Quality Teaching and the Capability Approach

Evaluating the work and governance of women teachers in rural Sub-Saharan Africa

Alison Buckler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317628651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book provides an analytical exploration of the condition of teachers working in expanding school systems across the world, with a particular focus on the lives of women teachers in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing from award-winning research, it looks beyond the official portrayals of teachers' lives in order to better understand the reality of the contexts in which teachers live and work.

Positioning Amartya Sen's capability approach at the heart of the study, each chapter considers documentary evidence alongside ethnographic research from rural, remote and under-resourced schools in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Sudan. Interweaving rich narratives from teachers in a variety of contexts, the book proposes a concept of professional capability and examines female teachers' agency to pursue and achieve this in their classrooms. This key examination challenges existing notions of 'quality education' and reveals insights into the broader purpose of schooling for rural communities.

Quality Teaching and the Capability Approach will be of value to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in education, particularly those concerned with gender, development and teaching, as well as educationalists and policy makers concerned with education and development.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755939-1

Towards the end of 2007 I spent six weeks in South Africa’s Eastern Cape carrying out preliminary research for the study which eventually inspired this book. One day I visited two farm schools. They were almost identical in terms of extreme remoteness, decrepit infrastructure and limited resources. What took place at each school, however, could not have been more different.

I arrived at the first school just before 10 a.m. The journey was gruelling: two hours of untarred roads pushing deep into the Katberg Mountains, with the last two-mile stretch only just passable in a four-by-four. The teacher had already been there for an hour, although her journey had taken three hours, much of it on foot. It was bitterly cold and the wind howled around the single classroom.

The teacher unlocked a cupboard where a few old textbooks were carefully stacked and proceeded to conduct a Mathematics lesson, raising her voice above the sound of the rain on the corrugated iron roof. The topic was angles and she leapt about the room ‘making’ angles with her arms and legs shouting ‘acute!’, ‘obtuse!’, ‘right angle!’ The pupils, shyly at first, then laughingly, joined in. Despite the limited resources the teacher had a well worked out plan. The pupils were engaged and learning.

Later that day I drove a few miles south to another school. I had arranged to meet the head teacher but there was no sign of her. A few bored-looking children were leaning against the water tank, a handful more were listlessly kicking a deflated football against a wall. I asked them where I could find the head. They said she hadn’t turned up but there was another teacher I could talk to. A boy led me past classrooms with desks upturned, broken chairs flung to the sides of the room. The date written on one blackboard was from four months earlier. Another room housed a sea of damp, damaged textbooks, strewn ankle-deep and sticky with spiders’ webs.

We arrived at a room with a boarded-up window. The boy knocked but there was no answer. He knocked again and there was a shout from inside. Awkwardly I suggested that I come back another day. He shouted something in Xhosa and, after an uncomfortable pause, a bolt slid back and the door opened. The teacher stared, swayed and caught the doorframe for support, slurring apologies. A bottle of whisky stood on the table.

This trip offered many insights into the professional and personal lives of teachers, but experiences like this one fascinated and troubled me. They confirmed my understandings of some of the literature around wide variations in the motivation and effectiveness of teachers, but the more I observed the more I realized that these issues were more nuanced than this literature implied. Why do some teachers trek for hours through a storm to deliver a well-planned lesson to a handful of pupils? Why do some make the effort to go to school – even if no one is there to check up on them – but then make no effort to teach? In isolated classrooms like these ones, what is valued in teachers’ work, and how do teachers navigate ideas around value? How can we conceptualize valuable teaching and how can educational governance support teachers to deliver an education that is valuable to pupils being taught in these contexts? This book, which draws together five years of research into women teachers’ lives in rural and remote communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, is an attempt to answer these questions.

Overview of the issues

The provision of quality education for all children is a colossal global problem, but especially so in low-income countries where expanded enrolments in primary school have exceeded government capacities for training teachers. In 2012, the Brookings Centre established a baseline in education quality below which students were learning so little that they had no value added to their education. A subsequent report estimated that almost half of the 111 million children attending primary school in Sub-Saharan Africa were below this baseline (van Fleet et al. 2012). While countries have made significant progress on access to education, quality remains a concern at local, national and international levels. Teachers – what they think and what they do in classrooms – are at the core of this concern.

Over the last decade vast sums have been invested in policy development, curriculum reformations and teacher education initiatives that aim to enhance teacher–pupil interactions (Altinyelken 2010; Chisholm and Leyendecker 2008; Schweisfurth 2013). Yet improvements in quality – when quality is interpreted as enhanced pupil attainment – are disappointing (UNESCO 2014). Large-scale studies from India suggest that a teacher’s level of qualification makes little difference to children’s learning (ASER 2011), and more generally it is reported that teachers’ experiences of professional development tend to be piecemeal, lack relevance to the contexts in which they work and have limited follow-up support (Saigal 2012; UNESCO 2014). Where more interactive pedagogies are poorly implemented in teacher professional development programmes it can lead to ‘unproductive chaos’, ‘time wasted’ and ‘no, or negative learning’ in classrooms (Schweisfurth 2013: 137). Other evidence suggests the impact is minimal: teacher-centred practices appear particularly resistant to change, the dominant mode of teaching remains a teacher-led transmission style (Akyeampong et al. 2006; Mtika and Gates 2010; Pontefract and Hardman 2005) and the quality of teaching and learning remains a key concern.

Underpinning issues around education quality are the structures and policies of educational governance: the formal organization and management of teachers and the systems in which they work. UNESCO’s 2009 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report demonstrated how governance is a crucial – yet under-examined – factor in creating enabling conditions for quality teaching and learning, yet existing coverage is preoccupied with budgets, red tape, corruption and teacher posting, salaries and strikes. Critical here, and less reported, is educational governance in terms of the relationships that develop – or do not develop – between education officials, head teachers and teachers.

Educational governance – both structural and relational – is especially weak in rural areas. Rural schools remain a great concern to educationalists in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite rapid urbanization, 62 per cent of the region’s population still live in rural areas (World Bank 2014) where education facilities are known to be sparse and dilapidated and where it is reported in much of the literature that teachers do not want to teach (Grieve 2014; VSO 2008). Rural schools are often invisible in large-scale national statistics (UNESCO’s ISCED questionnaires, for example, which provide the information for their Institute for Statistics (UIS) database, do not distinguish between rural and urban data), and where rural teaching is considered in the wider academic, policy and practitioner literature there is a tendency to assume that ‘rural’ is synonymous with deprivation and negative experiences.

Gender-specific experiences of teachers are also missing from much of the literature. When the focus is on women teachers, it tends to be on the harassment, violence, discrimination and logistical difficulties they face (Adedeji and Olaniyan 2011). This is in spite of large and well-publicised campaigns to increase the number of female teachers in rural schools. There is a need to better understand these gender-specific experiences. It has been suggested, for example, that teachers can be subject to the same gender assumptions and norms that girls face in school and that it is more likely that teachers perpetuate the existing gender status quo rather than challenge it. Jackie Kirk (2006), describes how a group of women teachers in Pakistan expressed a preference for teaching girls because they spoke less in class, and de Lange et al. (2012) highlight the contribution of women teachers in South Africa to the socialization of male and female pupils into traditional gender roles.

This book draws these themes – quality, governance, rurality and gender – together to provide insights into how women teachers working in the most remote and under-resourced schools experience the teaching profession and how they understand quality teaching within these contexts. The intention is to consider alternative ways of conceptualizing quality by considering what is understood to be valuable in education from different perspectives, and by exploring the pursuit of these valued goals. Ultimately the book aims to explore how educational governance might better respond to the well-documented challenges of rural schooling to enhance the experience of rural education for pupils and for those that teach them.

Approach to the issues

At the heart of this book is an empirical study into the professional lives of seven women teachers living and working in rural schools in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Sudan.¹ Ethnographic data was collected over a period of five years, between 2007 and 2011. This data, which focuses on what these teachers value in their work, is compared with data on official perspectives around what is valued in teachers’ work. An overview of official perspectives is drawn from key education policy documents published in the five focus countries since 2000 as well as interviews with education officials at different levels of policy formulation and enactment. The purpose of the study was to understand how teachers navigate these potentially different interpretations of valued (or quality) teaching.

The book deliberately moves between the regional, the national and the local. Education is an increasingly globalized issue and policy-makers are increasingly concerned with how ideas move around the world (Schweisfurth 2013). Countries compete for high placements in rankings of basic educational provision as well as in international assessments of student achievement, representing a shift towards standardized experiences of education for participation in the so called ‘global knowledge economy’. This shift is evident in increasingly aligned national education policies, written to reflect international goals, commitments and funding agreements. Yet at the same time, calls for new models of educational governance which are rooted in the human development paradigm and built on frameworks of social justice, and calls for new definitions of education quality which focus on the specific learning needs of the individual and the rooting of learning in the ‘local’, are increasingly prevalent in both pedagogic and policy literature (Buckler and Gafar 2013; Murphy and Wolfenden 2013; Walker 2006; UNESCO 2005). This book explores how these different quality agendas play out at the level of the school.

In addition, it is consistently reported that teachers’ voices are ignored in education policy-making – most recently in the 2014 EFA Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO 2014) – and even when there are legal frameworks in place to incorporate their input (VSO 2011). Rarely are Sub-Saharan African teachers’ voices discoursed on the same page as the policies that govern their work and, at the analytical level, too little space is given for reflection on how teachers engage with social justice in their everyday practice, and how this can help with reviewing processes and structures of social justice at the national and international levels (Unterhalter 2013). This book intends to contribute a space in which women teachers’ everyday practices, and the global and national processes and structures within which they take place, are reflected on side by side.

A policy overview was chosen over a focus on the most recent policies for three reasons. First rapidly changing policy environments mean that it is very difficult to capture an up-to-date policy picture of individual countries and the relevance of the findings would date more quickly than the broader focus used here: policy is conceptualized as a process rather than something static (Thomas 2007). Secondly, Chapter 2 highlights the regular delay – or failure – of polic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Appendix: List of documents used in the policy overview analysis
• Index