“Who do you think they are?” Troubling how mental conceptions of TVET lecturers shape lecturer support interventions : The case of the Lecturer Support System in South Africa

Abstract

Underpinning any intervention to develop, support or capacitate lecturers in the TVET system sits a tacit idea of who TVET lecturers are, as well as an ‘ideal imagined TVET lecturer’ towards which change initiatives strive. This case study examines one lecturer development intervention, the Lecturer Support System (LSS): how it has changed since it was first established, and how it relates to other intended interventions (e.g., the National Open Learning System). It does this through the lens of the ‘imagined ideal TVET lecturer’, i.e., who decision-makers wish lecturers to be. Interviews with key stakeholders within DHET were held to explore their perspectives and motivations for what they felt the LSS was and is (or isn’t) able to achieve, in terms of lecturer development. Deploying the theoretical work of Foucault, the case explores discourses about how to change TVET lecturers’ practices, and what these discourses suggest about how TVET lecturers are imagined by those designing development interventions. By contrasting the different policy ‘ideas’ about who TVET lecturers ‘should’ become underpinning each of these past, present and future interventions, the case offers policymakers tools to consider how to learn from past decisions, as well as a novel framing for how different TVET lecturer support interventions relate and complement each other. Any effective continued professional development programmes, whether credentialled or informal, must reckon with this ‘imagined ideal’ (Jacklin, 2018) and how it relates to the realities and pluralities of lecturers’ own subjectivities and experiences.How change interventions relate to present and future lecturer subjectivities raises some complex questions about core themes in the Cases of Open Learning (COOL) project of which this study forms a part; in particular whether ‘open learning’ is always the path to improved teaching and learning. The question of subjectivities also challenges a Fraserian framework of social justice as used in the COOL project, asking who subjects of justice are and how their sense of self might inhibit engagement with justice-oriented initiatives.