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Mentoring is intended to guide student teachers towards pedagogical decision-making within the complexity of the classroom. In this article we focus on the mathematics mentoring practices of 1 primary school teacher at a university-affiliated teaching school in Johannesburg. The teacher had many years of experience and had undergone some development as a mentor over a period of 5 years. With the research reported on here, we aimed at gaining insight into how the teacher conceptualised her mentoring encounters with student teachers and how this aligned with her mentoring practices and processes. Using a qualitative case study design and multiple methods of data collection, the findings point to the mentor teacher making substantial progress towards functioning as an expert teacher. However, the data confirmed a fluctuation in enactment of mentoring between experienced and expert teacher, in both generalised and subject-specific contexts. The implications of the findings are relevant for the thousands of school teachers who mentor student teachers and novice teachers, particularly in primary schools where teachers are often generalists and not subject specialists. The findings could also inform guidelines and policy briefs for training by higher education institutions, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the South African Council of Educators in order to support the development of expert mentor teachers.

Background: Studies in South Africa show a high prevalence of male caregiver absence in the lives of children under the age of 9 years. In this respect, foundation phase teachers are well positioned to provide input and shed light on how schools can contribute towards improving male caregiver involvement in their children’s early education. Aim: This study aimed to explore foundation phase teachers’ views of the involvement of male caregivers in the education and development of young children. Setting: The paper reports on the qualitative phase of a mixed methods study conducted in three township schools near Johannesburg. Methods: Focus group interviews involving a sample of 17 foundation phase teachers were conducted in three schools. An iterative coding process within a generic qualitative data analysis approach was carried out to articulate overarching ideas and themes. Results: The results highlight how teachers’ taken-for-granted gendered assumptions about the roles of females and males in the education and development of foundation phase children and about the children’s care arrangements influence how they communicate with parents, unconsciously alienating male caregivers. Conclusion: Although teachers had not considered the role of male caregivers in the early years of children’s education, they acknowledged that such an undertaking would be beneficial to the learners and the school. Therefore, the authors argue for training aimed at capacitating foundation phase teachers with the essential competencies necessary to galvanise and increase meaningful involvement of male caregivers in the education of learners in pre-service and in-service teacher professional development.

In this paper, the authors report on the process of designing and implementing an academic support programme using peer tutors at a newly established rural university. The need for support for the development of first-year preservice student teachers' English language academic proficiency motivated the programme. In educational action research mode, the authors tracked changes and improvements to the programme and its implementation over a four-year period. Data in the form of questionnaires, interviews, video recorded lessons, and observations were generated in four cycles to inform reflections and new actions. The data were analysed using procedures associated with content analysis, and interpreted through the lens of cultural historical activity theory. The results show that competing tensions and a lack of focus on a shared object initially led to a delay in building shared knowledge in the beginning of the project. The authors interpret the results from a CHAT perspective and show the value of these tensions for identifying levers of change in a developmental process in the project. In this respect, the missteps of the researchers led to multiple iterations of reflection and action in order to arrive at a shared object, while defining the legitimacy of mediating tools, organisation of division of labour, and effective rules in a higher education programme.

In this article, we report on a study of two South African primary school teacher education cohorts undertaken to investigate and understand their readiness to succeed in higher education and to plan support accordingly. Using the methodology of portraiture, we generated data from a combination of student questionnaires and examination results. Qualitative content analysis enabled the construction of six personas and three main themes. The portraits helped with an understanding of the complexity of the themes, in particular with how an identification of both the malleable and non-malleable elements affecting students' lives could inform and shape interventions for successful transition into university. More specifically, the dominance of particular characteristics in the personas provided information about which student groups required the most psychosocial and academic support and where it was required. The portraits also helped us to gauge the value of existing first-year initiatives, such as the educational excursion, for promoting student enculturation and in overcoming their initial anxieties and preconceptions. We argue for more nuanced information about students to inform a multi-pronged approach to student support that may extend much longer than teacher educators anticipate.

In 2011 the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa was promulgated. This framework proposes the establishment of teaching schools to strengthen pre-service teacher education. This study arises from this initiative. A generic qualitative study was undertaken to explore the views of research participants from selected teacher education institutions and schools in South Africa on the potential of teaching schools to enable student teacher learning for the teaching profession. The key findings are that teaching schools can potentially make a distinctive contribution towards enabling student teacher learning for the teaching profession through student teachers experiencing good teaching in a model environment and through coordinating experiences in coursework and at the school. The discussion of the findings points to the distinctive potentialities of teaching schools for strengthening teacher education. The notion of hybridity and third space is i...

The article reports on the University of Johannesburg’s efforts at offering a practice-based teacher education program in partnership with a university-affiliated school (a ‘teaching school’) with a view to developing inquiry-oriented novice teachers. The research aimed at exploring what it takes to develop a ‘learningplace’ (Conway, Murphy and Rutherford 2014) conducive to student teachers’ development of professional practice knowledge and the role of mentoring in this regard. A two-phase process of generating data was used. In the first phase the published research on the university-affiliated school was analyzed, using qualitative content analysis to look for patterns across the historical unfolding of the findings of these papers. In phase two a questionnaire was administered involving final year student teachers in the teacher education program. The research shows that a teaching school, if integrated into the program design and delivery, provides a rich practice learning site for student teachers. In addition, mentoring in cognitive apprenticeship mode could indeed be a powerful contributor to student teachers’ professional development. However, the overall programme design is decisive. The preparation of teachers with strong professional practice knowledge requires attention to four interrelated aspects of program design, namely program identity, organizational structures, curriculum and teacher education pedagogy. Addressing these aspects in an integrated manner would be difficult without working closely with one or more partnership schools.

There is an abundance of research in support of interdisciplinary approaches to teaching Environmental Education (EE). Research has also supported the use of a holistic and systemic approach to the teaching and learning of environmental content. Curriculum planning in South Africa has followed a cross curricular approach to teaching Environmental Education whereby EE is infused across all Learning Areas in the Senior Phase. This is done with an assumption that, irrespective of their fields of speciality, teachers have been equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to teach Environmental Education effectively. This article explores educator competencies in teaching EE in accordance with the expectations outlined in the National Curriculum Statement. A quantitative study was undertaken to determine the nature of knowledge, skills and attitudes that teachers are currently equipped with to be able to teach EE holistically and systemically. The findings of this investigation emphasise the need t...

This study emanated from the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa. This Framework proposes that teaching schools should be established in the country to improve the teaching practicum component of pre-service teacher education. A generic qualitative study was undertaken to explore the affordances of a teaching school to enable student teacher learning for the teaching profession. The overarching finding of the study is that a teaching school holds numerous affordances for enabling meaningful student teacher learning for the teaching profession. However, the full affordances of a teaching school will not be realised if a teaching school is viewed merely as a practicum site. Foregrounding a laboratory view of practice work in a teaching school could enable true research-oriented teacher education. A teaching school as a teacher education laboratory would imply a deliberate inclusion of cognitive apprenticeship and an inquiry orientation to learning in the schoo