Teacher Preparation in South Africa

South Africa's transition to democracy has seen massive changes in the field of teacher education aimed at integrating its previously raced and gendered character. This book provides a comprehensive historical overview and relational understanding of the patterns of teacher preparation supporting South Africa's unequal formal education system. It shows how emerging patterns, policies and pedagogies were deeply entangled with the country's position within a broader international and colonial order as well as with dominant national political and economic social frameworks. Using rich archival and oral evidence, this book illuminates how successive policies restricted and enabled access to different institutions, while differentiated curricula prepared teachers to teach students intended to play different roles in a society marked by class, race and gender division. It explores the location and control of teacher provision for black and white teachers provided by mission societies and the state in colleges and universities. Post-apartheid governments sought to reverse entrenched racial legacies in education through closure of the colleges and incorporation of teacher preparation into universities, altered admission criteria and new curricula. These have resulted in new tensions which have arisen in relation to a world of competing pressures on universities and teachers. By shedding new light on these tensions from a historical perspective, this book will prove an invaluable resource for education leaders and researchers in the field of global and comparative education.

“This book traces the history of teacher preparation in South Africa in the context of broader social, political, and economic contexts and schooling policy; international and transnational processes; race, class, and gender; and issues related to the nature, status, and control of the teaching profession by governments and other agencies, requirements, supply and demand, funding, and different expectations for teachers in different sectors. It argues that history plays a part in the inequalities in South African schools that also appear in the teaching profession. It describes the roots of teacher education in church and mission-run systems and colonial systems; the impact of rapid industrialization at the turn of the 20th century; changes introduced after Union in 1910; the consolidation of segregation through the regulation of access through provision, certification, and curriculum; the repositioning of teacher preparation under apartheid; the policies and processes to relocate teacher training for black teachers to the bantusans and the continued cooperation between colleges and universities in the preparation of white teachers; how under-provision of teachers for African secondary schools resulted in a crisis that caused both efforts to reform the system by the government and to upgrade teachers; and how post-apartheid South African governments have attempted to address the apartheid legacy of inequality and under-provision in and through teacher education.”

-- Copyright 2019 Portland, OR

Linda Chisholm is a Professor in the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation of the Education Faculty at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published widely on the historical, contemporary and comparative aspects of education policy and curriculum in South Africa and the region. Her most recent book is Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education (Wits Press, 2017).

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