BRIDGING THE CONTENT KNOWLEDGE GAP OF TEACHERS: AN AGENDA TO IMPROVE BUSINESS STUDIES TEACHING IN SOUTH AFRICAN COUNTRYSIDE SCHOOLS

‘Transformation' became the buzz word in South Africa in 1994. Lots of changes have taken place in all aspects of the new South Africa as a result of democratization and education is not an exception to this reality. The changes in education seek to provide equal opportunities for all citizens of the new democratic society. With the introduction of Outcomes Based Education stakeholders of education e.g. government, communities, parents and the general public, have become obsessed with quality of teaching and learning. To achieve quality education teachers must be more knowledgeable and skillful in some particular subjects to be able to teach well. This is however contrary to the observation of these writers. The reality is that most economic and management science teachers in the rural black schools have some gaps in content knowledge of the subjects. The existence of insufficient content knowledge among Business Studies (i.e. Accounting, Business economics and Management) teachers is a direct result of the apartheid education policy which did not provide better resources for training of teachers for countryside schools. Most of the teachers in the countryside schools were trained in under-resourced ‘home land' colleges of education with little emphasis on content knowledge of business studies subjects. With the drastic changes taking place in the curriculum and content, particularly of business studies subjects in the new South Africa, it has become more apparent that teachers of these subjects need both in-depth knowledge of the content as well as the methodology or skills for imparting the specific content to their learners. The paper which is a case study advocates for the use of in-service training programmes for Business Studies teachers in the countryside schools as a strategy to fill in the gaps in content knowledge. The experiences of the authors are validated by a small-scale empirical investigation.