Archaeology of a language development non governmental organisation : excavating the identity of the English Language Educational Trust.
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Date
2003
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Abstract
Any attempt at understanding the influences that impinge on teacher development in
South Africa is incomplete without an exploration of the role of NGOs, particularly those
alternative development agencies that were conceived in response to apartheid education
and which continued to pursue progressive, contextually relevant interventions in the
transitional democracy. Using the archaeological approach to excavate deep insights into
the behaviour of a language development NGO, this study documents the institutional
memory of the English language Education Trust (ELET). Portraying two decades of its
history (1984 to 2001) through the eyes of key participants in the organisation, the study
traces the multiple influences, internal and extraneous, that have shaped ELET's mutating
identity as it negotiated the challenges of a volatile and unpredictable NGO climate.
The study pursues two reciprocal outcomes. First, it attempts methodological elaboration.
In advocating transdisciplinary research, it borrows from the established traditions of
empowerment and illuminative evaluation, appropriating their key tenets for an
institutional evaluation. Underpinned by the genre of narrative research, the study
expands the lifehistory method as an evaluative tool, providing opportunities for
organisational members to engage in self-reflexive interrogation of the organisation's life
as it negotiated a multiplicity of development challenges. Second, it attempts theoretical
elaboration. It challenges classical organisational theory (which derives from the
structural - functionalist corporatist mode of management theory), as conservative and
inadequate in understanding the organisational culture of an NGO. The study proposes a
post-structuralist mode of discourse analysis as complementary to classical management
theory in organisational analysis.
Conflating theory and method provides incisive conceptual lenses to appraise the
contribution of ELET to language teacher development. The study finds that while ELET
has been complicit in allowing its mission as a counter-hegemonic agency to be
undermined by its submission to normative, coercive and mimetic isomorphism, it
nevertheless demonstrates agency to innovate rather than replicate. It achieves this
despite the cumulative constraining pressures of globalisation, manifest through volatility
in corporate funding, shifting imperatives of bilateral funding agencies, and the fickle
agendas of the fledgling democratic government. The study demonstrates that, given
these unpredictable conditions, NGOs Iike ELET are forced to reinvent themselves to
respond to emerging development opportunities as a hedge against attrition. In this
regard, ELET has benefited from astute management and a vigilant quest for homegrown
intervention programmes as alternatives to imported literacy programmes, all of
which helps it redefine what constitutes emancipatory literacies.
Despite its proven record of accomplishment as a site for alternative teacher
development, the study demonstrates that a competitive higher education sector a hostile
policy environment and the debilitating reporting mechanisms demanded by funders
results in ELET's potential as a site for 'authentic' knowledge production to be devalued.
A further consequence of this marginilisation is that the organisation finds itself
increasingly vulnerable to co-option by the state as a functionary of service delivery,
accounting upwards to funders rather than downwards to beneficiaries of development.
The study argues that the exploitative relationship the NGO endures with other
development constituencies is as much a consequence of the NGO's failure to embrace
an expedient corporate culture as it is the failure of these constituencies to acknowledge
the potential of the NGO. Hence, rather than preserve the antagonistic relationship
between higher education institutes and alternative agencies for knowledge production,
they will each benefit by mutually appropriating the accumulated expertise of the other,
giving substance to the ideal of a community of reason through creative dialectical
evolution. The study concludes with the proposition that one mechanism to operationalise
the notion of a community of reason is community service learning, a partnership
between higher education institutes, corporate funders and development NGOs, a
relationship in which the NGO provides leadership in appropriating disparate energies
towards the cultivation of a socially literate country.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2003.
Keywords
Language and education., Language acquisition., Theses--Education.