Students primed to the nth degree
Teachers from Nelson Mandela university are trained for the diversity in our classrooms
With the closing of teacher colleges in the late 1990s and their incorporation into universities, the bachelor of education qualification became the most sought-after option for initial teacher education.
The BEd is a four-year degree, which prepares students with disciplinary, pedagogical and practical knowledge to become beginner teachers.
This qualification has become more important because we are faced with an ageing and underqualified teaching force.
When we prepare teachers, we also need to prepare them in subjects that are needed in the country. This means preparing teachers in scarce subjects such as mathematics, science and languages, as well as in the appropriate phases, such as the foundation and the intermediate phases. Universities are thus the main producers of teachers. However, their efforts are not co-ordinated because they compete for students.
The department of basic education introduced the Funza Lushaka bursary scheme in 2007 to encourage students to become teachers and to promote them. This bursary enables students to complete a full qualification in teaching in an area of national priority.
Its uptake has gain momentum over the years. At the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), our BEd first-year intake increased from 324 students in 2013 to 453 last year.
Our university has a long history of preparing teachers and our emphasis is on the student teacher, as well as the child. We have centred our qualification on the kind of teacher we would like to see in the broader schooling system and beyond.
The child is therefore at the centre of our teacher education programmes. We recognise that the classroom is a factious place because of the widely differing realities of the learners, teachers and community.
We thus challenge our students to be brave, creative, determined, compassionate and passionate.
The programme is designed to allow students intellectual independence and to think critically by developing their research competence as a foundation for postgraduate studies in the field of education.
Our vision is to produce a dynamic community of teachers, leaders and scholars in education committed to creating a vibrant, socially just and democratic society.
It is on this mission that we, as a faculty, base our work so that we can produce students who possess these attributes. Thus teachers who graduate from NMMU will possess dispositions, values and attitudes that separate them from the rest.
In the BEd programme, we offer the foundation phase (grades R to three); intermediate phase (grades four to six); and further education ing phase, we also provide students with an opportunity to specialise in one of two streams — commerce or science.
We prepare our students to have a good command of their content knowledge and to know the pupil and the learning environment so that they can teach effectively. But we also ensure that our students are competent in subject matter knowledge beyond the prescribed school curriculum.
Our BEd also exposes our students to diverse school-based learning opportunities to experience practical teaching in multilingual contexts. The general aim is to introduce our students to teaching and its routines under the supervision of a school-based teacher (mentor) and a lecturer.