STUDENT TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Education and change are crucial for humans to survive in a universe that is rapidly changing and where uncertainty for the future reigns. Education change in South Africa is seen in the new education policies aimed at making the curriculum relevant, inclusive of different knowledge types and providing quality education for all. But, teachers are the crucial interface between the policies and quality education practice. There seems to be little clarity and/or agreement on how teachers should be prepared to fulfil this critical interface role. The daunting challenge for education is therefore to change teachers' paradigms of thinking and action completely and to recognise the personal aspects that are linked to uncertainty (Barnett, 2004). This can only happen if teacher professional development programmes focus on student teachers constructing and using phronesis - the capacity to act in the most effective and appropriate way in every particular situation – rather than possessing a body of spatially temporally detached universal knowledge” (Slabbert, 2003, p. 7).