Kris Stutchbury

The Open University (UK) · Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology

Education policies across sub-Saharan Africa require teachers to change from being transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of learning. This means that teacher education needs to change as well and professional development which focuses on practical teaching is urgently needed. The Teacher Education for sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) MOOC - Making te...

New school curricula across Africa are calling for new approaches to learning and teaching. In response, much educational development work focuses on supporting pedagogic change. The successful implementation of educational change is challenging, attested by persistently low achievement levels, yet it remains under-theorised. However, 'implementati...

Zambian Education School-based Training (ZEST) is an innovative programme aimed at improving teaching in line with policy aspirations in Zambia. It draws on existing roles, structures and processes whilst making innovative use of technology and resources, to support teaching and to challenge attitudes which can limit achievement. A programme of res...

This paper demonstrates how the features and affordances of open learning have been developed in new and productive ways to provide school-based continuing professional development for teachers in Zambia. It presents and critically reviews data from 200 teachers who have taken part in phase 1 of the Zambian Education School-based Training (ZEST)-a...

This paper describes how critical realism was operationalized to provide an explanatory framework for a small-scale qualitative study in the field of teacher education in a sub-Saharan African context. Critical realism combines a realist ontology (there is something to find out about) with a relativistic epistemology (different people will come to...

Tutors working in colleges of education in sub-Saharan Africa are responsible for teaching, and inspiring hundreds of thousands of aspiring teachers, yet they have received little attention in the literature, often being depicted as a conservative cohort of professionals, unprepared for their role, yet resistant to change. This study reports on ho...

Issues in the environment drive societal change (Brown in Seven global issues to watch in 2018, blog post. United Nations Foundation, New York, 2018); and hence challenge the purpose of education. Participants on a Masters course, representing informal and formal education for children aged 4–19, discussed the question “How should the purpose of ed...

This paper demonstrates how the features and affordances of open learning have been developed in new and productive ways to provide school-based continuing professional development for teachers in Zambia. It presents and critically reviews data from 200 teachers who have taken part in phase 1 of the Zambian Education School-based Training (ZEST) –...

This study investigated how a school-based professional development programme, designed by the Headteacher and staff of a Kenyan primary school, and delivered by a Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) team, supported teacher learning and growth. The TESSA team observed teaching in the classroom before the implementation of the school-bas...

You Tube now has more searches than Google, indicating that video is a motivating and, potentially, powerful learning tool. This paper investigates how we can embrace video to support improvements in teacher education. It will draw on innovative approaches to teacher education, developed by the Open University UK, in order to explore in more depth...

Teacher education in Africa has been criticised for being not ‘fit for purpose’ (Verspoor, 2008, Mulkeen, 2010). The TESSA programme was established in 2005 to support teacher education at primary level, and there is evidence that the initial project has made an impact across Sub-Saharan Africa (Harley et al., 2012). This paper describes the TESSA...

Ethics is a complicated field and much has been written about its application to educational research. In this paper we introduce a way of planning for and dealing with situations that arise in the course of research that promotes detailed ethical analysis. We present a framework based on the work of Seedhouse and Flinders and describe a methodolog...