Teachers feel excluded from South Africa’s schools by race and culture
Emotions ran high at a high school south of Johannesburg in 2017 when the largely coloured community rejected the appointment of a black principal. A group of black teachers were also removed from the school because coloured parents didn’t want them there. The apartheid system delineated people using racial categories – white, black, Indian and coloured – and these continue to influence post-apartheid South African society. This high school’s story is just one example of the many types of exclusion teachers face regularly. The problem is that debates about exclusion focus almost exclusively on the experiences of learners as they try to overcome barriers of race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, disability and language. Yet teachers also have difficulties around inclusion, participation and belonging in post-apartheid schools. Many have migrated from historically black to historically white schools because these tend to be better resourced, classes are smaller, safer school environments, more learning support services and in some cases higher salaries. But being employed by a school doesn’t automatically guarantee inclusion. A study I conducted with my colleague Professor 16 | Teacha! Magazine
Yusef Waghid showed that even when black teachers are hired at historically white schools, they have to deal with constant questions about their “competence” and whether their work is in line with a school’s stated “standards”. Education experts argue that the term “standards” is often used to justify profoundly racialised conceptions of a diametrically opposed “white competence” and “black incompetence”. The ongoing exclusion of particular teachers from schools – whether on the basis of race, religion, culture, or sexuality – has serious implications for learners as well as the curriculum. On the one hand, learners do not encounter the life-worlds of diverse teachers. On the other hand, learners from minority groups struggle to find points of resonance. This leaves them with no option but to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking and being. Learners benefit from being exposed to multiple and unfamiliar teacher identities. They begin to experience those they previously might not have encountered. They enter life-worlds which they otherwise might not have known. It’s time that policymakers paid serious attention to the problem of teacher exclusion.
