South Africa’s future success depends on a number of national priorities, amongst them the transformation of its education system. Education is the best route to follow to alleviate poverty and many other social ills. One way to overcome some of the complex challenges and crises that we face in South African schools is to pay attention to issues of leading and leadership, including the leadership of teachers. This study is done with the hope that research into teacher leadership will be one of the answers to the crisis in education. It should become a beacon of hope for all educationists who passionately want progress in the youth of South Africa. What better way than to ‘Awaken the Sleeping Giant’ of teacher leadership, borrowing the term from Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009). This study was designed as a case study, the purpose of which was to find out about the enactment of teacher leadership in an Eastern Cape township high school as well as the enhancing and hindering factors to this enactment. This study was done as a replication study of a similar study done by a group of 11Master’s students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2010. Similar to the original study, this case study was located within the interpretive paradigm and drew on school profiling, survey questionnaires, a focus group interview, selfreflective journals and individual interviews for its methods of data collection. The study was framed by distributed leadership while Grant’s (2008; 2012) Model of teacher leadership was adopted as the analytical tool. It emerged from the data that the three teacher leaders, my primary participants, exhibited teacher leadership across all four zones of Grant’s (2008) Model. The first zone was leadership in the classroom where all three teacher leaders showed leadership to varying degrees. Zones Two to Four are about leadership beyond the classroom into the school and beyond. In Zone Two, the zone where teachers work with each other and the learners outside the classroom, substantial levels of leadership were enacted by the three teacher leaders. Zone Three, where leadership is exhibited in whole-school development, the three primary participants showed distinct leadership qualities as well. The fourth zone, which is about interaction with neighbouring schools, also revealed that all three teacher leaders demonstrated active leadership on a regular basis. Findings further revealed that there were only a few inhibiting factors to the leadership of teachers at the case study school, including limited resources and infrastructure as well as insufficient support and acknowledgement from the relevant stakeholders when leadership initiatives were made, either successfully or otherwise. However, the enhancing factors superseded the inhibiting factors. A functional committee culture guided by a shared vision existed in the case study school together with an ethos of trust which enabled the staff to work collaboratively. Though there was certainly room for improvement in leadership practices at this case study school, the enactment of teacher leadership in this school illustrated a strong case of ‘developed’ teacher leadership (Muijs& Harris, 2007) within a dispersed leadership framing (Gunter, 2005)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:rhodes/vital:2052 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | John, Daisy Mary |
| Publisher | Rhodes University, Faculty of Education, Education |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MEd |
| Format | 137 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | John, Daisy Mary |
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