Enhancing further education and training accounting teacher training capacity at a University of Technology : educational implications for theory and practice

Abstract

The researcher, an FET Accounting Lecturer, experienced a lack of FET Accounting Content knowledge in First Year FET Accounting Students. Each of these students scored at least 50% in the Grade 12 final Accounting examination. Upon commencement of First Year Accounting, this knowledge seems to have been lost. This phenomenon instigated this study to determine the cause for this apparent loss. To ensure that pre-service FET Accounting Students entering the Education profession are sufficiently capacitated to educate Accounting Learners, the researcher decided to involve all role players in Accounting Education. The role players were the following: 16 School Based FET Accounting Teachers from 5 schools in the Motheo Education District (Focus Group interviews), 143 FET Accounting Students from the Central University of Technology (CUT) (online Questionnaire) and 3 FET Accounting Lecturers(interviews) from the same university. Each of the above-mentioned data collection methods aimed to investigate the relevance of the FET school Accounting curriculum (CAPS); measure the presumed Accounting Content knowledge of FET pre-service Accounting Students and FET Accounting Teachers; quantify the ability of preservice FET Accounting Students and FET Accounting Teachers to apply resourceful methodology strategies; and lastly to determine if a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) system would be feasible and worthwhile to implement for incapacitated school-based FET Accounting teachers. Research findings suggest that the FET Accounting Methodology currently taught at the CUT does not sufficiently prepare FET Accounting Students to be capacitated FET Accounting Teachers. Numerous challenges at schools seem to prevent the effective transfer of Accounting concepts and knowledge to learners; as it appears that current FET Accounting Students have limited Accounting content knowledge. The researcher therefore deduced that a CPD (Continuous Professional Development) system would be a viable option to capacitate school-based FET Accounting Teachers. Such an innovation would require a concerted effort from all stakeholders, as educators already feel burdened with the current workload. The implication of these findings, among others, suggest that more effort from FET Accounting Lecturers have to be made to capacitate pre- service FET Accounting Students. This would require more exposure to real life scenarios and increased training opportunities for school-based FET Accounting Teachers already in the system.