Emergent teacher leadership : a case study of three teacher leaders in a semi-urban primary school.

Abstract

In the past apartheid era, the South African education system was dominated by hierarchical structures. Top-down leadership in schools reflected a singular view of leadership. The principal’s position of power and authority had to be maintained. When democracy prevailed post 1994, the task team report on Education Management and Development (1996) called for a move towards a more participatory and democratic management style in school. The purpose of this study was to describe how teacher leadership was enacted by three post-level one educators in a semi-urban primary school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and to investigate factors that enhanced and hindered this enactment. The research was located within the interpretive paradigm and was qualitative in nature. I adopted a case study approach and tracked three teacher leaders in a school in which I taught. This study was conducted within a theoretical framework of distributed leadership. Data were collected over two semesters, from October 2008 to March 2009. Data collection methods included school observation, questionnaires, a focus group interview, participant self reflective journaling, participant observation and individual interviews. Data analysis was mainly qualitative using thematic content analysis but data were also analyzed quantitatively where questionnaires were entered into the programme called the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).