Teacher Identity and the Challenges in Teaching about HIV/AIDS: A South African Perspective

1. Teacher Identity and the Challenges in Teaching about HIV/AIDS: A South African Perspective Jean Baxen Senior Lecturer University of Cape Town A Presentation at the College of Education, Kentucky University Tuesday, 18 October 2005

2. Format of Presentation • The study • Practices shaping teachers understanding, experiences and responses to HIV/AIDS • What happens in classrooms • Doing Teaching, Doing Identity

3. Rationale 1 • Schools as ‘natural’ repositories for teaching HIV/AIDS and sexuality • Largest single site where youth can be reached • Large numbers of children remain in schools at least till 5th Grade • High correlation between schooling and delayed sexual debut • Known entity: practices, rituals, rules and regulations Kelly, 2000; Coombe, 2000; Galant & Maticka-Tyndale, 2003

4. Rationale 2 • Research Agenda • Paucity in research about what happens in classrooms • Nature of questions posed • Epistemic origins of the research

5. Practices shaping teachers understanding, experiences and responses to HIV/AIDS • Material Conditions • Social & Cultural Practices • Discourses and Institutions • Teaching as a Field of Practice

6. Some Material Conditions • High incidences of HIV/AIDS amongst heterosexual communities • Poverty, unemployment and HIV/AIDS • Morbidity and Mortality • Conditions in Provinces, Communities and Schools

7. Some Social and Cultural Practices • Early Experiences • Familial Structures and Parenting • Fertility and Early Motherhood • Family Discipline and Perceived Promiscuity • Conceptions and Experiences of Marriage • Marital status, religion and anxiety • Teaching and ‘Becoming Somebody” • Status and Mobility • Community Perspectives and Responses to HIV/AIDS • Who is vulnerable? • Myths and Misconceptions • Denial and Stigma

8. Discourses and Institutions • The Politics of HIV/AIDS • Competing discourses in the media, president’s stance, Africanization of HIV/AIDS • Discourses on Sexuality • Religious, Medical and Sexology • Naturalist conception of sexuality • A biologized body • Link between sex and gender • Discourses on Disease • Moral • Health and Medical • Research about HIV/AIDS • Epistemic and Methodological Frameworks

9. Theoretical Framework Understanding Teaching as a field of Practice • Pierre Bourdieu • Subjects act as agents in the construction, modification, and transformation of society, social practices, and institutions. • Concept of field • Anthony Giddens • Structures are rules and resources people draw from to act in their daily lives • Social Systems are the regularized practices firmly embedded in time-space • Duality of Structure • Judith Butler • Beyond Reflexivity, towards performativity • Teaching as performative: Doing teaching

10. Teaching as a field of Practice Typologized Teacher Enactments • Repetition • Rhetorical Discourse • Style of Language • Procedural trajectory of the lesson • Reliance on the official text as authoritative • Discipline and time on task • Invoking the official purpose

11. Content as Discursive Space • Bounded Discourse • Assessment and Examination • Task Sequencing • The official authoritative text • Frame the discourse • Distantiation • Adherence to a code of teacher behavior • Normalize the Private • Naturalize and normalize the body • Non-sexed, objectified body: emphasizing its physical functions

12. What is happening in classrooms? • Students temporarily rupture and insert a different discourse thus providing opportunity for three things • A change in student-teacher relationship • Shift in teacher identity • A different discourse about sexuality and HIV in classrooms-one closer to children’s reality • Discomfort by teacher produces teacherly behavior that re-inscribes normalised conceptions of what a teacher is and what he/she does

13. Teacher Identity and performativity • What are the ruptures, shifts, inscriptions • Not about silences and inability to speak- its about speaking from a position and often subverting the official • Reinscriptions of the normalised • Teacherliness becomes an end in itself and as such the self is somehow preserved