Indian teachers and African pupils in a desegregating school in Durban : a case of turning the other into the same?

Abstract

This study investigates the processes through which Indian teachers constitute themselves in relation to the African pupil. The research was undertaken in an historically Indian state secondary school in Durban. The school's pupil population was dominantly Indian though 10 % of the pupil body was African. This report shows that teachers' perceptions about the African pupil are based upon perceived differences and result in subtle practices of exclusion. The teachers in this study are able to legitimate their positions through different processes and discursive practices. Their own positions become dominant while the discourse that African pupils present becomes marginalised. Teachers are able to position a modernist western discourse as the appropriate form of thinking. In this manner the African pupil is constructed as the Other because she or he is different from the sameness that inheres in schools that were until recently, racially exclusive. Having constructed the African pupil as the Other teachers attempt to subsume the otherness in the name of progress. Teachers attempt to create sameness and they react positively when they see more of the Same in the Other. This study shows that African pupils are not consciously treated unfairly by teachers in their classroom interaction. Teachers declared their open rejection of Apartheid education and welcomed the process of desegregation as part of the dismantling of a racially exclusive education system. The research report shows, however, that the construction of the African pupil as the Other works to suppress them. The African pupil is expected to conform to the ethos of traditionally Indian schools and to the little changed expectations of Indian teachers. The practices and the processes that teachers engage in reveal the paradoxical nature of the teaching process. V .. A postmodern analysis informs the research project. This form of thinking offers a useful explanation of dominating tendencies and the contradictions as they occurred in the school undergoing desegregation. Case study research was employed over a period of nine months. I am a teacher in the school under study and was thus, able to gain easy access to data. However, the fact that I was a known observer and a permanent member of the teaching staff meant that teachers were apprehensive about recording sensitive details of the interviews.