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Comparative Pedagogies and Epistemological Diversity: Social and Materials Contexts of Teaching in Tanzania

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This article examines how epistemological differences regarding knowledge production and material differences in the conditions of teaching influence teachers’ and teacher educators’ understandings of learner-centered pedagogy. Emerging from a 5-year collaboration between teams of US and Tanzanian teacher educators, the research focuses on six Tanzanian secondary schools whose teachers participated in a workshop on learner-centered pedagogy and pedagogical content knowledge. We find that teachers’ views of knowledge production are profoundly shaped by the cultural, economic, and social contexts in which they teach. We conclude not only that teachers’ working conditions are important contextual factors in comparative studies of schooling but that the conditions themselves need to be conceptualized more fully in theories of knowledge production and global/local reforms of teacher education.
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... Policy-level constraints included poor communication of key messages [39,42], which often led to inconsistency of understanding of key concepts [43,44], a lack of time to cover the curriculum [30,36], and examinations that contradicted the changes [35,45]. Regarding teacher recruitment and development [46], constraints included a shortage of qualified teachers [37,42], poor working conditions [36,40], insufficient teacher training [37,39], short and superficial teacher training [43,47], a lack of follow-up to initial sessions [34,48], passive, unengaging training [37,48], a lack of practical experiences [40,41], a lack of flexibility to adapt to the context [37,44], and a lack of opportunities for teachers to collaborate [41,43]. Conversely, more successful teacher training experiences were those that were longer, incorporated ongoing support [49,50], were active and engaging, incorporated practical experiences such as observation and teaching practices sessions [33,51], included opportunities for teacher collaboration [51,52], and incorporated opportunities for teacher reflection, especially regarding the flexibility and autonomy to adapt learner-centred principles to their own teaching contexts [50,53]. ...
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Book
This book addresses students, practitioners and scholars in educational policy studies. The authors use Mongolia as a case to illustrate how global influences shape domestic developments in education, and how imported education reforms are locally modified, re-contextualized, or 'Mongolized'. © Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Ines Stolpe, 2006. All rights reserved.
Chapter
The Republic of Guinea in West Africa has a centralized educational system that controls teachers right down to daily sign-off on lesson plans by school directors. Yet, ironically, during our research on reading instruction in Guinea, we noted that the Ministry of Education was promoting massive reforms that seemed to encourage teacher autonomy. One was a project to improve teacher skills and support student-centered instruction in every elementary classroom in the country, a project supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).1 Another was the Small Grants School Improvement Project, supported by a World Bank loan, which encouraged local teachers across the country to propose school-level reforms and then compete for funding to carry them out (Diallo et al. 2001). An ambitious program of teacher recruitment and training, which had strong Canadian participation, was also framed within “a strategy of professionalizing teaching” since teachers “have to continually make professional decisions” (Diané and Grandbois 2000:8). Finally and of particular interest in this chapter, the nationwide distribution of a new set of textbooks, which was supported by a loan from the African Development Bank, had inspired Ministry of Education staff to argue that teaching methods should be “in the teacher, not in the book.”