No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1987.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1982.

This research presents an understanding of being a teacher and of teacher's work in schools which are defined as 'rural'. In asking the question, "What does it mean to be a teacher in a rural school?" I produced data of their daily practices and social realities that constitute the lived experiences of teachers within the context of rural education. Employing a critical, emancipatory framework, I documented the multiple identities and meanings that emerged, and drew attention to the teachers' need for change. The need to change what rural means, what rural schooling is, becomes the space to challenge and question oppressive practices and for opportunities of freedom. Using a narrative inquiry approach, I produced data of the lives of four teachers who work in two high schools in the Vulindlela District. The data sources used to produce the data included four life history interviews, which were conducted as the main methodological strategy, critical conversations and collages. Through narrative analysis, four reconstructed teachers' stories were produced. The storied narratives are reconstructions of lives told by two groupings of teachers: constructed by teachers that commute to the rural school from one rural area to another, and those that live in the same area as the school. Through the reconstructed teacher stories, the study makes visible how gender identities read against the history and traditional coding of rural settings. It also shows how these identities narrate these individual lives in particular ways, and how the teachers threaten these spaces to rework their meanings and practices for different ways of thinking, living and working as teachers in schools in rural settings. The study contributes towards an understanding of the relationship between 'school life' and 'whole life' . The study concludes that these teachers' personal and professional identities are negotiated on a daily basis, shaping and being shaped by particular social spaces in which they live and work, and make sense of the kind of the teachers they are and want to be. The teaching and learning choices and judgments they made in their classroom are intertwined with other variables other than just teaching. Being a teacher in a school within this particular schooling context, they are challenged with conditions, and have to constantly confront them. Alongside this, teachers enacted certain practices to disrupt, and challenge stereotypical understandings and meanings that we have come to adopt about rural schooling. This study shows that these four teachers in rural schools enacted certain practices 'within the school' and 'beyond the school'. They were able to cultivate commitment, connectedness and care. We see how the notion of "Engaged Pedagogy" (Hooks, 1994) plays itself out in rural schools by teachers who work there. They cultivate this type of pedagogy through constant reflection and by engaging in practices within the formal teaching time, during lunch breaks and beyond the formal teaching time. Through ongoing reflection in how they teach and what they teach they challenge traditional oppressive practices and establish better innovative ways of thinking and working as teachers. By making the change, rurality is transforming and, therefore, rural schooling too is being transformed. The desire expressed by the four teachers to support, care and to express love for learners as a way of improving the life for the learners in the school opened up opportunities for them to excel. By learners feeling good about themselves, they were able to perform better and in this way changed the experience of rural schooling. So to answer my research question, what does it mean to be a teacher in a rural school? It meant to work 'within the school' and 'beyond the school'. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

The Further Education and Training (FET) sector in general and the public Further Education colleges specifically are in a state of perpetual transition. The merger as an attempt at restructuring and transforming public Further Education and Training colleges presents many challenges to its educators. This narrative inquiry explores four educators' subjective experiences of the merging process with a view to attempting to understand the effect this process may have had on their identity development and/ or the renegotiation of their social identities. The researcher who is also the quality manager at a FET college, is presented with the opportunity to reflect critically on her own experiences and identity development while actively engaging with other participants' narratives about their experiences of the merging process. A strong perception of the college as an oppressive environment emerged from the findings. The merger was evidently a catalyst for the different levels of awareness, introspection and renegotiation of participants' identities. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

Every educational institution depends on people behaving in acceptable ways for its success. Bad behaviour not only hinders and disrupts the educational process but also poses a fundamental threat to the culture and identity of the institution and to those who behave well. This aspect emerged in the report by the Task Team on Education Management Development, initiated by the National Minister of Education in February 1996 entitled Changing Management to Manage Change in Education. In its characterisation of the educational legacy of apartheid, the report highlighted concerns with the breakdown of the culture of teaching and learning in certain schools and acknowledged that poor discipline impacts on the disintegration of learning environments. It further emphasised that good school discipline is an important feature of any effective school. In addition, the importance of sound discipline in the running of effective schools has been acknowledged as one of the recommendations of the South African Schools Act, No. 84 of 1996, which stipulates that the governing body of each school formulates a Code of Conduct, the purpose of which is to create a well-organised school so that effective learning and teaching take place; to promote self discipline; to encourage good behaviour and to regulate conduct. There is general agreement that while the process of drawing up the requisite Code of Conduct is an important element in the management of discipline, it is no more than a first step. What is required in each school is the establishment of a strategic management plan, extracted from the school's vision of a safe and secure environment for all. Drawing from this vision the emerging development plan, for the management of discipline, will incorporate strategies from a range of players whose roles inter-relate in the maintenance of discipline: e.g. learners, educators, parents, the governing body, the Department of Education, the community and other partners external to the school. This research project proposes a possible strategy for managers of education which focuses on the potentiality that good discipline has for the enhancement of learning environments. / Thesis (M.Ed) - University of Natal, 2000.

Despite the numerous intervention programmes provided by the Department of Education to make a difference in Grade 12 exam results, there are schools that are still performing below expected national and provincial standards. Although the Department of Education has provided strategies to improve the performance of Grade 12 learners, the four schools investigated in the Mount Frere district of the Eastern Cape are still performing poorly. These schools performance has been compared with the National and Provincial percentages from 1998 to 2001 and exhibits an alarming failing gap. During these years the pass percentage increase in the Eastern Cape was 7.72% in 1998, 14.6% in 1999. 15.9% in 2000 and 22.3% in 2001, showing a great decline during the years 1999 and 2001. Respondents believe that full involvement of stakeholders in schools and availability of resources would yield better exam results. Supervision by the School Management Teams is another important aspect that seemed to be neglected by the principals, deputy principals and heads of divisions. Educators' attitudes towards supervision should be made positive so that they see it as a development strategy more than an evaluation procedure. Limitations which include incomplete information, time constraints, the attitudes of stakeholders towards research, sampling and the compilation of the findings, did not have a severe impact on the recommendations. An important advantage of this investigation is that openness from respondents was achieved to a very great extent. Clearly there is a need to investigate this poor performance of Grade 12 learners which ranges from 33% to 20% pass rate during the 1998 to 2001 in the four schools. The provincial averages were 44.6%, 40.1%, 49.8% and 45.6% during the years investigated. Surely this investigation and the application of its recommendations can improve the performance of Grade 12 learners in these schools and those operating under the same conditions. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of Durban-Westville, 2004.

Educational Technology as a significant discipline within the educational landscape has been firmly accepted by many countries throughout the world. Most notably, countries such as the United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, Hungary and Scotland are amongst the forerunners in implementing educational technology in their educational systems. The value and significance of educational technology is such that democracies throughout the world can ill afford to ignore. This study is thus an attempt to investigate, assess and identify the role and policies of educational technology in post apartheid South Africa. The rationale behind this study is thus to examine and ascertain whether the Government of National Unity has gone far enough to affect major changes in the educational landscape with special reference to the assimilation and in co-operation of educational technology. Based on this rationale, the study investigates amongst others, the perception and understanding of educational technology amongst educationists in primary and secondary schools in Phoenix which is located approximately 25 km north of Durban in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. This limitation of concentrating and restricting the study to Phoenix was unavoidable due to various mitigating circumstances amongst which were the factors of time, cost, human and financial resources and also the issue of security. However after all these concerns were analysed it was found that the majority of schools in the Phoenix area were ideally suited to the study as these schools were made up of a well balanced racial mix of pupils. In investigating the understanding of "educational technology" amongst the various respondents, a number of correlations such as the influence of age, tertiary institution where the respondents graduated, qualification levels, the role of media centre and it's staff, etc were made. Thus this study eventually strengthened the resolve in providing significant information on the previously uncharted territory of "educational technology" in South Africa. In fact this is one of the only known research studies that was undertaken on educational technology in KZN. The study also gleaned various other data to assess whether there exists any policy frameworks on educational technology within the educational landscape of South Africa. In the final analysis various conclusions were drawn, and were subsequently followed by recommendations. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1997.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1986.

This study set out to investigate teachers' mental models of learners' cognitive and moral development, with reference to the inclusion of learners in the governing bodies of schools. Strauss' (1996), concept of implicit mental models is used as a basis for the investigation of teachers' beliefs about learners' cognitive and moral development. The study made use of Piaget's stages of concrete and formal operation thinking because learners in the governing bodies of schools fall within that part of the continuum, and Stages 5 and 6 of Kohlberg's theory of moral development. The research was in the form of a survey. Teachers were interviewed using a tape-recorder and the responses were later transcribed. The schools in which research was carried out were in Imbali in Pietermaritzburg, and the focus was on the learners in Grade 8 and higher. Teachers who were interviewed were either on the governing bodies of their schools, or who had experience with the learners in Grade 8 and higher. The findings of the research were of significance. Strauss (1996) found that teachers' beliefs about learners do not coincide with the explicit theories. This study coincided with Strauss' research findings in as far as Kohlberg's theory is concerned and the opposite occurs in as far as Piaget's theory is concerned. Most respondents (eleven out of fifteen) said higher grade learners question things that they do not understand. The researcher made use of the response to argue that learners can do well in the governing bodies of schools because they have the ability to question things that they do not understand despite the low regard that teachers have about learners' moral development. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

The aim of this study was to investigate Grade eight (8) Natural Science educators' assessment classroom practices and their perceptions about assessment. This study was based on the theory of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills that underpins the Revised National Curriculum Statement for Natural Sciences. An assumption was made that if assessment practices are to promote learning, as conceived in Curriculum 2005, educators' assessment practices must reflect a hierarchy of knowledge and skills. The educators' perceptions and their assessment practices were explored in the light of how learning is conceived to take place in the Revised National Curriculum Statement for Natural Sciences, i.e. learning is conceptualised as a "process". It was on this basis that an "accumulative" nature of learning was perceived as a relevant theoretical framework informing this study, i.e. learning ranges from simple to complex capabilities. To facilitate the educator's assessment practices and perceptions, a qualitative and quantitative approach was adopted. Interview schedules, observations and document analysis instruments were used as a means of collecting relevant data. The interview schedule included questions that elicited educators' biographies, perceptions the educators hold in relation to a hierarchy of knowledge and skills and the perceptions the educators hold about assessment. The observation schedule and the document analysis instrument were based on Gagne's hierarchy of knowledge and skills. These skills are discrimination learning, concept learning, rule learning and problem solving learning. The sample consisted of four Grade eight Natural Sciences educators drawn from four high schools in the greater Pietermaritzburg district. Three of these educators were from well-resource urban schools and one was from a poorly resourced Imbali Township. Interviews, documents and observations were analysed in terms of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills as a research framework informing the study. The results show that all the respondents assessed concrete and concept categories more frequently than the rules and problem- solving categories. This assessment strategy was common in both oral and written assessment tasks. The results exposed some inconsistencies between the educators' perceptions and their assessment practices. All four educators have unclear perceptions of the notion of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills, while in practice a wide range of categories of knowledge and skills were used in assessment tasks. The findings led to the conclusion that the policy needs to be explicit about the fact that the expected assessment standards within each learning outcome are organised around the notion of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills. This will make it clear to science educators why assessment should form an integral part of learning. In- service programmes are necessary to sensitise educators about organising assessment practices on the basis of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.