Teacher Exclusion in Post-apartheid Schools: On Being Competently (Un)Qualified to Teach

Abstract

Commonly, debates on educational inclusion/exclusion in South Africa are centred on learner and student experiences. While current calls for decolonisation and decoloniality have encompassed demands for broader racial representation among academics in higher education, the particular solitary and isolationary experiences of minority group teachers have slipped below the radar, and remain largely unnoticed, and hence, unrecorded. The encounters and confrontations of minority group teachers embody a specific complexity which brings into disrepute professional competence because of racial identity. In other words, minority group teachers are deemed as less competent on the basis of their disconnection from the majority group teachers. This means that while a teacher might have a qualification to teach, he or she is not qualified to teach because of who he or she is. In this regard, the interest and concern of this chapter is threefold. What are the implications for conceptions of social justice, if teachers experience pedagogical undermining and estrangement as practices of exclusion? Secondly, how might innovative career counselling assist in cultivating pedagogies and ways of being that move towards openness and inclusion? And thirdly, how can career innovation be extended beyond normative parameters of advancement, and instead be reconceived as an enactment of social justice? Our argument is in defence of teacher inclusion: teachers are included when they are recognised for the responsible acts they perform in expediting student learning. In our case, responsibility is conceptually and pragmatically linked to cultivating decoloniality, evoking student potentialities, and acting responsibly and ethically.