Human Rights Education: Exploring the Safety of Teachers in South African Secondary Public Schools
Ernest Mpindo 
& Constance Mphojane
Issue: Vol.5 No.3 Issue Article 8 pp.247-256
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024538 | Published online 8th March, 2024
© 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This paper examined the extent and nature of safety for teachers in their different school settings and further underscored the importance of safety for teachers in the school context. The current school environment is violent owing to the increasing lack of teachers’ ability to maintain order in schools due to the uncertain alternatives to corporal punishment. This creates a hostile learning environment that weakens the teachers’ position of power and prohibits them from using their authority and fulfilling their duty to provide learners with compassionate monitoring. A qualitative interpretivist research paradigm was used in this study employing Critical Emancipatory Research (CER) as a research framework. A CER framework aims to strengthen the liberating, enlightening, emancipating, and empowering democratic values of equality and justice among the researcher and the participants in the research setting. A team of four teachers, a principal, and the School Governing Body (SGB) member from each school were purposively sampled to apply the principles of PAR in Lejweleputswa District in the Free State Province in South Africa. A focused group was employed to answer the following questions: What are the perceptions of secondary school teachers regarding their safety in the school setting? To what extent does learners’ violent behaviour threaten teachers’ safety at schools? And, how can teachers be assisted to change their minds regarding Human Rights Education as a tool for peaceful education? Data was analysed thematically. The findings of this research showed that teachers do not feel safe at their workplace, they fear both learners and parents who most of the time come to humiliate them physically and emotionally in front of their learners. The study contributes to a debate on the safety of teachers in schools for professional development.
Keywords: Human Rights Education, Teacher-Learner Relationships, Teachers’ Safety, Parental Involvement.
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Ernest Mpindo is a Doctoral student and a Part-Time lecturer at the Central University of Technology, Free State (Welkom Campus), South Africa in the Department of Educational and Professional Studies. His research is focused more on school safety, school violence, human rights education and education law.
Dr Constance Mphojane (D. Ed) is the Departmental Manager in the Department of Educational and Professional Studies at the Central University of Technology, Free State (Welkom Campus), South Africa. Her research is focused more on educational mentorship, micro-teaching and public management.
Mpindo, Ernest & Mphojane, Constance.“Human Rights Education: Exploring the Safety of Teachers in South African Secondary Public Schools,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 5, no.3 (2024): 247-256. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2024538
© 2024 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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