The persistence of the teacher-centred modality in South African public primary schools: A matter of control and compliance

Abstract

The study assumed that the teacher-centred modality is an institution in South African public primary schools. It applied the institutional analysis and development framework to explore how teachers teach and view on the structure of the teaching action situation. The study observed 54 lessons and interviewed 47 teachers from three public primary schools in three townships in the Johannesburg Central education district. The study found that teachers across the sample schools, education phases, grades and subjects use a lesson routine. The lesson routine assigns limited actions to teachers and learners. Teachers must deliver curriculum content at the pace prescribed by the national curriculum and assessment policy statement, assign learning tasks for learners to complete, and control classroom interactions. Learners must be quiet, follow teachers’ instructions dutifully, answer teachers’ questions promptly, and complete learning tasks quietly on their own. These actions generate limited interactions about curriculum content between learners, learners and the teacher and learners and learning and teaching support material. The limited interactions produce the following observable outputs: an hierarchical pedagogic relation, the curriculum is presented as uncontested facts, evidence of curriculum delivery in learners’ exercise books, and unofficial streaming of learners. Teachers believe that the tightly prescribed curriculum and narrow bureaucratic accountability measures used to monitor its delivery, the legislation governing sanctioning of learners, the large and overcrowded classes and the heterogeneity of learners in multiple indicators influence their teaching and choice of teaching modality. These exogenous variables create the opportunities and constraints that teachers believe they face in a lesson. In this context, teachers adopt 12 shared rules and norms to regulate their behaviour in a lesson. These shared rules and norms prescribe the actions and outcomes they must do, must not do and may do in a lesson. They incentivise teachers to choose actions that allow them to control their emotions and comply with the prescriptions of curriculum policy and legislation governing sanctioning of learners. As a result, teachers choose a limited set of actions that routine lessons. It takes the form of whole class teaching with limited classroom interactions, a list of content from the textbook and Department of Basic Education workbooks and cognitively simple learning tasks. The exogenous variables that teachers identified in this study that affect teaching are not unique to South Africa: they are intrinsic to the organisational form of modern teaching, namely age-graded classes where a single teacher is responsible for a group of heterogeneous learners and to deliver a national curriculum statement that is monitored using a limited set of measures. In this context, the teacher-centred modality is a logical outcome. It allows teachers to deliver the curriculum and control a group of heterogeneous learners. The study concludes that the teacher-centred modality is an outcome of the modern organisational arrangement for providing mass education, and in particular schooling. It will persist for as long as this arrangement of schooling is considered an immutable fact. Keywords: Ostrom, Institutions, Teacher-centred modality, Teaching, Institutional analysis and development framework, Satisficing, Rules-in-use, Institutions-in-use, Rules, Norms, Lesson routines, Incentives, Grammar of schooling, Sanctions, Heterogeneous learners, Overcrowded classes, Classroom interactions, Structured Pedagogy, Classroom management.