Reflections on power, knowledge and belonging from the Free State and Mpumalanga Immersion
Three things were said at our Free State and Mpumalanga Immersion that I have not been able to put down.
A Foundation Phase teacher told us that she had wanted to attend a science workshop. Her colleagues talked her out of it. Her job, they told her, is to look after kids.
A teacher told us that, as a Zulu man working in the Free State, he feels that his colleagues look down on him.
And at our fireside chat on teacher wellness, the hardest conversation of the week to hold, a teacher described being so ill that a doctor booked her off, and going to school anyway. She went because she needed to do justice to the children, and because she knew that if she stayed home her colleagues would make the absence her problem. They were, after all, her classes.
At first they read as three separate problems: a status issue, a prejudice issue, a wellness issue. The longer I sit with them, the more they look like one story wearing three faces. Each is about what a teacher is permitted to know, how a teacher is permitted to act, and who a teacher is permitted to be.
Schools have a curriculum for children. It is printed, paced, tracked and moderated. There is another curriculum, unwritten and largely unexamined, that teaches teachers. Nobody signs it off. Nearly everybody transmits it.
“Your job is to look after kids”
That sentence is doing more work than its speakers intended. It claims that looking after children and knowing science are different jobs. That curiosity has a pay grade. That the Foundation Phase is a place of care rather than intellect, as if care were possible without intellect, and as if teaching a six year old to read were not one of the most cognitively demanding acts in the entire system.
I have written before about how this country speaks of the Foundation Phase: as childminding with a timetable, as the basement of the profession rather than its foundation. What struck me at the Immersion is that the fence around this teacher’s curiosity was not built by a district official or a policy document. It was built by her own colleagues, at the door of a workshop, in a single sentence offered almost kindly.
Michel Foucault gave us a vocabulary for this. Power and knowledge, he argued, are never separate; institutions do not merely distribute knowledge, they decide who counts as a knower in the first place (Foucault, 1977; Deacon, 2006). Somebody’s vocabulary is treated as expertise. Somebody else’s experience is treated as anecdote. Once a profession has absorbed that hierarchy, it no longer needs enforcing from above. Ordinary people enforce it on one another in corridors, fluently and without malice, the way her colleagues did. They were not being cruel. They were being fluent in a discourse that had already decided which knowledge belongs to whom.
A quieter version of the same problem ran through the whole week. Teachers almost never named theory. Nobody said constructivism, or Vygotsky, or critical pedagogy. And yet theory was everywhere in the room. When a teacher explained why she slows a lesson down for one child and stretches it for another, she was performing a theory of development. When another described building trust before demanding work, he was quoting Maslow and Vygotsky without the citations. Every seating plan is a hypothesis. Every decision about when to challenge and when to comfort is a theory of learning in motion. Once I started listening for it, I could not stop hearing it.
The research is blunt about why this knowledge stays unnamed. Theory is presented to teachers as something that lives at universities and merely visits classrooms (Korthagen, 2010; Gravett, 2012). Teachers are positioned as implementers of knowledge produced elsewhere: researchers theorise, departments legislate, teachers comply. Biesta, Priestley and Robinson (2017) add a sharper point: the professional vocabulary available to teachers shapes what they are able to imagine and defend. If the only language you are given is the language of coverage, compliance and curriculum trackers, then that is the language in which you will describe your own work, and eventually the language in which you will think about it.
Teachers do not lack theory. They have been trained to believe that theory belongs to universities, policy belongs to departments, and only practice belongs to them. The silence about theory is not the absence of thought. It is the sound of a profession that has been taught its thinking does not count as knowledge. And every time a programme like ours arrives with slides and a reading list, we risk teaching the same lesson in a friendlier font.
The negotiation nobody signs
At the fire-side chat, teachers spoke about feeling almost powerless: the sense that the timetable, the annual teaching plans, the moderation files, the district’s instructions and the principal’s office all belong to somebody else, and that the teacher merely rents a small space inside them.
Driving home, I kept circling a question I could not settle. Is the system doing this to teachers, or are teachers doing it to themselves? The closest I have come to an answer is that the question itself is faulty. Priestley, Biesta and Robinson describe teacher agency not as something a person owns but as something a person achieves, in interaction with their history, their beliefs, their relationships and the conditions around them (Priestley et al., 2012; Biesta et al., 2015). The system shapes what teachers believe is possible. Teachers then interpret, negotiate, comply with, resist and sometimes reproduce that system. Both things are true at once.
And in South Africa the history is not incidental. Apartheid era teacher governance was engineered for obedience: inspection regimes that punished independent judgement, and a Bantu Education apparatus that did not only starve schools of resources but manufactured a professional identity of compliance (Oswald & Perold, 2015). Identities like that do not resign when a policy changes. They live on in staffroom cultures, in leadership reflexes, and in the professional instincts of teachers who never personally experienced the original machinery.
Foucault’s concept of governmentality names the mechanism precisely (Perryman et al., 2017). The system rarely announces that teachers are powerless. It does not have to. It arranges conditions under which teachers announce it to themselves. That is above my pay grade. The department will never allow it. We just implement. External control matures into self-management, and the sentence “I have no power” starts to feel like realism rather than surrender.
I have started calling what I heard at the fire negotiated powerlessness. These teachers are not without power. They have negotiated their expectations downward, one disappointment at a time, because challenging the order of things has too often produced risk, exhaustion and no visible change. Pillay (2017) found something similar among South African teachers who did not describe themselves as change agents even while their own stories showed them changing things. The gap between what teachers do and what teachers believe about themselves may be the single most expensive gap in our education system.
The teacher who came to school sick
Then there is the story I cannot stop thinking about. A teacher was ill, seriously so. A doctor examined her and booked her off. She went to school anyway. When she told us why, nobody around the fire-side chat looked surprised, and that absence of surprise is itself a finding.
Her reasons were two. She felt she owed it to the children. And she knew that her colleagues would make the absence her responsibility, because the classes were hers.
I recognised her immediately. There is a version of me, from my own classroom years, who would have made the same drive, coughing at the traffic lights while rehearsing the day’s lessons. Which is exactly why the easy reading, the one that files this under dedication and moves on, has to be resisted. The easy reading is what keeps teachers sick.
Zembylas (2003) argues that professions run on emotional rules: unwritten laws about which feelings a good teacher may have, and which may be shown. One of teaching’s deepest rules is that a good teacher does not put herself first. Her exhaustion is a private matter; her presence is a moral duty. Foucault (1988) called the machinery beneath this technologies of the self. Nobody phoned that teacher at dawn and ordered her in. The school was already inside her. She examined herself, measured herself against the image of the good teacher, and disciplined herself, doctor’s letter notwithstanding. Ball (2003) describes this as performativity reaching into the teacher’s soul: the moment teachers begin grading their own worth with the institution’s ruler.
Notice, too, where the pressure came from. Not only from above. From beside. Her colleagues would make it her problem. Discipline in schools does not only run downward from the district office; it circulates sideways, through staffroom sighs, through the politics of who covers whose class, through the quiet ledger of who is pulling their weight. We are, at our worst, one another’s inspectors.
At the fire-side chat we offered a distinction that seemed to land: the difference between the personal self and the professional self. In most occupations this boundary is simply assumed. An accountant who is booked off does not believe the ledgers will feel abandoned. An engineer does not suspect the bridge of taking her absence personally. Teaching collapses the boundary, because the work is relational and the people on the other side of it are children, so absence stops feeling like an ordinary act of an employed human being and starts feeling like betrayal. Part of what we tried to say that evening is that the tensions teachers experience, thin cover arrangements, resentful colleagues, guilt about workload, exist in every workplace on earth. They are conditions of employment, not verdicts on a person’s love for children. A teacher can lay the professional self down at the school gate without the personal self collapsing. This is not an argument for caring less. It is an argument for locating care correctly, in a whole person who is allowed to be sick. Whether the distinction survives the first Tuesday back, I do not know.
Because the alternative has a name, and the name is burnout. Researchers now also speak of moral injury in teaching: the distinct harm done when a professional knows what right practice requires, is structurally prevented from doing it, and then absorbs the failure as her own (Oberg, 2025). Our teacher felt she was failing children by being sick. The actual failure sat in the system’s arithmetic: staffing so thin that one woman’s illness becomes a crisis her colleagues resent. Diminished self-efficacy and burnout feed each other over time (Brouwers & Tomic, 2000), and prolonged occupational stress does not stay in the mind; it settles in the body. A culture that treats a doctor’s letter as an act of desertion is not a culture of dedication. It is a slow harvesting of its own people.
Ubuntu is often invoked to bless exactly this kind of sacrifice. I have caught myself doing it, praising a teacher’s selflessness when I should have been asking who was carrying her. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu is sometimes wielded as if it means the individual must dissolve into the group. It does not. Ramose (1999) reads Ubuntu as a verb, a continuous becoming human through relation, and relation runs in both directions. If she is a person through other persons, then her colleagues are precisely the people through whom her personhood should be carried when she is ill: her classes covered without a ledger, her absence met with soup rather than suspicion. Interdependence that flows in one direction only is not interdependence. It is extraction wearing Ubuntu’s clothes.
Told, without words, that he does not quite belong
The third moment came from a man who named it plainly. He is Zulu. He teaches in the Free State. And he feels that his colleagues look down on him for it. I have thought often since about the quiet that followed, and whether it was respect, recognition, or the discomfort of people wondering what they themselves transmit.
One man’s account is not a verdict on a province, and Free State staffrooms are not on trial here. But his experience is not unintelligible either. It lands inside a documented history. Apartheid did not only separate black from white; it deliberately partitioned black South Africans from one another, by language, by manufactured homeland, by an administrative ethnicity designed to prevent solidarity. Scholars argue that this legacy still surfaces as ethnophobia, the othering of people by ethnic and cultural association, within black communities themselves, and that the 1994 transition built a new flag without building a sturdy framework for unity among the groups apartheid had spent decades dividing (Masuku & Mlambo, 2023).
Around the fire, the word we reached for was tribalism, and I understand why: it is the word the country hands us. But I have come to think it is too blunt for what may actually be operating. What his account gestures at is more specific. A language hierarchy. Judgements attached to an accent. A regional in-group. The quiet expectation that the newcomer will assimilate. De Kock, Sayed and Badroodien (2018) show that South African schools carry their own linguistic and cultural identities, and that the local identity is usually presented as neutral, as simply how things are here. Whoever matches the neutral belongs automatically. Everyone else must audition, indefinitely.
This is where I find the distinction between multiculturalism and belonging useful. Diversity means different people are present in the building. Multiculturalism means the differences are formally acknowledged, perhaps on Heritage Day. Inclusion means people can participate without amputating parts of themselves. Belonging means being received as a legitimate member rather than a tolerated guest. A staffroom can be genuinely diverse and still run on a single unspoken template of the normal teacher: how she sounds, how she greets, what she finds funny, how she mourns. Our colleague was describing life outside the template.
And the stakes are not merely social. South African national data associate perceived discrimination with mood and anxiety disorders (Williams et al., 2008; Moomal et al., 2009), and meta-analytic work links it to measurable stress physiology (Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009). Being made to feel lesser at work, repeatedly, is an occupational health issue. It belongs on the same wellness agenda as workload and burnout, not in a separate box marked personality clash.
The deepest irony is that the philosophy this soil produced already answers the problem. Ubuntu locates personhood in relation, not in resemblance. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu does not say a person is a person through people who sound like him. The Immersion room was itself the proof of concept:, teachers becoming a “we” without anyone being asked to surrender who they are. We built that in days. The question his story leaves us with is what, exactly, prevents a staffroom from building it in years.
What the fire-side chat taught me
Foucault’s largest insight is that institutions do not only tell people what to do. They shape who people believe they are (Deacon, 2006). The Foundation Phase teacher was being taught what she may know. The fire-side chat was rehearsing what teachers may act upon. The Zulu teacher was being told, wordlessly, who may fully be. That is the curriculum that teaches teachers, and like every hidden curriculum, it is taught most effectively by people who do not know they are teaching it.
The counterargument deserves a seat at the fire too. None of this dissolves responsibility. The colleagues at the workshop door were teachers. The staffroom that would have punished a sick woman’s absence is made of teachers. The looking down, if that is what it is, is done by teachers. Structure explains; it does not excuse. But accountability without structural honesty produces only another round of blaming teachers, and blaming teachers is the one intervention this country has already tried to exhaustion.
What remains is the harder, slower work: authoring ourselves differently. Judith Butler (2004) describes identity as improvisation within a scene of constraint. We do not write ourselves from nothing, but neither are we merely written. That is why the Immersion, and the work of Teachers CAN more broadly, begins with identity before technique. Techniques are easy to distribute. A changed sense of who I am, and therefore of what I may know, do and be, is the only thing that survives contact with a Monday morning staffroom.
And by that measure, the teachers at the Immersion had already begun. The Foundation Phase teacher is still wanting the science workshop, and wanting, in a system that fences curiosity, is a form of resistance. The Zulu teacher named his exclusion in a room that received it, which turned a private wound into shared knowledge. And a circle of teachers said we are almost powerless out loud, which happens to be the opening sentence of every serious analysis of power ever conducted. Speech is where the negotiation reopens.
I left the fire-side chat with a simple test for the work ahead. We will know we are succeeding when a Foundation Phase teacher’s curiosity is nobody’s business to fence. When a doctor’s letter is met with cover and soup, not a ledger. When a Zulu man in a Free State staffroom is a colleague, not an exercise in tolerance. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A teacher becomes a teacher through other teachers. The only question the fire-side chat left burning is what kind of abantu we intend to be for one another: the kind through whom our colleagues become more, or the kind through whom they quietly become less.
Written by Michael Sterksen – Network Mobiliser, Teachers CAN
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