Rethinking quality in Teacher Education in South Africa This paper is based on a national teacher education research project in South Africa. The project aims to provide an informed understanding of the complexity of teacher education, determine the environment for quality learning, teaching and research and establish strengths and shortcomings in the current provision framework. Good practice strategies will be posited in an attempt to reconceptualise and reconstruct the notion of quality in teacher education. The quality imperative is viewed against the current crisis in the sector, the complexity of the teacher education landscape, the skills, knowledge and values that teachers need and the notions of good practice among the providers. The project has strategic importance since teachers constitute the most important component of the education enterprise and play a critical role in the social, political and economic development and transformation of society. In South Africa, teachers are considered key agents for achieving the post-apartheid transformation and development agenda are also expected to play a lead role in inculcating democratic ideals, promoting human dignity, equality and social justice. Given the acute skills shortage being experienced in the country, teachers are naturally expected to help expedite the process of human capital formation. Overall, teachers are at the core of improving the well being of the South African society. Are South African teachers adequately prepared to play these critical roles or are they mere lofty ideals stuck in the paradigm of political symbolism of the African nationalist state? It is within this scenario that the paper questions the quality of teaching and learning in the sector, the knowledge (content/pedagogical), understanding and skills of the graduates, and the nature and levels of the competence of the graduates. There are different notions of quality as well as the challenges in teacher education and the ways in which the different stakeholders attempt to ensure quality or meet those challenges has to be established. The quality of the intake as well as the quality of the input has an influence on the quality of the graduates. What matters most is not the student-lecturer ratio, or notional hours for programmes, but rather how much and how well those students have learned. From a Vygotskian social constructivist perspective, knowledge is thought to develop internally (intrinsic and influenced by prior knowledge) but in a process driven by social interaction with the outside world (extrinsic and input by provider). It includes the relations between the ways in which students approach their study, the quality of the learning outcome, their previous experiences of learning and the context in which the learning occurs. Critical questions that the paper will address are: Do providers conceive of teacher training as a quantitative increase in content knowledge concomitant with memorising and a surface approach to learning or is there foregrounding of cognition, meaning construction and an interpretive process aimed at understanding the African reality? Has the history of poor teacher training approaches among lecturers together with the poor quality of the intake led to a lecturer-focused information transformation model as opposed to a student-focused conceptual change model? How is knowledge and skills in teacher education affected by the tension around content versus skills, academic versus practical, college of education versus university training ‘mentalities’ and the scholarship of teaching versus the scholarship of research. How reliable are teacher effectiveness approaches that are based on the assumptions that outputs can be improved through correct calibration of the inputs?

Interviews Questionnaires Observations

Quality indicators for teacher education and good practice strategies for quality training.