Prior to 1994, the education system of South Africa was characterized by a
hierarchical and bureaucratic style of management as well as a situation where white
schools were the key beneficiaries of resources and black schools massively
disadvantaged. In 1996 a national task team made strategic proposals for education
management capacity, including a self-management approach to schools and implicitly
supporting the notion of teacher leadership for the new dispensation (Department of
Education, 1996). Despite this enabling framework, however, few teachers appear to
be embracing a teacher leader role and it is an unexplored area of research in South
Africa. This article reports on the experiences of 11 university tutors, many of
whom are also classroom-based teachers, around the concept of teacher leader, during
a professional development initiative which ran parallel with their teaching on a
postgraduate module. The article identifies how tutors develop their understanding
of the concept of teacher leader during the initiative, explores the factors which
may support or impede the take-up of this concept by teachers and argues that,
without teacher leadership, the transformation of South African schools into
professional learning communities is unlikely to occur.
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