3.2 Students

By 2000 the university had enrolled 60% of its students who were "African". 53% of the total student population was female. These figures are often quoted as evidence of the "transformation" that the university has made from "apartheid days", but a more close examination needs to be made through disaggregating these statistics especially for teacher education. Who are the students registered for teacher education courses, and does this profile reflect the goals of "social justice and democratisation" of the higher education system?

Firstly, within teacher education over the period from 1991 to 2000 there has been a steady decline in enrollment for students registering for a first-degree pre-service programme. In particular from 1998 to 2000 there has been decline from 132 registered students to 6. (Refer to Table 1 above). This also coincides with the reorientation of the undergraduate degree towards "General Education and Training: Grades 4-9"¹ (former primary school education) and a phasing out of the undergraduate secondary education offering. The postgraduate teacher education programme (HDE) during this period was directed at secondary school education. This transition to concentrate in each qualification on different bands of the schooling system was phased in over the last five years.

¹ The School chooses to focus on only grades 4 to 9 in their undergraduate programme because there was little staffing expertise in the initial foundational grades 1-3 (junior primary education) within the School. This clustering represents one of the proposed new bands on the National Qualifications Framework: General Education and Training band. Grades 10-11 are clustered into the Further Education and Training band of the formal school system (DOE: 1997).

Secondly, a more stable pattern of enrollment after an undergraduate degree into the pre-service HDE teacher education is evident (refer to Table 1: for the period 1992 to 1999). The increase in student HDE enrollment in 2000 reflects the School's choice to offer secondary schooling specialisation only in the HDE programme. One of the possible factors for the decline in the undergraduate numbers could be the lack of interest of students enrolling for primary education specialisation. Another source of explanation could be that having completed an academic undergraduate degree, many of the graduates do not have a professional qualification for employment. The choice of a professional teacher education qualification is one route to employment. This trend however is likely to decrease as the marketability and employment of undergraduate non-teaching career programmes and their qualifications increase.

Table 2 below reflects that more students enrolled for the Arts specialisation within the secondary school specialisation (an average of 79% of the students over the nine years period was enrolled in an Arts specialisation). Students would have specialised in teaching languages, history, geography or art. Comparatively only 11% were enrolled for Science and 10% for commerce subject specialisations. The teacher education programmes are not sufficiently able to attract Science and Mathematics teachers.

Table 2: Specialist Fields within the B. Paed (Secondary) degree (1991 to 1999)

A survey of the final year 1999 PRESET students who were registered for a B. Paed or Higher Diploma in Education course (n= 152) course provides further insight into the patterns of enrollment². It should be noted that these surveyed students reflect the cohort of students who entered into a teacher education programme in 1995, in a socio-educational climate unlike the present 2001 one. Nevertheless a description of this cohort presents an indication of the profile of the students with whom the institution was engaged during the pre-service programmes.

² The Bachelor of Pedagogics (B. Paed) and the Higher Diploma in Education (HDE) were the official names of the pre-service programmes in 1999. These were only changed in 2000 to reflect the nomenclature of the legislated SAQA framework: these programmes are now called the Bachelor of Education (undergraduate) and the University Postgraduate Certificate in Education (UPGCE) respectively.

Table 3: Final Year PRESET students (1999): Course and Gender

The majority of the students (74%) in 1999 were enrolled for the B. Paed four year degree course, whilst 26% are HDE students.

Table 4: Final Year PRESET students (1999): Race and Gender

The overall majority of students of this cohort are female (58%), with 18% being Indian and 40% being African. The smallest representation is Indian male students (9%).

However the above pattern of enrolment is not consistent across all areas of subject specialisation. For example a survey of a cohort of 1997 Special Method English students (Samuel: 2000) reflects the following dominance of Indian females (57%), and a general under-representation in the number of African student teachers (33%) registered to train as teachers of the English language.

Table 5: Final Year PRESET students (1997): Race, Gender and Subject Specialisation (English)

Whilst the enrolment of more African student teachers is in keeping with providing a representation of the race demographics of the region (73% in Table 5 above), the representation of African students in specific subject specialisations also needs to be addressed.

The questionnaire survey of final year students also revealed the following trends:

3.2.1 Home/Family background

A large percentage of the students enrolled to become teachers in this cohort represented the first generation of their family to engage with tertiary education. 82% of the students indicated that their parents do not have post-secondary schooling qualifications. 32% of this cohort also described their parents as professional or semi-skilled while 68% indicated that their parents had relatively low paying jobs. These statistics accumulatively point to the student cohort emerging largely from the working class or lower middle class communities.

3.2.2 Domicile and schooling

61% of the students' original domicile was within the rural area, which they reported as the area within which they experienced their primary schooling. (Their present domiciles as tertiary students spanned three different geographical descriptions: 32% report their domicile as being rural; 30% peri-urban and 37% urban.) Only 8% of the cohort had experienced primary schooling in an urban area. This bias towards rural experiences of schooling is significant especially in the context of the university being located within an urban area. The teaching practice experiences for student teachers are conducted within the urban township environment, which may be a relatively new cultural experience for many of the students. Most university staff have limited experiences of teaching and learning within rural schools.

3.2.3 Formal schooling

Formal schooling for 46% of the students spanned the normal 12 years duration. However, 16% of the group took an additional year to complete schooling, 10% took an additional two years to complete and 18% took three or more additional years to complete. This suggests that they all had experienced set backs in their journey through primary and secondary education. This could have been the result of dropping out and then into the education system; failure and repetition of grades. Nevertheless it represents a commitment to complete formal schooling. The repetition rates of this cohort in their matriculation school-leaving certificate are perhaps alarmingly high: 18% repeated their matriculation once; 22% twice and 4% thrice. This above profile is perhaps consistent with the poor matriculation pass rates of many rural schools.

3.2.4 Subject matter knowledge

42% of the student cohort reported that they did not study Mathematics at matric level; nor did 37% study Science. These subjects, Mathematics and Science form the compulsory course of the curriculum for primary school (teacher) education. Students who read for English, Science and Mathematics at secondary school matric level, achieved symbols which cluster in the bottom range of grades, reflecting a weak competence in these subjects.

3.2.5 Entry into teacher education and teaching as a career

56% entered teacher education immediately after leaving school. 17% had taught prior to coming to university, with 25% having taught in secondary schools, 71% in primary schools and 2% in adult education programmes. This suggests that the remaining 17% had been engaged in other forms of employment besides teaching before enrolling to read for a teacher education qualification. 55% of the students indicated that their friends thought that it was unfortunate that they had chosen teaching as a career. 52% indicated that they did not think that teaching would be the best job that they could get. Over 80% agreed that there are many teachers who would prefer to do other jobs. 87% of the students indicated that teachers were not as respected as they were before. These statistics reveals as much about the negative perception by members of the teaching profession and the general public about teachers and teaching as it does the opinions of the student teachers themselves.

3.2.6 Medium of teaching and learning

The African students in the cohort reported that they were proficient to teach using English (96%) and isiZulu (93%). Amongst the Indian students 100% reported being proficient to teach using English and 12% indicated that they would be able to teach using isiZulu. The students teachers are likely to be placed within the province where the majority of the learners will be first language isiZulu speaking, whilst English dominates as the official medium of teaching and learning. This profile suggests that the African students are more likely to cope with dealing with multilingual classroom settings, which are characterised by the use of both these two languages. However the reporting of the degree of proficiency to teach using the English and isiZulu languages by African students could perhaps be a reflection of the students' registering of the dominant use of codeswitching between these two languages which dominates many African classroom settings within which they had experienced their own schooling. Indian students are at a significant disadvantage in being limited in their proficiency in isiZulu.

The detailed student profile reflects that the institution has been dealing in the main with those sectors of the South African population which have been previously excluded from tertiary education, namely rural African women. However their entry into the teacher education programme is not necessarily into subject areas of high demand within the schooling system. These students are accessing higher education in subject area specialisations where there is already an oversupply, i.e. within the humanities/arts. This is also as a consequence of their own underexposure to these subjects in their secondary schooling.

These students emerging also from the working class communities have little access to role models of higher education study being themselves First Generation University going students. They are underprepared from their own secondary schooling system, having either dropped out periodically or failed to achieve high grades in Mathematics and Sciences. These subjects, Mathematics and Sciences are the compulsory learning areas within the new school curriculum and are included within the design of the new teacher education course (see below). The underprepared students are likely to experience more difficulty coping with such university level courses. Developing the subject-based expertise of these underprepared students is a crucial factor to consider in the design of a new curriculum for these students.

So-called underprepared/disadvantaged students are nevertheless likely to be a valuable resource in so far as multilingual teaching and learning, where English and isiZulu are the accepted languages of the school. The students who do possess a multilingual expertise in the dominant languages of isiZulu and English would also need to be supported in the teacher education curriculum. However their poor competence in the subject English in secondary school also needs addressing.

It should be noted that the shift in student profile towards a growing number of African rural women was a deliberate decision taken by the Selection Committees for the B. Paed degree and HDE taken during 1995 (when this cohort of surveyed students entered the teacher education course). Immediately following the country's first democratic elections in 1994, the university community deliberately foregrounded their social and political mission to increase access to previously underrepresented groups within the higher education system. The admission of these groups was seen as a conscious plan to develop a cadre of rural teachers who would serve the communities from which they came. Whether these students will return to the rural area after graduation will be discussed in Section 6: "Conceptions of being a teacher" below.

Overall, questions need to be raised as to whether the curriculum design of teacher education sufficiently challenges the notions that (teacher) education is a middle class enterprise, biased towards the urban school as the norm. By posing such questions and challenges, the notions of the students as deficient becomes contested and the shift in evaluation of the curriculum veers towards the examination of the staff and the curriculum itself in terms of whether they provide adequate acknowledgement of the working class communities and the marginalised rural communities.