Abstract
Initial teacher education (ITE) serves as a bridge between prospective teachers exiting the school system to enrol in teacher education faculties, on the one hand and newly qualified teachers (NQTs) who are embarking on a career in schooling on the other. The present paper describes the language and thinking skills student teachers bring to their ITE programmes and the conditions faced by NQTs when they enter schools on the other side of the chalk face. This is the context within which we ask the question: To what extent are the universities providing the teachers required by the school system? While a review of the literature, together with new evidence emerging from the Initial Teacher Education Research Project (ITERP) study, indicates that the answer to this question is by no means unequivocally positive, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has issued new regulations aimed at addressing the gap between current programmes and the demands of schooling. We conclude by arguing that the quality of ITE will only be improved once teacher educators move their practices closer to those of practitioners in the strong professions, which are characterised by the development of a strong theoretical knowledge base, from which effective protocols of practice may be derived and which is continuously interrogated by the practitioners themselves. We suggest that the place to start on this quest is the instruction of prospective primary school teachers in early literacy and numeracy.
Highlights
initial teacher education (ITE) serves as a bridge between prospective teachers exiting the school system to enrol in teacher education faculties, on one hand, and newly qualified teachers (NQTs) who are embarking on a career in schooling, on the other
How is the sector bridging the gap between the abilities that student teachers bring to ITE and the demands of the schools their NQTs will enter on graduation? in the first instance, how is ITE developing the language and thinking abilities required, first for the development of subject expertise and second, for the exercise of professional judgement? We illustrate the point with analysis of recent SAQMEC findings and examples from the specifications concerning the curricula for primary school teachers specialising in the B.Ed. offered in 2012
Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (MRTEQ) makes no explicit mention of literacy instruction for prospective intermediate phase (IP) teachers, a curious omission, given that the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results and all subsequent comparative tests clearly indicate that the large majority of South African grade 4 and 5 children are unable to read and comprehend age-appropriate texts at the most elementary level
Summary
The South African school system currently serves to reproduce apartheid’s grand plan five decades after the assassination of its principal architect (Taylor & Muller, 2014). These discussions hardly intersect with the frequent and furious public exchanges on how to improve the quality of learning outcomes. The present paper describes the language and thinking skills student teachers bring to their ITE programmes and the conditions faced by NQTs when they enter schools on the other side of the chalk face The assumption behind this approach is that it is through the analysis of these two sets of bracketing conditions that the following question can be adequately examined: To what extent are the universities providing the teachers required by the school system?. The HEQC review attributes what it calls the ‘disarray’ of initial teacher education in the US and SA to a lack of agreement about the curriculum and, While ‘disarray’ is possibly too emotive a word to describe the state of the field in South Africa, a conclusion that is hard to avoid is that the field is riddled with difficulties
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