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Personal-professional identities: stories of teachers’ lived dilemmatic experiences in the context of school quintiles.

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Date

2020

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Abstract

This study, Personal-professional identities: Stories of teachers’ lived dilemmatic experiences in the context of school quintiles, explored the identities and dilemmatic experiences of five teachers who each represented one of the five school quintiles in the South African public school system. Quintiling is used in the South African educational system to categorise schools based on their poverty ranking. This qualitative study, guided by an interpretive paradigm that employed narrative inquiry, aimed to understand who these teachers were, what personal meanings shaped their professional practices as teachers, and finally, how they could negotiate their professional practices within their different school quintiles. A multiple-method approach for the generation of field texts was employed. These included narrative interviews and art-based methods (photovoice, collage inquiry and poetic inquiry) to respond to the three critical research questions. These field texts were subsequently reconstructed into research texts. The researcher drew on social identity theory, the dilemmatic space conceptual framework, the ethical dilemma decision-making model, and teacher identity theory, to produce stories that reflected the five participants’ subjective experiences. The stories encompassed critical moments of the teachers’ lives in relation to the diverse socio-cultural, historical, economic and political contexts within which they found themselves. These stories were analysed using narrative analysis and analysis of narratives. The analyses were written as storied narratives and vignettes, and attempted to understand the critical moments and experiences of my participants. The teachers’ experiences were found to be the result of socialisation within their families and the communities within which they lived. The study found that various difficulties that were a consequence of the system of school quintiling challenged the teachers professionally, emotionally, mentally and physically. In addition, dominant social identities (race, class, gender, and ethnicity, amongst others) intersected in complex ways to shape the teachers’ personal lives, and what and how they thought and acted as teachers within the context of school quintiling. The study revealed that school quintiling had consequences for the practices of these teachers. However, in undertaking their practice they were able to draw from their reservoir of past and present experiences, beliefs and values to make ethical choices in negotiating their personal-professional lives and dilemmas in the context of school quintiling.

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Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.

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