunner of advanced learning and teaching
methodologies. We thus need as Faculty not simply to embrace technology, but to pioneer research on the
learning and teaching possibilities with technology. The only way in which this can be done is for academics to
conduct research on teaching and learning with technology. In our Faculty, a Chair in Technology in ODL
might provide leadership at a high level for this, but without colleagues to use the technology, and research to
use in the context of their module teaching, we remain simply consumers of innovation, rather than informers
of innovation development, or innovators in our own right. The challenge is thus to break out of the bubble,
engage more in perception change, innovate or understand innovation better, and avoid going for bust.
Insisting on quality with excellent research which demonstrates quality is useless as a strategy forward.
Finally, in 2013, the Faculty experienced the transition from our former to new structures. This change was
affirmed at the leadership workshop this week as necessary and strategic. Necessary and strategic because
we seek to deepen our scholarly work as specialists in education who possess disciplinary expertise, that
needs either to be deepened or made more rigorous. How do we approach this as Faculty? Here is another
means of articulating the value of our currency in the knowledge economy through research and reflection, to
enhance the academic rigour of our qualifications. We do this through research and also in dialogue (not
debate) with colleagues in our fields, or in relation to our fields. It is for this reason that arising from the 2011
BEd Report and the 2013 JET Report on the BEd that Dr van Vuuren and Prof Richter have arranged the first
BEd Colloquium on Depth and Rigour in the BEd to which you are invited on 12 February.
The other way in which we achieve higher quality of our degrees is through the revision of our materials in line
with the Guidelines we seek to pass through our Faculty Board on Self-Directed Learning, and Diversity and
Representation as abiding foci within our Curriculums. These provide cohesion associated with higher levels of
academic content and grounds also for peer-critique: do our materials and guides meet these aspirations? Are
these aspirations sufficiently special and unique to merit our claim to being best in teacher education, and
teacher education research in South Africa? Clearly we cannot claim to be best in teacher education without
having research that is at least excellent on teacher education.
Thirdly, with the provision of five new quality coursework postgraduate qualifications, we seek to address the
need in the profession for high level deepening of pedagogic and subject content knowledge; at the same time
this higher level teaching is a deliberate intervention to provide colleagues in subject groups who hitherto have
not had much exposure to higher level teaching, with that experience and exposure.
Finally, and arising out of the leadership workshop this week, we seek to test with you a new Vision and
Mission for the Faculty that interrogates the bubble of false value, and can galvanise us enough to resist the
bust in teacher education. By saying to ourselves that critique points to inadequacy, we admit only to an
aspiration to do better in this leap year as Faculty. I thank you.
References
Balfour, RJ. 2010. Culture, Capital, and Representation: 1700-2000. London, Palgrave-Macmillan
Balfour, RJ, Moletsane, R, and Karlsson, J. 2011. “'Speaking truth to power’: history and research in higher education
institutions in South Africa with Balfour, RJ and Moletsane, R, in RJ Balfour, R Moletsane and J Karlsson (Eds), in a
Special Issue of the South African Journal of Higher Education, 25(2) pp.195-215.
Beaudreau, Bernard C. 1996. Mass Production, the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. New York,
Lincoln, Shanghi: Authors Choice Press.
Drucker, Peter. 1969. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to our Changing Society Chapter 12. New York, Harper
and Row.
Freire, P. 1970. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London, Penguin.
Walker, S and Newman, S (Eds) 2013. BERA Report. 2013. Why Education Research Matters? a briefing to inform
future funding decisions. Published Report, BERA.
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