Since the year 2000 learnerships have been introduced in all sectors of South African society including education, as a strategy to overcome the acute skills shortage which hinders national development. A learnership is defined as work-based learning with the aim of obtaining a qualification within the South African National Qualification Framework. Unlike an internship which provides experiential workplace learning for a successful graduate, a learnership provides work-based learning for a student who is in the process of gaining a qualification. In this context Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is the ideal tuition model as it enables the student to work and learn full-time while engaged in formal study. The value of learnerships as an effective means of training teachers is generally misunderstood by teacher education providers. To overcome this gap a qualitative case study explored the value of learnerships in teacher training endeavours. The inquiry was informed by Vygotsky's social constructivist learning theory, Lave and Wenger's theory of situated learning and Kolb's experiential learning theory. Twelve participants who were engaged in a teacher learnership programme in a public primary school and who were studying for a teaching qualification through ODL were selected by purposeful sampling. Data were gathered by means of participants' written accounts of their learnership experience structured around a set of ten open-ended questions which functioned as a prompt for writing. Findings indicated the professional benefits of learnerships; drawbacks of learnerships; the personal significance of the learnership; and the role of ODL tuition in the learnership programme. It was concluded that learnerships in teacher training embody a powerful and innovative strategy to produce teachers who possess a combination of work-based and theoretical knowledge and who can help overcome the skills shortage in the education sector in South Africa.
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