Cycles of curriculum reform and policy concerning professional development have been implemented in South Africa over the past 20 years. The cycles, while initially veering towards proscriptive guidelines, have now turned to tighter regulation in terms of prescribed input. Since 2007 a tightly specified and framed curriculum is in use and teaching is monitored with systemic type tests. Professional teacher education is the task of higher education institutions, but is increasingly monitored and even closely regulated by the department of basic education. The South African education system is under severe strain. We have high attrition rates in our schools; we generally perform at extremely low levels in international comparative assessments; we experience large numbers of teachers who leave the profession; and large numbers of students entering initial teacher education programmes with poor literacy, numeracy, and life skills. One challenge for initial teacher preparation is to provide opportunities for enabling agency for students from socio-economic contexts where information era thinking and skills currently have little application. The Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (Department of Basic Education, SA, 2011) describe teaching as a complex endeavour that requires integration of pedagogical, practical, fundamental and situational skills and knowledge. This description is in stark contrast with the expectation that teachers must adhere to a highly prescribed curriculum. In addition, the requirements stipulated in policy are general and teacher educators at different universities prioritise and enact these requirements in different ways. For example, the basic minimum requirement that initial teacher education should provide teachers with strong subject knowledge, is enacted by some universities as formal mathematics at second year level in a Baccalaureate of Science level, and by others as mathematics integrated with pedagogy and taught by education faculty. Empirical work is in progress to survey the interpretation and specification of prescribed minimum requirements for initial mathematics teacher education across a sample of South African teacher education institutions. Our paper will report on how teacher educators at participating institutions view their own agency in relation to their programmes, and how they rate the need to enable agency in their students.

Department of Basic Education, SA, 2011