Leerders se ervaring van opvoederleierskap

D.Phil.Traditionally leadership was seen as synonymous with the executive authority of an organisation and in the school environment with that of the headmaster. However, a paradigm shift occurred and leadership is now viewed as attitudes, competencies and skills at three levels, namely the personal, interpersonal and professional levels, implying that every person is a leader in his or her own right. The idea of a leader as a value-driven, principle-centered and character-based person gathered momentum. The afore-mentioned qualities call for a special kind of self-knowledge that can partly be obtained from feedback to leaders on how stakeholders in the organisation perceive them and/or how their behaviour impacts on the organisation. Although school leadership gained momentum only in the past two decades, it has been realised that professionalism and the quality of leadership impact on the quality of teaching. It therefore seems important in the evaluation and improvement of teacher leadership to gain insight into how stakeholders, especially those (learners) who can speak authoritatively on their firsthand experiences of what is happening in class, perceive teacher leadership. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe learners' everyday experiences and interpretations of their teacher leadership in order to make recommendations to the stakeholders concerned. I embarked on an explorative-descriptive inquiry. To ensure high-quality research, I adhered to all the necessary criteria for reliable, valid and ethical research. In order to capitalise on both qualitative and quantitative research methods, and to compensate for the shortcomings of both, as well as to enrich the credibility of the study, I opted for a mixed-methods approach. In this study of an Afrikaans governmental high school in Gauteng, I made use of a symbolic interactionistic methodology to understand how learners perceive, understand and interpret their teacher leadership. Complying with ethical and professional considerations regarding research with children (namely access, protection against harm, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality) the study crystallised in two phases. In the first qualitative phase I made use of purposeful snowball sampling methods, and gained rich descriptions from learners and their parents regarding the learners' experiences of and perceptions about their teacher leadership. I used analytical methods based on the Chicago School of Symbolic /nteractionism to generate codes, which was categorised according to the leadership paradigm of personal, interpersonal and professional leadership. In a second phase, the universum of learners and teachers were included in a social survey. Two questionnaires were designed for the learners and teachers respectively. The learner questionnaire contained odd questions on demographic details, as well as hypotheses which were drawn from the codes and categories forthcoming from the first phase. However, from a symbolic interactionistic standing, I was not merely interested in the majority viewpoint. Therefore the learners were once again given the opportunity to expand on their answers qualitatively. The teachers, in turn, were asked why they chose the teaching profession, and had to comment on what they thought the learners would have to say about their own, as well as their colleagues' leadership qualities as teachers. The second-phase narratives were noted until saturation was gained and then concluded and summarised