Teacher’s voice : a basis for improving curriculum literacy in the teaching of English in the North West Province of South Africa

D.Phil. (Curriculum Studies)The three-year long study (2008-2010) highlights the conceptual and practical challenges in providing professional teacher development that is research-driven. It aimed to develop teachers‟ understanding of how they could use their individual interpretation and translation of the concepts and underlying principles of the content they were teaching as a resource or foundation for their own professional development. The study involved three schools in the North West province of South Africa. It investigated a research approach that was used with English First Additional language (EFAL) teachers (N=9) to initiate a self-driven professional development model. The study adopted a participatory action research (PAR) approach to elicit the teachers‟ voices about their teaching and experience of the research process. Classroom observations, stimulated recall discussions and focus groups were employed. While teachers were interested in the research process they still indicated difficulties in engaging in a self-reflective process that required them to problematise their taken-for-granted professional beliefs and practices. The finding amongst others is that teachers could not refer directly to the theories on additional bilingualism that ought to have informed their teaching unless researchers engaged them in deliberations that were not self-sacrificing or professionally threatening. For them to be willing to reveal tacit beliefs and values and expose themselves in a process of self-explanation requires „empathetic neutrality‟ from researchers. Consequently, to understand how teachers experience and understand their teaching the study had to adopt a broader view of competence that was not restricted to their practice. The argument in the study is that the type of competence that would be consistent with the logic of the Revsed National Curriculum Statement (RNCS) is an integrated/complex model of competence, underpinned by excellence and rational decision-making and based on moral and ethical values The school-based study provided teachers with a platform in which their voices and practices witnessed were meaningful resources for their professional development. It highlights a strategy that may be useful for promoting self-initiated professional development