"Mauvaises pratiques" et Burn Out dans l'école sud-africaine

An interdisciplinary, multi-method ethnographic participatory action research study was carried out over a period of three years in four case-study schools in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg. The present article examines the experiences of burnout reported by educators who teach in these underprivileged inner city schools, and who are at the forefront of the transformation process. The severe deprivation, violence and emotional hardships to which learners are exposed in their daily lives was found to account in large part for this overbearing sentiment of emotional overload and burnout among educators. The other significant contributing factor is the unequal access to material and pedagogical resources as well as insufficient social support structures for educators and learners alike. We argue that an analysis of change and transformation in terms of the binary of good and bad practices is reductive of the complexity that characterises teaching and education in post apartheid and post-struggle South Africa. In this regard, the “bad practices” (understood in terms of neglect or abuse of the rights of the child) that some educators carry over from apartheid education (corporal punishment is a case in point) or that they develop in the face of the emotional demands made upon them by the institution, the community and the learners, cannot be understood without a deeper analysis of the systematic breakdown of family systems, emotional deprivation, violence and the Aids pandemic that pervade the learning relationship and stand as the legacy that apartheid has left this new generation of educators to deal with, often single-handedly.