ABSTRACT
As the South African state begins to democratize, so questions are raised about how this process might be mediated by schools and teachers or how schools' and teachers' practices might inform the wider process of social change. This paper explores these issues through an examination of how teachers sought to alter relations of authority and the nature of their work within schools, and how these have interacted with new managerial and state initiatives. It examines the conditions of teachers' work under apartheid, the challenge to these by the South African Democratic Teachers' Union and the struggles in schools over changing relations of authority and teachers' work in the crucial transition years of 1990-1997. It argues that alternative conceptions and practices were developed and institutionalized. This paper uses the results of both a 3 year longitudinal study and research conducted on teacher appraisal with the teachers' union.
As the South African state begins to democratize, so questions are raised about how this process might be mediated by schools and teachers or how schools' and teachers' practices might inform the wider process of social change. The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues through an examination of how teachers have sought to alter relations of authority and the nature of their work within schools, and how these have interacted with new state initiatives. It does so by examining the conditions of teachers' work under apartheid, the challenge to these by the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU) and the struggles in schools over changing relations of authority and teachers' work in the crucial transition years of 1990-1997.
The significance of an examination of teachers' work through these events is illuminated by two main bodies of literature: critical education theory and education development theory. In the first, three main theoretical tendencies (rational choice or human capital theory, poststructuralism or postmodernism and labour process or structuration theory) lead to distinctive views of teachers. Amongst these, labour process theory is most suggestive for this study. Concerned with the relationships and forms of organization that characterize teachers' work, they have proceeded from an assumption about education as a social process, schools as conflictual workplaces, teachers involved in the `social production of capacities for labour' and the `labour process as a strategic component of any large-scale process of social change' (Lawn & Grace, 1987; Ozga & Lawn, 1988; Ozga, 1988; Connell, 1995; Acker, 1996).
In Connell's conception, the political order of the school as a workplace is crucial and teachers are placed in different situations in relation to their students in schools differentiated by race and class. But this political order is `never fixed for good', and is contested by social movements in education, the issue explored in this paper in relation to South Africa. For Ozga and Lawn (1988), the social and historical construction of skill, including notions of `professionalism', as well as a recognition of agency, is critical to an understanding of teachers' work which goes beyond the proletarianization thesis. Their argument that `a bridge must be built between the key idea of human agency and the interpretive theory of work...' (p. 329) is at the heart of this paper.
The forms of teachers' contestation in developing country contexts have been analysed by education development theorists. Education development theory linked to teachers' work takes two main forms: on the one hand, it is classically concerned with how processes of modernization in developing country contexts lead to the nationalization and bureaucratization of school systems and the decline of teachers' political activism (Harber, 1984; Dove, 1986, 1995; Fuller, 1991). Teachers' radicalism is here generally associated with transitional periods as teachers link up with national movements outside education. This radicalism becomes muted once national systems of education are institutionalized. On the other hand, there is a growing literature which links teachers' resistance at the workplace manifested in high levels of absenteeism to the introduction of new controls brought about by structural adjustment austerity measures (Samoff, 1994; Carnoy, 1996).
Departing from the assumptions that the `labour process (is) a strategic component of any large-scale process of social change' and that `bringing life to democracy is always a struggle' (Apple & Beane, 1995, p. 8), this paper argues for the importance of social context and agency in understanding the specific unfolding of these issues in practice (Little & McLaughlin, 1993). It argues that the linkage of bureaucratic controls over teachers with the apartheid state generated teacher resistance and the development of alternative, professional forms and sources of authority and control over work. But these were contested by the influence of new global trends manifested in the local context, and their outcomes were, as a consequence, ambiguous and contradictory. None the less, alternative conceptions and practices were developed which altered ways of working profoundly.
The paper proceeds by providing a brief overview of the character of the teaching profession and its main forms of organization as a prelude to a discussion of teachers' work under apartheid, challenges to controls over this work between 1989 and 1994 and the restructuring of teachers' work in the postapartheid era. It concludes by examining teachers' responses to these new developments. In each case, both the organizational and individual responses of teachers in schools are explored.
The evidence for this paper arises from two main sources. The first is a 3 year longitudinal study on the impact of social change on schools and teachers in the years immediately following the 1994 democratic elections. This was a qualitative study focused on seven schools historically divided along race lines in a major urban, metropolitan area in South Africa. It included two white and five black schools--one administered by authorities defined as coloured, another as Indian, and two as African. One school was a private school and one all-girls' school was included. All were situated in working class communities within racial spatial boundaries. I conducted interviews with seven teachers from probationer to principal level in each school from 1994 to 1996 and collected additional documentary evidence on the policy and social context of each school (see also Chisholm, 1999).
The second arises from a collective project and research conducted on teacher appraisal with SADTU between 1992 and 1996. The main purpose of this project was to inform negotiations between the union and the state on a new form of teacher appraisal which would replace older forms. Analyses of the existing system and alternatives to it were developed through a process of action research involving a team from the University of the Witwatersrand Education Policy Unit and union members who were actively involved in all parts of the research process and who led the negotiations with the state (see also Chisholm (1992, 1993), Chetty et al. (1993) and Mokgalane et al. (1997)). Evidence from both projects reveals the critical importance of the control of teachers' work to teachers--an index of the penetration of democratizing concerns to the very core of schooling, its internal social relations. This is the principal concern of this article which analyses how teachers' work under apartheid was challenged in the moment of transition and how it is being reorganized within the context of a neo-liberal global economy.
Since the role of teachers' organizations is crucial to the analysis, it is necessary to provide a brief outline of the main lines and forms of teachers' organizations since the 1970s. These take both a racial and gendered form linked to the constraints under which teaching as a profession has developed in South Africa.
At its crudest, according to information for 1994, African teachers at 71% of the teaching force comprise the majority of teachers, while teachers classified Indian comprise 4% and white and coloured combined number 26% (Bot & Schindler, 1997). Information specifically on the gender dimension of teaching (Department of Education, 1997b, p. 82) suggests on the one hand that the proportion of women is increasing and on the other that the majority of the total teaching force in both primary and secondary schools are women; 64% of all teachers are women, but their numbers are larger in primary than secondary schools. Although their numbers decline in secondary school, they are still in the majority (p. 109). The ratio of male to female teachers was 1.6 to 1 in 1991 and 1.8 to 1 in 1994 (Bot & Schindler, 1997). The predominance of women in primary schools is partly but not completely linked to apartheid education policy which explicitly discouraged the appointment of men at primary level in order to cut costs. Although men account for 36% of all teachers in South Africa, they hold 58% of all principal posts, 69% of all deputy principal posts and 50% of head of department posts. In 1994 only 4% of all female teachers were principals compared with 11% of all male teachers. Men dominate in managerial and decision-making positions (Bot & Schindler, 1997).
Teachers' organizations have corresponded both to the gendered and racial organization of education as well as to the nature of the opposition to it. There are two main distinct movements in South Africa; the National Association for Professional Teachers' Associations (NAPTOSA) emerged in the early days of apartheid, whereas SADTU arose in the context of emerging internal opposition in education to apartheid. Both cut across race but are in numbers dominated by African teachers; in practice, leadership of NAPTOSA is exercised by white teachers and the union by black teachers. Leadership of both is dominated by men and reflects the gendered character of schooling more generally.
There are marked differences between the two which are rooted in their histories. First, whereas NAPTOSA is a federation of white, Indian, coloured and African teachers' organizations that emerged in the womb of apartheid's racially based education departments during the 1960s and 1970s, SADTU began as a series of fragmented, locally based teacher organizations linked to oppositional movements which developed in civil society in the 1980s, eschewed racial forms of organization and is now a trade union. Second, there are differences in the respective organizing ideologies. In the course of the emergence of teacher organizations opposed to apartheid in the 1980s, a new discourse emerged around whether teachers were 'workers' or 'professionals'. These were symbolic markers of political difference. Older, more conservative teacher organizations with histories rooted in the consolidation of racially divided departments of education described themselves as 'professionals'. Laying claim to this professional status, they sought career advancement within the apartheid hierarchy, expressed commitment to the interests of the 'child' over those of 'politics', eschewed militant forms of action to obtain their ends and promoted a racial federalism of teacher organization (see Hyslop, 1990). Each department, white, Indian, coloured and African, had its own association; differences were recognized and organizational autonomy maintained, but links were made on the basis of common values based on a view of teachers as 'professionals'. And finally, whereas the leadership of both is predominantly male, NAPTOSA draws its membership largely from female primary school teachers, whereas SADTU draws its membership mainly from secondary school male teachers.
Younger, radical teachers growing up within the national democratic movement of the 1980s distanced themselves from the philosophies and strategies of the older teacher organizations and described themselves as educational 'workers' who saw education and politics as inseparably linked, and the future prospects of school students linked to this resolution. The assertion of a 'worker' identity supported a model of the school as an industry and enabled teachers to forge links with the major trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The 'teachers as workers' identity led to a focus on workplace issues amenable to collective action and bargaining.
To some extent, particularly in black schools, the division has also been generational. As a younger, more militant generation of teachers emerged in the post-1976 era, they grew impatient with the seeming collusion and conservatism of older teachers and principals belonging to the professional association; as such the stage was set in the 1980s for generational, political and educational conflict between the majority of teachers and principals in black schools.
In 1990, the two formations united in SADTU, but soon thereafter split again into NAPTOSA and SADTU. Both now have official recognition and both play an important role negotiating conditions of work for teachers in the newly created Education Labour Relations Council. The focus of this paper is on black schools in which the clash between principals and inspectors belonging to the older, more conservative association and teachers organized in the union found expression. These struggles cannot, however, be understood unless placed in the larger context of the organization of power and control in South Africa.
To understand how teachers' work came to constitute 'a strategic component' of South Africa's 'process of social change' (Connell, 1995), it is necessary to examine how teachers' work was organized and controlled under apartheid.
The racially differential character of schools under apartheid is crucial to understanding not only the lines and forms of teachers' organizations in South Africa, but also the historically constructed and differentiated nature of controls over teachers' work. The division of education into departments for people categorized as white, Indian, coloured and African also produced different authority relations linked to the goals of apartheid education in ensuring participation and representation of whites and exclusion of blacks. In the case of white schools, these can broadly be defined as professional; in the latter as bureaucratic.
The professional forms of control of teachers' work in white schools were rooted in their relation to citizenship within the apartheid system. Teachers in white departments had the benefit of substantial representation in policy making at the state level; black teachers did not. In contrast to the majority of black teachers, their experience (except for those who sought to challenge apartheid) appeared to have been shaped by an ethos of negotiation, consultation and participation (Chetty et al., 1993, p. 3). Teachers enjoyed a degree of autonomy over their work, signalled by the fact that departmental structures existed to provide professional support to teachers and to ensure that schools were well and properly resourced. White teachers were represented on official curriculum and assessment structures which defined curricula not only for white schools, but also for black. Despite being in controlling positions in departments of education for black people, and determining policy and curricula for black schools, their insulation from the day-to-day realities of black schools was almost complete.
At the other end of the spectrum, control over teachers' work in black schools was bureaucratic, hierarchical and authoritarian. Official departmental structures, represented in the figures of the inspector and subject advisor, principal and head of department, loomed large in the lives of ordinary teachers. At these levels, officials were often black rather than white, and male rather than female. Control over work was direct and linked to official concerns with social control and departmental demands for loyalty and subservience. Control over the curriculum and assessment practices in schools was bureaucratically determined rather than teacher-driven. Describing the system pre-1990, a deputy principal in a Soweto girls' school said:
Like in the past we used to have a record, a logbook. If a teacher doesn't go to class, we'll record that the teacher didn't go to class. If we record a teacher three times, we refer the matter to the inspector.
A young female mathematics teacher at the same school experienced her work as arduous and unrewarding: 'We are not encouraged to teach--instead we are pushed. We are pushed to work. We are just expected to work, work, work, and then the heroes in teaching will never be known. I don't feel encouraged to go on. I go to classes, but I know I'm not going to get anything except my salary'.
Control was exercised in a number of ways (see, for example, Sebakwane, 1997). One most significant way was through a system of teacher evaluation which became the pivot of teachers' resistance in schools in the transition years of 1989-1994. The main concern with procedures for evaluation was monitoring and surveillance. These were performed on the basis of checklists which evaluated teachers in terms of four components: curricular efficiency, extra-curricular efficiency, personality and character traits, and professional disposition and attitude. In the context of growing resistance by teachers to apartheid education, the latter were increasingly used to assess and measure loyalty to the department controlling African education. Punishment came in the form of suspension, transfer or dismissal of teachers who were found to be disloyal, disloyalty manifested in belonging to SADTU or participating in any other form of oppositional political or educational organization (Mda, 1989).
Models of work inside black schools thus relied on external forms of control and supervision closely implicated in the overall system of white control. These models, however, lent themselves to a conceptualization of schools as factories or industries, of departmental officials and others in the hierarchy as management or bosses, of teachers as workers and of unions as industrial associations. The contradiction that emerged in the late 1980s, however, was that at the same time as the teachers' union laid claim to this conceptualization to challenge top-down, bureaucratic and authoritarian controls over teachers' work and develop alternatives focused on professional and autonomous control over teachers' work, new forms of control over teachers' work were finding their way into education policies of developing countries, including South Africa, at the very moment of its transition. Before considering how these have interacted with teachers' struggles, it is necessary to examine how they unfolded and what their implications were.
The evidence provided in this paper seems to confirm some but not all of the assumptions of those development theorists who presuppose a 'premodern' period in which teachers are not radical, a transitional period in which teachers become radical as they link up with national movements, and a 'postmodern' period in which teachers' activism is muted. Setting aside the interesting conceptual difficulties to which this periodization gives rise, an argument can be made that apartheid education stimulated large-scale teacher resistance during the period of transition and that labour process issues lay at the centre of this resistance. The reason for this was that control of the labour process approximated to broader social controls, the struggles against them operating as a metaphor for wider demands for national self-determination.
In 1989 black teachers, for the first time, embarked on mass protest action against apartheid education. This was not the first time teachers in South Africa had embarked on protest actions; teachers' opposition to apartheid education dates back to the 1950s, and to segregated education to the beginning of the century. What is significant about resistance in the late 1980s is the fact that it was initiated by a teachers' union and was conducted on a mass rather than an individual or localized scale. Throughout the 1980s, students had been in the forefront of oppositional activity in education. It was only towards the end of the 1980s that the actions of teachers became militant on a large and collectively organized scale. And then they focused on defiance of the symbols of authority and control by a white department exercising control over work through its departmental proxies. Protests in 1990, the year of the unbanning of political organizations in South Africa, took the form of stay-aways, 'chalks-down', marches to regional offices, submissions of lists of grievances, sit-ins and the prevention of departmental officials from visiting schools (Department of Education and Training, 1990, pp. 62, 64, 66). In 1991, in the words of the Department of Education and Training, 'control personnel', such as inspectors and subject advisors, 'were barred from school grounds' (1991, p. 19). At the end of 1990, the total number of 'principals and others in authority being driven from their posts' came to 1991 (Department of Education and Training, 1991, p. 19). In 1991 and 1992 the union embarked on strike action and continued with the campaign to eject symbols of an illegitimate department from school grounds.
The impact on internal relations within schools was profound. Power relations were dramatically challenged by the growing strength of the union and the broader process of democratization. The interrelationship of issues is captured by a teacher who said:
I think to a certain extent the strikes were the beginning of the change of attitude of teachers... What the strike did was to demystify the department. Prior to that, people were afraid . . . But . . . it can also be attributed to the political changes from 1990 onwards, that people were now less afraid... Up to 1990 teachers didn't say a word, even in staff meetings. Issues that directly affected teachers, we wouldn't bring it up.
Principals experienced the changes directly. One (in a 'coloured' school) described how his own compliance was bound to his prospects of promotion, a kind of 'blackmail' exercised by the department:
And the younger generation of teachers weren't very happy about the old teacher organisations and they joined the newer, more vociferous, more anti-apartheid organisation, SADTU. And they took us to task. And they even went on demonstrations and chalk-downs and marching and toyi-toyis and meetings. And you, as an old guard person, you found yourself painted in a corner, because you were seen as the department's lackey. You are supposed to be the loyal servant of the department, to effect the department's whims and fancies. And you couldn't jolly well turn against your department, because there is also such a thing as whether you are interested or not in promotion.
A black principal in a Soweto school spoke of his altered authority as follows:
Generally, you will find in all the schools, there has been defiance of authority. You actually have to earn the respect of students. You can't use your position of authority to dominate over them. The same applies to teachers. I actually have to negotiate everything in the staff meetings, you know, whereas before I could just give orders. These days you actually have to negotiate your position. So there's been a change in the nature of staff meetings as well.
As the campaign progressed in the early 1990s, school managements and teachers lined up on opposing sides. Conflict was expressed in who was for or against activities associated with broader national political campaigns linked to the process of democratization and whether, how and by whom teachers' work was controlled. The defiance campaign by teachers in schools effectively brought to an end older forms of the organization of teachers' work. In some schools teachers were experimenting with new forms of the organization of work and the concept of teacher as classroom manager of a learning process, motivated intrinsically as a professional to implement curricula which can be adapted to teaching circumstances.
Concrete alternatives at the school level came in two forms, one reformist, the other more radical. The first, advocated by chastened representatives of hierarchy in schools, such as principals, their deputies and heads of department, still relied on external supervision and was linked to the establishment of discipline in schools. This perspective sought reform of existing departmental controls but not their elimination. The problem was perceived as one in which the departmental structures were 'not working' and needed to be made to work but in an altered way: 'the departmental structure, the structure which is going to be formed, that structure has to be more active, support us, so that we can maintain discipline. Because the most important thing we have is discipline. We are lacking discipline'. The other, promoted by teacher unionists, sought the removal of external supervision and hierarchical forms of management and their replacement by internal and locally based forms of authority. The problem lay not just with the attitude of and lack of support by departmental officials, but in the hierarchical relationships and expectations of teachers. In this more radical view, departmental officials were seen as 'unreformable .... It's a matter of removing them and having people who will be sensitive, with an open mind, very creative'. Implicit in the latter view was an understanding of teachers' work which sought to maximize teacher autonomy and collegiality (Chetty et al., 1993; Swartz, 1994).
Ensuring that such new approaches became part of and institutionalized within a new state apparatus became a crucial concern of the teachers' union in the immediate run-up to and aftermath of the 1994 democratic election. Negotiations were conducted with old and new educational departmental authorities, meetings were held across the country, action and participatory research was undertaken to investigate new forms of school management and the control of teachers' work and a pilot teacher appraisal programme designed to democratize the evaluation and control of teachers' work was implemented in all new provinces.
In the process of establishing new departments and new policies, however, new approaches to teachers' work, informed by the discourse of cost reduction and the new managerialism, increasingly began to collide with this vision.
To what extent have the bureaucratization, institutionalization and routinization of new systems in the postapartheid period resulted in a muting of teachers' activism, and to what extent have issues over the control of teachers' work become less salient?
Postapartheid approaches to the organization and control of teachers' work need to be situated within the context of the larger canvas of reform of the injustices and inequalities of apartheid education. Democratization of the wider society and the diffusion of democratic values throughout the system have rendered obsolete older forms of control. The byzantine system of 18 racially based education departments has given way to one national and nine provincial education departments. Underpinning the vision of the new state is the view that educational development should aim at fostering a new culture of learning and teaching in which autocratic and authoritarian forms of management have no place, and in which the aim of teaching and learning would be to 'foster creative, critical, independent thinkers, with skills and competencies that are transferable; and attitudes and values that are compatible with the ongoing transformation of society' (MEC for Gauteng, in Chisholm & Vally (1996); see also the 1996 South Africa Schools Act).
South Africa's transition has occurred, however, not only in the context of its own past, but also in the context of global changes which, in the educational terrain, have seen the dismantling of welfare systems, the discrediting of public alternatives, the promotion of marketized forms of education and a resuscitation of human capital theory in which the role of teachers in the school system is reconceptualized in narrow terms as producers of human capital for `economic growth' and competitiveness (Chisholm, 1997). As such, new discourses and practices centred on marketing and management have emerged to ensure the restructuring of controls over teachers.
The actual, potential and historical changes in the conditions of teachers' work in South Africa echo those of teachers across the developing world, where countries have become subject to structural adjustment policies. These need some analysis before returning to the South African picture. The main elements of structural adjustment policies have included tariff reduction, cuts in public expenditure, privatization and deregulation. In education, these policies have been felt mainly in the areas of reduction of public expenditure. Although South Africa has not taken World Bank loans which would subject it to structural adjustment policies, it has not been isolated from new global trends and the frameworks governing education policy in developing countries. Through its Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (1996), South Africa effectively adopted its own internal structural adjustment programme. This has meant an emphasis on fiscal discipline and austerity. On the basis of the argument that relative to all other countries, spending on education is already high, South Africa has sought to undertake massive social change while keeping social expenditure within limits and without any expansion of the educational budget. Instead of expanding the budget, South Africa has sought to redistribute resources from white to black schools, from higher to primary education and from richer to poorer provinces. In addition, new policies have been introduced promoting new forms of management (conflict resolution, human resource management and management of learning organizations), teacher accountability, development and support, competency- and outcomes-based curricula.
To some extent, however, austerity-based fiscal policies have the potential of undermining the more innovative aspects of new educational policies. In an analysis of the impact of structural adjustment on teachers in Africa and Latin America, Carnoy (1996) has argued that the reduction of education budgets has compromised both equity and quality. Even as many countries have managed to keep education budgets within limits, spending on education materials has declined. The overall deteriorating financial condition of education has meant increased teacher absenteeism, as teachers are enjoined to work harder in already difficult circumstances, while pressures on salaries are forcing more teachers to take two or three additional jobs to make ends meet. The combined impact of these new policies is to diminish teachers' motivation for innovative school change. Or, as Samoff (1994) has argued, structural adjustment policies, in the effort to lower costs per pupil, have imposed larger classes, external supervision, and hierarchical forms of management. New and contemporary forms of management, from this perspective, may be no less concerned with control, albeit through the medium of `meaning management' (Blase & Anderson, 1995, p. 115). The expansion of the field of `management' is thus related in part to the proletarianization of professions and the management of compliance in this regard. Redeployment and redundancy policies as much as new assessment procedures are typically part and parcel of the new proletarianization of teachers, leading to a greater job insecurity and greater control of the pace, content and volume of work conducted by teachers.
Indeed, a closer examination of these policies and teachers' responses to them will illuminate not only the specifically South African issues, but also the broader questions relating to routinization and depoliticization of teachers following transition.
This article examines three policies that appear to have had an impact on the control teachers have over their work. The first has been linked to policies for cost reduction linked to redistribution, the second to the introduction of Curriculum 2005 and the third to new managerial policies. Each requires consideration.
One of the first major goals of the new education department to be implemented has been redistribution of resources. This has been closely linked to policies for the reduction of public expenditure. Since the largest item of expenditure on the budget is teachers' salaries and higher salaries are locked up within the better-qualified teachers in the system, national policy sought between 1995 and 1997 to redeploy resources (teachers) from areas of over-supply (white and black urban) to areas of under-supply (poor, black and rural). Areas of over- and under-supply were calculated on the basis of pupil:teacher ratios, teachers from schools with low pupil:teacher ratios being invited to move to areas with high pupil: teacher ratios. Teachers not wishing to redeploy themselves were invited to leave the profession through a golden hand-shake, referred to as a Voluntary Severance Package. The policy as a whole has been referred to as `right-sizing of the public sector' (for a further discussion of these issues see Chisholm et al. (1999)).
Responses can be examined both at the organizational level as well as at the school level. Both seem to confirm the arguments made above by Carnoy (1996) and Samoff (1994). Initially both teachers' organizations, NAPTOSA and SADTU, rejected the policy. Whereas NAPTOSA led representations to government, SADTU teachers first embraced, then rejected the policy. In 1996, teachers in coloured schools in Cape Town marched on departmental offices, claiming amongst others that the policy had a discriminatory effect on women teachers with families. Large numbers of white and black teachers were applying for Voluntary Severance Packages which proved to be more expensive than the department had bargained for. By late 1997, the government was admitting that the policy was in disarray (Department of Education, 1997a).
But cost-cutting measures were still a priority and proposals were then mooted for terminating the contracts of temporary teachers, largely composed of black teachers in poor, rural and farm schools. In April 1998, SADTU `gave notice in terms of Section 77(
How was this felt at the level of the school? Here, there has to be some differentiation between schools historically constituted as white, Indian, coloured and African. And here, too, amongst the small number of schools studied, it appears that the effects of the policy were not redistributive (see also Chisholm & Vally 1996). Amongst six of the seven schools where interviews were conducted, the impact of the policy was one of larger classes, an increased volume of work and `discipline problems'. The exception was the private school which had control over its resources. Black schools in the study were all in terms of departmental ratios over-enrolled and were required to redeploy teachers. When the Soweto girls' school began redeploying teachers at the start of 1996, one of the first to do so, feelings in the school ran high, ranging from resignation, hope that it would all end soon, anxiety, insecurity and anger (interviews with principal, heads of department, four teachers and one probationer). Whereas the majority of teachers saw justification in the policy in terms of its redistributive goals, a minority, as one teacher put it, were `against what is happening right now':
Teachers have been moved from our school to another school, but I still feel we are understaffed. I wonder if redeployment is taking place in white schools . . . I don't think any school here in Soweto can boast about being overstaffed. We have lots of students...
And a teacher at another school commented:
If somebody were to land in the country who hasn't heard of the changes, I don't think that person would see anything visibly different from the past.
In this, as in other black schools, rates of absenteeism and non-involvement by teachers in the affairs of the school were high. Although a study of the full impact of redeployment still needs to be conducted, these responses are suggestive, confirming to some extent similar patterns observed in other developing countries.
Apartheid curricula were not only white, male and bureaucratically controlled, but also geared to ensuring ideological control and subjection. Such control was exercised through tight control of what teachers could teach and how they could teach it. Teacher-centred pedagogical practices were reinforced by large classes (Nkomo, 1990; Kallaway, 1984). Compliance was enforced through the managerial tool of evaluation discussed above. In 1997, the new national department of education launched Curriculum 2005. In conception it is closely tied to the wider policy framework for the integration of education and training through a national qualifications framework which aims to ensure mobility for learners between different parts of the education system through recognition of prior learning. Crucial for the argument of this paper, though, is its emphasis on outcomes and its reconceputalization of the roles and expectations of teachers. Where previously a teacher was expected to ensure loyalty to the state and students/pupils to be obedient and know the contents of a syllabus, the new curriculum, commonly referred to as OBE (outcomes-based education), expects teachers to facilitate or guide learners to achieve outcomes which incorporate knowledge, understanding, skills, attitudes and values. It also dispenses with the textbook and expects teachers to use a variety of resources applicable to the general and specific outcomes that are identified as having to be achieved.
The evidence on teachers' interest in new curricular approaches is scanty. What does exist is mixed. Perhaps it is too early to assess these issues, as Curriculum 2005 is only now being implemented, and then only in one grade. None the less, it is worth gathering some of the evidence. Although the assumptions and expectations of Curriculum 2005 have been widely criticized (Jansen, 1997; Samson, 1998) for their implications for black and female teachers operating in circumstances with limited resources and little capacity to implement these new approaches, NAPTOSA and SADTU have been less critical and initially sought to engage with the ideas and implications. Both associations are represented on national structures defining norms and standards for teacher education informed by the principles of OBE and both have been involved, albeit at a formal level, in the determination of standards for different learning areas.
But despite greater official recognition and participation in the determination of curricula and despite a mass interest in the new curriculum, specific school-based issues linked to how teachers may do their work are still burning issues. In early 1998, SADTU included in its list of grievances precipitating its mass protest action the absence of textbooks in black schools (SADTU, 1998). The call for textbooks was made on the grounds that OBE favours better-resourced and trained teachers and disadvantages black schools which continue to be poorly resourced and staffed with teachers less well-trained to use a variety of resources.
Curriculum 2005 was introduced in 1997, a year after the research on which this article was based was conducted. In the limbo created by the departure of an old department and a not-yet-entrenched new department, teachers were experimenting with new approaches. In the desegregating (but not deracialized) white, Indian and coloured schools, the main challenge for teachers was the new, linguistically diverse character of classrooms. Teachers were grappling with issues of multi-culturalism and anti-racism, with the values of a society founded on non-racialism and how to embed these in pedagogical practice. Although individual union activists in some schools held meetings to raise awareness of the issues, it was not a major issue for either NAPTOSA or SADTU. In predominantly African schools, teachers were uninspired by curricula which continued to be marked by the past and were waiting for new directions in the field of curricula. By 1998, there were no new textbooks or resources in schools.
How is organizational control and control over teachers' work changing and being restructured in the postapartheid period? Are these approximating the processes of marketization occurring in advanced capitalist contexts where `the ideology and political rhetoric of the market . . . celebrates the superiority of commercial planning and commercial purposes and forms of organization against those of public service and social welfare' (Bowe et al., 1992, p. 53) and, `far from releasing people from the burdens of bureaucracy.., increase the internal administrative load (p. 81), the result being that teachers experience "considerable overload and stress" and "senior staff are weighed down by multiple roles"? (p. 101). In this conception, new forms of management constitute new forms of control over teachers and their work. And if so, how are these processes confronting historically produced school cultures shaped both by bureaucratic controls and the oppositional assertion of alternatives? How have teachers responded to these processes?
The retraining of school principals and educational managers in the `new management' has become a major growth industry in South Africa, particularly in the context of the decentralization of a range of powers and controls to schools. Symbols and images as well as methods, procedures and values are freely borrowed from commerce and industry. The widely used metaphor of the school as a factory or industry seems best to illustrate this. Another example is the question of performance appraisal and performance-related pay. As mentioned above, the evaluation of teachers provided a focal point of opposition for teachers in the run-up to the election, acting as a microcosm of demands for the democratization of schools and control over teachers' work. In the process of the transition to new educational authorities, however, contestation broadened from a contestation within schools to one between teachers and policy mandarins of commerce and industry as the latter sought to appropriate and give a new and different meaning to the issues.
The process was subtle but significant. In influential policy texts, teachers were presented as lazy and engaged in a useless paper-chase which had little effect on classroom practice except to remove them from the classroom. This representation produced its policy correlative: the need for appraisal of the performance of teachers and the use of performance appraisal for the control and discipline of teachers (Hofmeyr & Jaff, 1994). The call for democratization of control of teachers' work thus became converted at a policy level into a managerial mechanism of control rather than empowerment, as originally conceptualized. The emphasis by SADTU on training of schools and teachers in the developmental, peer review and process-oriented principles underpinning new forms of appraisal were overtaken by the promotion of the older check-lists of behaviours implemented by managers and which had been rejected in the mass resistance of the early 1990s. Thus, new managerial conceptions of the organization of work collided with professionally located notions of control constructed in the process of opposition to bureaucratically based apartheid controls. By the beginning of 1998, however, a developmental form of appraisal was approved by the Education Labour Relations Council and began to be implemented at the beginning of 1999.
But how did schools and teachers respond? And what was the outcome of this contest? As suggested earlier, social relations inside many schools were already in the process of democratizing as a result of a campaign aimed at delegitimizing the symbols of authority in schools. As a result, almost all the principals, their deputies and heads of department in the schools studied were studying school management to help find solutions to problems. But the language they used was infused with the experience of the democratic transition in South Africa more broadly and the experience of the struggles of teachers' control in the schools. The language of flexible and negotiated management provided a new language to managements for approaching school-based issues. The problems of transition, explained one school principal, were outweighed by the `biggest change that had happened in the school, the transformation of the school being dominated by authorities.., waiting for them to say this and do things--the transformation from that system into a partnership, forming the Parent Teacher Student Association and trying to work out problems, being a team. We have never had that'. And a head of department in another black school described his approach as follows:
I don't really prescribe anything. There's no such thing as any form of rigidity. It's simply a suggestion, and if a teacher has a suggestion that is better than what I've suggested, then we try that out and see if it can work... We have what we call focused visits. In other words, you would call the teacher and say, `Look we are going to look at classroom management, what does classroom management entail, how does one ensure that you have some form of discipline in the classroom and what it is and so forth'. Then that is the first step. The second step would be, we decide mutually, whatever we've discussed, we will now apply it in the classroom and see what it's worth. Once that has taken place, we will have a close appraisal of it to see what were the shortcomings, what we can learn from that... Teachers don't look at heads of department or members of management as policing or trying to catch them out, but rather being supporters, making sure that they are quite successful in the classroom and assisting them as far as possible.
An evaluation of the union's pilot project to implement a democratized form of teacher assessment, focused on empowerment of teachers in classrooms, found that teachers welcomed the principles of openness and transparency, processes of feedback and follow-up, self-appraisal, peer review, significance attached to contextual factors and formative assessment, but that they responded negatively to, in particular, the length of time required for the process and the administrative work required (Mokgalane et al., 1997). The results of this pilot and the way forward were taken up for negotiation in the newly created Education Labour Relations Council on which all teacher unions and organizations along with the new national and provincial education departments are represented. Finally, in mid-1998, it was resolved to implement a purely developmental form of teacher appraisal, revised in accordance with the outcome of the pilot results, and to be evaluated at the end of 1999. As such, then, it can be argued that teachers managed to institutionalize a more democratic form of teacher appraisal than that which prevailed under the old order, and also managed to stave off a more managerially based approach to performance appraisal, which had currency and was fought for by powerful education policy think tanks linked to business.
This paper has tried to examine the relationship between broader social and local school changes, how the former are mediated at the local level by social struggles, and how historically produced cultural and organizational educational forms, raced and gendered in particular ways, may shape and re-shape broader processes impacting on schools. The mutually constitutive processes of structure and agency are at the heart of a paper which tries to show how teachers' work has been at the centre of teachers' struggles in the transition to democracy. Conflicts over the control of teachers' work have thus been at once a metaphor of the broader process of social change, a strategic component of it, and a concrete struggle to transform authority relations in schools.
The complexity of the democratic transition is illustrated by situating teachers' struggles to transform schools in the broader context of policies increasingly influenced not only by the history and content of national democratic struggles inside and outside education, but also by the global conjuncture and the impact of new ideologies. These are concerned on the one hand with the reduction of public expenditure and consequent intensification of teachers' work, and on the other with changing teachers' roles such that they become simply the producers of human capital for an increasingly competitive global market, rather than citizens concerned with democratization of society in all its forms.
This paper tries to show, however, that these are not simply imposed on to South African schools, but in some cases collide head-on with teachers who recognize and resist their implications, and in others are negotiated into new forms consistent with more democratic school organizational forms. Far from teachers' resistance becoming muted in the postapartheid period, it has taken new forms in relation to new circumstances. As such, this paper suggests a more nuanced picture, illustrated by reference to South Africa, than that found in some of the existing approaches to these issues in the literature on education in developing countries.
The racial categories of white, Indian, coloured and African in use in South Africa are historical and social constructions. To the extent that they found material expression in state and social forms of organization, and to the extent that they are still used, albeit now chiefly for purposes of redress, this paper will use them. This is not an endorsement of these categories as defining an essentialist identity. The term `black' is used to comprise all groups who were historically excluded from citizenship and defined as Indian, coloured or African. It was the term popularized by the black consciousness movement of South Africa to denote the common historical oppression of black people in South Africa and is still useful to problematize racial categories in South Africa.
Correspondence: Professor Linda Chisholm, School of Education, University of Natal, Durban 4001, South Africa.
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By Linda Chisholm, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa
