A Study On South African Teacher Education In The Background Of Social Transformation

The aboriginal people in South Africa have always been in a tribal education before the arrival of European colonists. Since the Dutchman invasion in1652, it has not badly destroyed the South African socio-economic structure, but also changed indigenous traditional education system. Due to the different social classes, the early European immigrants have different opinions on Education, one of which is Boer (Boer is Dutch, German and French's descendants in South Africa) because they mainly engaged in scattered, large-scale, extensive ranch and farm work by slaves so as not to emphasize on education, even if the establishment of primary schools, it is mostly limited to reading the Bible and arithmetic. However, the British immigrants continue to have their own way of life when they occupied the Cape Town in1806.What's more, they keep in contact with other parts of the world in the economy, culture, science and technology, and also pay more attention to the education for setting up elementary and secondary schools, colleges and vocational schools. After the establishment of South African Union in1910, it has completely inherited the British education system, and it has also been the implementation of the apartheid policies for a long time. Based on the idea of different races have the different educational right. South Africa established four different teacher education system which includ Black African, White, Indian and Colored people in accordance with the race, geography and ideology respectively. In the1950s, South Africa has founded different college of teacher education for the different races. In the1960s, individual university began to train teachers for the specific racial groups. To the seventies and eighties of the20th century, teacher education in South Africa has formed a so-called open training pattern in the strict racial boundaries which teachers of all races can be cultured in the teacher education colleges and universities that corresponds with their identity, to obtain teaching qualifications teachers can have the opportunity to teach in the separation of primary and secondary schools. At the beginning of the1990s, University is responsible for cultivating of secondary school teachers and Education College is responsible for training of primary school teachers. This system not only restrained the exchanges and cooperation between the universities and colleges, but also hindered the rational flow of teacher education resources.In1994, the birth of democratic South Africa signs an end to apartheid system which is continuous for342years and open a new era to teacher education. In order to meet the needs of state reconstruction, new government takes teacher education as an important way to develop human resources, and focus on the reform of teacher education policy. For cultivating new teacher in the idea of democracy, faire, justice and human rights, and redressing teacher they have ever suffered from unequal education, new government threw out a series of laws and policies and integrated the teacher education institutions. Furthermore, the content of teacher education is also innovated and professional management organizations are established. In the process of practice, South Africa has developed the relevant standards from the normal school students'admission to the accreditation of inductive teachers'qualification, which includes the enrollment standards of senior school graduates, non-normal university graduates, unqualified teacher based on REQV13(Relative Education Qualification Value, REQV); the criteria of teacher education curriculum, teaching competency, teaching practice contents, teaching practice agencies, practice supervisors, teachers'educational qualifications and language skills, etc...All these strategies effectively promote the orderly development of the teacher education in South Africa.According to the standard system of teacher education, a variety of training models were used by teacher education institutions including the Concurrent Model, Consecutive Model and Mixed Model. First of all, Concurrent Model refers to students study academic curriculum when they also learn teacher education curriculum at the same time. Typical degree is the Bachelor of Education (BEd) which is short for "4+0" model Besides, a specific form of organization is different owing to different school type. In Technology University, the academic curriculum is implemented at subject knowledge college, but the teacher education curriculum is organized by teacher education college. However, the Comprehensive universities adopt another model in which both the academic and teacher education curriculum is organized by teacher education college. Second, trainee teachers following the Consecutive Model usually complete a first degree, followed by a one-year teacher education curriculum, including an appropriate practical component. It refers to the PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate of Education, PGCE,120credits), which is short for "3+1" or "4+1" model. In a word. Technology Universities emphasize on training the subject teacher of primary school (Grades4～6), and Comprehensive Universities cultivate teachers in all periods of primary and secondary school. Third, Mixed Model has combined with characteristics of Concurrent Model, Consecutive Model. It is divided into two types:model of getting the qualified teachers identity and model of upgrading teachers'qualification. The former refers to NPDE (National Professional Diploma in Education, NPDE) and ACE (Advanced Certificate in Education, ACE), which is short for "3+0","2～6+0"and "1/2+0".The latter includes the BEd Hons ("3+1+1/2" or "4+1/2"), Master of Education ("5/6+2" or "5/6+1/2"), Doctorate in Education or Doctor of Philosophy ("5/6+2+2-4" or "5/6+1/2+2").In order to ensure the quality of different teacher education models. South Africa takes greatly notice of the construction of quality assurance system, and it makes the decisions of quality assurance that changes from monitoring-based university and peers to involving self-evaluation, professional agencies evaluation and government supervision. Therefore, South Africa has found a number of the quality assurance agencies such as the SAQA (South African Qualifications Authority, SAQA). HEQC (Higher Education Quality Committee, HEQC), SACE (South African Council of Educators, SACE), SETA (Sector Education Training Authority, SETA), and South African Democratic Teachers' Union etc...Meanwhile, South Africa has established the integrated of quality assurance system which includes institutional audits, accreditation of teacher education curriculum, national reviews of teacher education curriculum, accreditation of teachers' identity and teacher professional development and so on. In addition, South Africa has also developed the criteria of institutional audits, curriculum accreditation, curriculum review, teachers' qualification certification, etc...It is worth mentioning that institutional audits will not be aimed at reviewing universities own itself, but rather to assess the effectiveness of the institutions to develop the mechanisms of quality assurance. And curriculum accreditation is the premise of teacher education institutions to develop new teacher education program. To ensure effectiveness of audit, accreditation and review, the quality assurance agencies of teacher education must be registered in SAQA. To enhance the teachers' quality, a new Continuing Professional Teacher Development system is provided teacher with clear guidance about which Professional Development (PD) activities will contribute to their professional growth, etc.Teacher education reform in South Africa during the social transition period has explored a "law preferential, government-led, university-centered, all parties involved" working mechanism. Nowadays, it has its own feature in teacher education standards system, quality assurance policy, training model, student financial aid scheme and teacher professional development and son on. But there are still existences of many problems:the teacher education policy is so ideal that its impact is not effective. It is a haste to merge teacher education institution, some of which is lack of depth integration. Some education colleges with a long history did not be reserved so as to lose a lot of high-quality teacher education resources. Quality assurances mainly rely on government monitoring less consideration individual differences. Moreover, as a developing country, South Africa did not have enough capital to invest teacher education, etc...In order to avoid the negative effects of teacher education reform, and improve it's the effectiveness and pertinence of countermeasures, South Africa will take these strategies in the future:to suit the international teachers'development tendency based on the concept of professional teacher development, to alleviate the contradiction between supply and demand of teachers by the aid of diversity of teacher training path, to respond to the needs of high-quality teachers by the developmental models of high-level teachers'qualification, to regulate teachers' training activities by normalized teacher training system, to promote the balanced development of teacher education by the difference-oriented mechanism of funds investment.