Leading for change in the schools apartheid forgot

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The ongoing struggle for educational change after apartheid: Shadows of history, elusive futures

Abstract

For 18 months (January 2024-June 2025) I was immersed in leading the turnaround of a struggling high school in a working-class community that delivered the worst academic results (2023) in the Western Cape province of South Africa. As the external, turnaround specialist from outside the school, I had to balance two delicate roles: that of a social scientist (how to understand the change problem at hand) and that of a change agent (how to make change happen). In the course of the intensive engagement, I was guided by two key questions, among others. First, how does the (forgotten) history of the school explain the crisis of the present? Second, why was it so difficult to persuade some education stakeholders (though not the students) that different futures could be imagined for young people from the violent, unstable and unequal contexts in which they live and learn? To this end, the methodology deployed can be described as one of sustained immersion (18 months) in the life of the school as both observer and change agent during which I composed regular ethnographic accounts of each school day through observations, interviews, workshop engagements with small and large groups of teachers, individual deliberation sessions with the principal, systematic reflections on school events with the ‘senior management team’ of the school, informal meetings with parents, and teaching selected (science) lessons in different grades. The data analysis process generated seven qualitative themes of interest (context, classrooms, crisis, culture, connection, change and challenge) around which a grounded theory of working-class education has been developed. Four significant findings emerge from these narrative accounts of the change process at the school. One, that the failure to account for the history of the school (context, broadly defined) in the effort to reform academic achievements and culture breakdown made both tasks very difficult, which realization led to a major shift in the turnaround strategy after three months of involvement. Two, that strongly held perceptions of the students as poorly behaved working class with limited social and academic possibilities made it very difficult to imagine productive and fulfilling futures for them. Three, that without the exceptional leadership of the principal and her leadership team, the dramatic changes at the school would not have been possible or likely to be sustained. And four, that there is a striking paucity of theory of working class education in highly unstable and unequal environs that could explain more hopeful futures; this study offers some direction for a new theory of education under extreme conditions (violence, inequality, broken homes, hunger, and gangsterism) which does not exist in the extant literature, past and present (Willis 1977; Naicker 2024).

Author

• Jonathan David Jansen, Stellenbosch University