Untying the knots of dual pedagogical interfacing of teachers’ exertion in a full service school

Abstract

The dawn of democracy in 1994 in South Africa addressed the agonising and controversial education of the apartheid era by creating a single regulatory body to deal with state schools. However, transferred incongruences and complexities have directly affected management and control at government schools by creating a picture-perfect teaching and learning model. There has been an understandable absence of valuing learning differences and diversity; this valuing needs to be uniformly aligned to human rights, social justice and equity issues, as enshrined in the Constitution of South Africa. In this ethnographic study, knots are untangled to reveal the instructional practices of teachers working in a full service school (FSS). The balancing act of simultaneously schooling mainstream learners and learners experiencing intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to learning is interrogated. In this interpretative ethnographic topological approach, the portrayal of untying the taut knots (a derivative from Wittgenstein’s
view) is unravelled in the capacities of teachers at Lighthouse Full Service School1 . The depiction of their multidimensional exertion is presented to highlight the encumbrances that teachers at FSSs experience. Reconfiguring the work of teachers at FSSs will create opportunities for further research in teaching and learning.