Primary Investigator: Naydene de Lange; Deputy: Deevia Bhana. Robert Balfour, Thabisile Buthelezi, Claudia Mitchell, Lebo Moletsane, Daisy Pillay, Jean Stuart & Volker Wedekind.

In speaking about the situation in his community as a result of the AIDS pandemic, a young rural teacher in KwaZulu-Natal notes the vulnerability of children and young people – the high rates of orphaning, the levels of stigma, and just the sheer despair of people. The situation that he is describing is such that the term ‘vulnerability’ of children and young people represents an interplay of such issues as orphaning, deep poverty, bereavement, and gender violence, all issues that seldom are experienced in isolation of each other. Indeed, as an example of the interplay between orphaning, gender violence, poverty and HIV and AIDS, a recent UNICEF study from Zimbabwe for example notes that while girls between the ages of 15 and 24 are 4 to 5 times more likely to be HIV positive than boys of the same age, girls who are orphaned are 3 times more likely to be HIV positive that their non-orphaned peers, and that much of their vulnerability is attached to the fact that as females they are required to head up households and at the time support siblings through unprotected transactional sex. The teacher concludes by stating “It’s a challenge. It’s a call to everybody. Nobody has to neglect that call. Everybody has to respond positively to it.”

This teacher's words, which were recorded and are now part of a video documentary about rural teachers and community health care workers addressing HIV and AIDS prevention and care, Our Photos, Our Video, Our Stories (Mak, Mitchell and Stuart, 2005) serve as the backdrop to our project Every Voice Counts. While it is clear that these issues are not just lived out in rural areas, it is also clear that in rural areas which tend to be under-resourced in relation to health, education, and social services more generally, everyone in the community has a role to play, and schools more than any other organization can play a pivotal role in promoting the very community participation and partnerships that can bring about social change. Ironically, the ‘least resourced’ areas of the country in terms of teacher support, are the places where teachers (and the school itself) are in the most critical position to make a difference in the community – particularly, we would argue, when they have the tools and strategies for working together. Far from wishing to romanticize rurality and the myth of close-knit communities, the overall study seeks to explore and lay bare what geographic location and cultural context can mean in relation to addressing the vulnerabilities of children and young people - and where literally every voice counts.

Our Research Niche Area “Teacher development in rural communities in the age of AIDS” takes as its broad goal the notion of drawing together several research areas or nodes which ‘converge’ on teacher development in rural education in the age of AIDS. Through a dual focus on an ‘asset-based’ approach and on participatory methodologies, we have identified five study areas within teaching and learning that we regard as critical if schools are to make a difference in the lives of children and young people in rural areas in the context of HIV and AIDS.

Study Area One: Reflexive methodologies in studying teachers’ lives (Claudia Mitchell and Daisy Pillay).
At the centre of this project we would argue, is the specific study of teachers’ lives, and the use of reflexive methodologies which contribute to teachers acquiring a greater awareness of themselves as assets. Biographical and autobiographical methods such as self-study and auto-ethnography are already underway in the Faculty (Mitchell and Weber, 2005; Pithouse, 2005, 2006; Stuart, 2006; Grossi, 2006), along with oral histories and life-histories. Research and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are significant challenges faced by teachers in rural areas, and that teachers respond in very different ways to these challenges. For women teachers, one of the challenges can mean commuting long distances and living outside the community. For those actually living in rural areas, both men and women, issues of exclusion and ostracisation can be critical. Far from attempting to homogenize and narrow the field, we need to expand our understanding of teachers’ work in rural areas, and to deepen an understanding of schools as ‘community centres’ within rural communities. Most particularly, though, we think it is critical to ensure that teachers’ voices in terms of the impact of HIV and AIDS on their own lives are not ignored. We know from the work carried out by the HSRC on the impact of HIV and AIDS on educators (HSRC, 2005) that there is a need to build in a recognition of the ways that HIV and AIDS is having an effect on teachers’ everyday lives – ranging from dealing with bereavement and loss in the school, through to dealing with bereavement and loss in their own lives.

Study Area Two: School leadership and management (Lebo Moletsane and Thabisile Buthelezi).
School leadership, as has been well established in the effective school literature around the world is a critical feature of quality schooling. Not surprisingly when South Africa embarked on the transformation of its school system after the 1994 elections, it turned first to education management and the human resources sector as the key entry point to change. An every voice counts framework (at least implicitly) was at the heart of the South African Schools Act (SASA) which laid the foundation for decentralization and local governances through school governing bodies, youth participation through the Representative Council of Learners, school management teams (as opposed to schools being led solely by principals) and strong recommendations around training for principals that would prepare them for these new leadership roles (Beckman, Foster and Smith, 1997; Smith, Sparkes and Thurlow, 2001). Clearly however education management and governance remains a challenge, particularly in rural schools as Gordon (1999) and many others since have pointed out. What has become apparent though in the emerging literature on school change is that leadership can be manifested in a variety of ways, both formally and informally. Within an asset-based framework, one might look at how different types of leadership emerge, and how leaders, regardless of whether they are working formally or informally take account of the school and community assets. The studies within this Study Area will explore school leadership through an asset-based ‘lens’. Critical questions revolve around the overall effectiveness of ‘whole school development’: what are some examples of effective leadership within an informal context? How does gender come into play in terms of overall effectiveness? How does leadership play out in relation to taking into account the community and in particular community support for vulnerable children?

Study Area Three: Voices of young people (Claudia Mitchell).
Developing a coherent and relevant approach to interacting with children and young people in rural areas is critical. In rural areas where ‘every voice counts’ it is a critical that schools see young people as allies in developing a future for communities. Teachers may not have had exposure to human rights frameworks which support the rights of children, and may not realize how significant the voices of youth could be in combating violence in and around schools, in participating in classroom management (as an alternative to corporal punishment for example) and so on. Young people, we know, are often disillusioned, see little place for themselves in rural areas, and it is not uncommon for them to migrate to cities. Teachers and other adults in the community sometimes ‘demonize’ young people, as we saw in a recent health study where teachers and community health care workers were asked to visually respond to ‘challenges and solutions in addressing HIV and AIDS’ (Mitchell et al, 2005). How teachers can engage young people themselves as knowledge producers in addressing HIV and AIDS prevention, education and care is a key question in testing out asset-based approaches in schools. An important finding from our previous work in supporting teachers to work with young people is the significance of using media, arts-based and other participatory approaches to addressing HIV and AIDS (Mitchell et al, in press; Moletsane et al, 2005; Mitchell et al, 2006). Approaches to addressing youth participation vary from those which have a strong media base such as photography and video and including indigenous media, to those which draw on other arts-based and other participatory approaches such as drama and role play, writing, the uses of literature to explore gender and sexuality, etc. However, while participatory methodologies seem to be ideal for reaching young people, and indeed can contribute to a youth-empowerment model of education, teachers need a great deal of support in this work if they are to move from a transmission model of teaching to a more learner-centred approach. At the same time, however, the idea that teachers themselves can gain valuable skills-building in such areas as photography and poster production, film-making, IT and new media suggests that ‘what is good for young people is also good for teachers?’(Mitchell, Kusner and Charbonneau-Gowdy, 2004). In particular this approach responds to the critical issue of intergenerationality in addressing HIV and AIDS.

Study Area Four: Teachers and communities addressing gender violence (Naydene de Lange, Claudia Mitchell, and Deevia Bhana).
Addressing gender violence in rural schools remains a critical area of concern, as the recent South African Human Rights report (2006) points out. Male teachers continue to be perpetrators of violence, male students, as a recent study by Sathiparsad points out, continue to see it as their right and ‘their culture’ to hit their girlfriends and to engage in coercive sex (Sathiparsad, 2006). Even very young boys in primary schools, as Bhana points out (in press) are already enculturated in terms of expressing power through sexual violence. Girls and young women end up leaving school because of pregnancy and continue to be at the highest risk biologically and socially for becoming infected with HIV. A gap in much of the literature is in the area of counselling and it here that the work on asset-building seems crucial critical (De Lange, 2006). As we have seen in our recent work in a rural district, young people are asking what life after abuse looks like, a question which implies a lack of understanding of care and counseling, and a lack of opportunity for these voices to be counted or heard. Beyond this, though, what has also become obvious in some of our work with young people is that they themselves are noting the absence of a discourse for discussing gender violence, and for addressing masculinities and femininities amongst the community and in their own homes. As we have found in our recent work in rural settings where we used visual methodologies, there is clearly no one answer except to begin to see it a cross-cutting issue that runs beyond the school and into the community, and to see the community itself as an asset in creating safe schools and safe communities in terms of the response of the school, the community, parents and so on.

Study Area Five: Partnerships and pedagogies in preparing new teachers (Robert Balfour and Volker Wedekind).
Increasingly there is a recognition that a key dimension of preparing new teachers is the induction in schools. This takes place either as part of formal programmes (teaching practice and learnership) or in the first years of work. Attracting teachers to and retaining teachers in rural schools is significantly dependent on the induction process, and this requires universities and schools to work in partnership – to see each other as assets. Obviously, these are very challenging demands, and work that specifically responds to this new positioning of teachers and faculties of education, particularly in the context of HIV and AIDS and in rural areas is lacking although within the North American literature on teacher education, a focus on partnerships, at least in urban settings has been a burgeoning field of study for more than a decade (Barnhart, et al, 1995; Catelli, 1995; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Ewart and Straw, 2004; Lenski and Black, 2004; Rolheiser, 2005; Russell, McPherson and Martin, 2001; Zimpher and Howey, 2005). Beyond the obvious significance of the actual induction process though is the pedagogical preparation. Two curricular areas, numeracy and literacy pose particular challenges, numeracy remains as a legacy of apartheid education and which is only now being addressed through the new mathematical literacy curriculum, and school literacies, particularly in the context of home language (isiZulu) and school language (English). Additionally though there are key areas related to the politics of language education and the issue of new literacies (Gee, 1999; 2004). Working with and studying the participation of new teachers to take on these curricular areas, and in the context of rural settings where drop out rates diminish possibilities for future employment, and which in turn exacerbate levels of poverty and stability more generally is an under-studied area, particularly in the context of the overall focus of this project which is to understand and improve the lives of vulnerable children in the context of AIDS.

Organized around these five nodes the RNA has the following research objectives:

1.To deepen an understanding of the barriers to teacher empowerment and teacher engagement in the fight against AIDS, as well as an understanding of the ways in which teachers can make a difference in rural communities (particularly in relation to orphan care and bereavement).

2.To frame (and study) research related to youth, sexuality and HIV and AIDS (including masculinities and gender violence) within a paradigm that locates teachers, health care workers and other community members as youth workers, drawing on media, the creative arts and other youth-focused approaches.

3.To reposition the study of school leadership and whole school management in rural areas to include community action.

4.To position the Faculty of Education of UKZN to be an international hub in the study of teacher development and rural education in the age of AIDS through developing and expanding international partnerships with donors and through institutional affiliations with other national and international centres.