The study examined perceptions of female educators at a primary school in Durban, with regard to issues of gender equality. The literature review revealed that women educators have faced great injustices regarding past educational policies (before 1994) and the nature of gender biased practices both in society and within the school systems. The study highlights some of the main barriers, both intrinsic and extrinsic, faced by women teachers which prevented their upward mobility in the profession, thus determining their perceptions of their present career status. It also focuses on strategies that women educators perceived in helping to advance in their career as a teacher thereby achieving satisfaction. The research consisted of a quantitative phase which included the use of self-completion questionnaires to determine the perceptions of the female educators to their present career status. The data collected was used to develop strategies women teachers can use to advance their careers. The findings revealed that there were two groups of teachers each with different set of perceptions. The younger generation of teachers did not experience intrinsic barriers and displayed more satisfied perceptions of their career. The older generation of teachers seemed less satisfied with their present career status. Both, however agreed that organizational constraints (extrinsic barriers) affected their advancement in the profession. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

This research seeks to understand what it means to be a teacher and the experiences that shape what teachers do in the context of a primary school. In asking the question, What’s a teacher anyway? I produced data of teachers’ daily practices and social realities within their lived experiences. Located within an interpretive paradigm, I documented various identities and meanings of teachers which helped me to understand how teachers negotiate the multiple forces within the setting of a primary school. The research looked at teachers in their social context, since teachers do not work in isolation but are subject to particular social influences. Using the participatory approach, I produced data of the lives of two experienced teachers who work in a primary school in the eThekweni region of KwaZulu-Natal. The participatory methodology was most appropriate to gather the necessary data, as it allowed for the teachers’ voices to be heard. Against the social, institutional, contextual and programmatic contexts, data were sourced by means of career life-history interviews and photovoice. Through narrative analysis, the teachers’ stories were reconstructed and represented as identity categories through which they were able to construct their professional selves and their professional work. The findings that were generated from the two experienced primary school teachers were analysed and represented under the key themes of professional self and professional work. The findings offer an understanding of how practising teachers manage their work and themselves against all the changes and challenges of the South African educational landscape specifically in the schooling situation. Through the reconstructed stories by the teachers, the study makes visible how teacher identity shapes teachers and their work in the school. The data reveals that teachers have multiple identities of who they are and how they respond from their position as teachers, which clash with what is expected of them in the school. The findings show that teachers are unhappy with the curriculum and political shifts, as these are imposed on them in an arbitrary manner. The study contributes to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between teacher identity and teacher work. The study revolves around the teacher who tries to build an interesting relationship between the identities of “mother”, “teacher” and “caregiver”. Being a teacher, innovative ways are created to manage the administrative work and the curriculum work. The iii second teacher, an Indian male, as a person and an activist, growing up in a poor community, negotiates between the forces to make sense of what it means to be a teacher in the present shift, given the diversity of pupils and the various issues that accompany it. The teachers are working in a social reality and have to manage a range of challenges, difficulties and struggles. They find creative ways to negotiate the multiple roles and responsibilities and make sense of what it means to be a teacher. Due to excessive administrative and curricular demands being made on them, teachers are found to be experiencing tension and undue stress in their work while negotiating the multiple forces that surround them in the context of the school. To answer my research question, What’s a teacher anyway, I considered how they moved beyond their conventional roles and responsibilities as teachers, and how they endeavoured to make meaning and sense of themselves as successful teachers within the four dimensions of Samuel’s (2008) framework. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2010.

Dissertation / The aim of this study is to investigate teacher stress and to identify factors that contribute to the stress experienced by township secondary school teachers. Based on an extensive literature study, an inventory, the Teacher Stress Identification Test was developed. The inventory was completed by 368 teachers who live in townships and work in township secondary schools in the Free State. Information thus gained was analysed with the use of a statistical computer programme. It appears from the research that the inventory has both a high reliability coefficient and construct validity. The empirical research revealed that township secondary school teachers experience moderate to high levels of stress. It also gave a clear indication of the factors contributing to the stress experienced by these teachers, allowing the researcher to make several recommendations. Lastly, the manifestations of stress as well as the coping mechanisms of these teachers were briefly investigated. / Psychology of Education / M. Ed. (Psychology of Education)

This study sought to discover job satisfaction factors of African American faculty at a historically black university and a predominantly white institution. Data were gathered through the use of semi-structured interviews of 6 faculty members from a historically black university and 5 faculty from a predominantly white institution. Several themes emerged from the study. The most salient was that African American faculty at the historically black university were satisfied by their work with students, satisfied with the flexibility of their schedules, and dissatisfied with their pay, workload, and the lack of recognition that they receive from their institution. African American faculty at the predominantly white institution were satisfied by the impact the programs and courses they developed had upon students, satisfied with their job's freedom and flexibility, and dissatisfied with the ideas of being micromanaged or working with people who are not open and honest. The findings of this study showed that service is an important factor to job satisfaction of African American faculty and that there is a distinction between factors faculty are dissatisfied with but willing to endure and those that would cause them to leave an institution.

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

<p>The aim of this paper was to identify the sources of stress for teachers involved with inclusive education as well as whether there is a statistically significant difference in stress experienced by teachers based on their biographical details. In this research the focus was on intellectual disability.</p>

Mini-dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Education, Technikon Natal, 2002. / South Africa has been undergoing political change and this has impacted on education. There have been major shifts in education policy, structures and curriculum. Stakeholders in education and teachers, in particular, have had to cope with this new reality. As a result of the changes in education, teachers have been confronted with a variety of problems such as fewer resources, an increase in working hours and having to perform numerous administrative and fund-raising tasks. New school management structures have been established, class sizes have been altered and Outcomes-based Education has been introduced. Poor working conditions, increased workload, role conflict and ambiguity, the threat of redundancy and re-deployment, time pressures and pupil problems are additional stressors that teachers find themselves exposed to at school. These are but some of the stressors that have contributed towards teachers experiencing stress at school and which have impacted negatively on their work performance. However, at both the Education Department level as well as at school level, very little appears to be done to address the problem of teacher stress despite the negative impact that teacher stress has on the work performance of teachers. In order for schools to function efficiently and effectively, school management authorities will have to devise appropriate strategies to manage teacher stress. This study is confined to those aspects of teacher stress that impact negatively on teacher performance and that are within the scope of the principal's responsibilities at school. It Page vii investigates whether teacher stress is a management issue by examining its impact on the work performance of teachers at school, identifies school-based and school-related stressors and presents a set of recommendations that can be used by school principals to manage teacher stress in secondary schools. The findings of this study are also compared with the / M

In this study, six research questions were addressed: (1) Does a teacher who has a spiritual calling have a different motivation (self, interaction, task) to his/her work than a teacher who does not have a spiritual calling? (2) Does a teacher who feels a spiritual calling have a different locus of control (internal, external) than a teacher who does not have a spiritual calling? (3) Does a teacher who has a spiritual calling have a different degree of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal accomplishment) than a teacher who does not have a spiritual calling? (4) Does a teacher who has a spiritual calling have a different sense of voluntary commitment in the longevity of his/her work experience than a teacher who does not have a spiritual calling? (5) Is there a different concentration of teachers who have a spiritual calling in public or parochial schools? (6) Does the public or religious school affiliation make a difference in research questions #1 through #4? A Teacher Motivation Inventory was compiled using The Orientation Inventory by Bass, Rotter's Internal/External Locus of Control, Maslach Burnout Inventory by Maslach, Jackson, and Schwab, a Researcher-made Spiritual Calling Inventory, and longevity questions. Tukey HSD post hoc comparisons test and Chi-square Test of Independence were used. This study was conducted in the spring of 1994 in public, Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran and Jewish elementary schools. Teachers who scored in the upper third on the Spiritual Calling Inventory were categorized as having a spiritual calling to teaching. Teachers who had a spiritual calling had a significantly more internal locus of control, were less likely to depersonalize students, had greater personal accomplishment and were more likely to choose teaching again than those not having a spiritual calling. A spiritual calling had a significant relationship to some very meaningful, attractive qualities in a teacher's personal attitude toward a teaching career.