Kari Dahl SfAA conference in Merida, Mexico, March 2001.Page 1

The Danish University Of Education

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Every day teacher life and school strategies in Kenya.

A study of teachers' competencies between everyday life, school projects and strategies in rural Kenyan primary schools.

(Work-in-progress cannot be quoted, distributed or disseminated any other way without prior permission from the author).

Introduction

In Kenya as in many other South-countries the rural primary school for many children is the only option to gain formal knowledge. Primary school teachers are in focus of attention because they are mediating links between ministerial guidelines and local needs and practices. Teachers are main actors in children’s school learning; a competent teacher at least to some extent with engagement and will can compensate for deficiencies in structural and material surroundings at the local level. The value of dialogues between the school, its community and local authorities becomes accentuated in the light of globalisation, a process in which Southern schools adopt western school models based on scientific discourses: Rural Third World children become exposed to theoretical knowledge distant from their everyday life, embedded in a teacher-oriented and one-way hierarchical school structure. It can be argued, that modern western school systems possibly never will succeed in Africa, because of the exclusion of the civil society and its traditional values of ‘community’.[1] The question is whether teachers are capable and willing to change the current school patterns.

The general aim of this study is to explore the cultural worlds of teachers in school and their practice navigation. The practice field, in which teachers manoeuvre, I see as situated between school life, state ideologies and everyday life.[2] This triple-level approach I encompass within various thematically foci identified in two main pools of explanation; the issue of ‘School culture and institution life’, i.e. the local organisational frame in which practices are embedded, second ‘Everyday life and teaching practices’, i.e. life and practices in and out of school as seen from a teacher’s perspective. With this approach I ultimately aim at exploring learning processes and educational ‘rooms’ as constructed by teachers and schools

Locations and fieldwork

A total number of 12 months of fieldwork in the sub county of Bondo District in the Western part of Kenya is planned in the period of 1999-2001, at this time 8 months have been completed. Bondo District is situated near the shores of Lake Victoria, and most of the people in this area are Luo people who belong to the Nilotes, the second largest ethnic group of Kenya. The social organisation of Luo people is patrilineal, exogamous, and for a big part polygamous. Luo people live by subsistence farming supplemented by fishing. They are the ethnic group regarded the most influenced by modern aggravation in Kenya,[3] a fact that make Luo teachers worth a study regarding curriculum handling as well as their ability to accept alternative school approaches.

Five respectively two schools encompassing a total teacher study group of about 46 teachers have been identified for in-depth case studies regarding ‘school cultures’ respectively ‘teachers’ typologies’. After having visited the schools during some months, the interest concentrated on four teachers, institutionalised in three schools. These teachers all in some ways seemed to divergate from the official formulated teacher paradigm and being ‘extremities’, at the same time, they tend to encompass the diversity of teachers’ practices met on location. In the preliminary explorations it was realised that the four teachers represent a range of typologies of teaching practices that also could be linked to their respective life forms. Engaging in everyday life on the premises a contemporary rural member increased the understandings of the dynamics of everyday life - what hindrances and opportunities embedded at the institutional level respectively in the setting out of school and at home that might have an influence on how teachers go about handling children. Though participant and non-participant observation as well as informal conversations were the major strategies employed to generate the tacit formulated universes of meaning,tape recorded semi-structured interviews and more focused observation later on made valuable contributions to address and disclosethe more ‘fuzzy data’.[4]

Preliminary findings

  • It is true that Kenyan teachers feel overworked, underpaid, unappreciated and misunderstood, and that they become socially and emotionally ‘burned-out’ and demotivated in their teaching professions. But findings from the present study indicate that teachers nevertheless find a way to navigate in the complex of rural realities’ possibilities and hindrances, and manage to conduct aschooling, which from an outsider’s standpoint can seem hard to understand when looking at the difficult conditions.
  • Teachers in the Kenyan primary school context pursue their own practices at school based on a logic that seem to incorporate a variety of different projects and missions. These practices seem to be results of navigations in a complex of social, economical and managerial problems, but also symbolise visions and desires about ‘the good life’. The logics of practice seem to be situated between teachers’ everyday lives, the school as an institution and the official guidelines.
  • Four representatives of various teacher ‘typologies’ in the local school context could be located on the premises of paradigmatically different ‘fields of navigation’. These navigation fields encompassed everyday and school life, and functioned as well as fields for teaching practices covering various areas in a spectrum from ‘drill’ (fear stimulation and competition), over ‘laissez-faire’ to psychological and political teaching.
  • The manoeuvring ways for each teacher constitute a universe of meaning, where everyday life at home and in the community intertwines with life at school. In this way, there is substantially differences in how teaching is accomplished, and what will be addressed below.
  • Though different in their perception of what a good school is, in their socio-cultural background from their everyday life, and with their positioning in the official and unofficial school hierarchy, the four teachers all seem to do the best of their resources, and to their own and different extent provide an education that mediate between their everyday life and that of the school. In this way they also thus manage to perspective that of the school children, namely the difficulties of being a rural child growing up modern [5] on distant and foreign premises.

End piece

There seems to be a gap between the official terminologies of Kenyan primary school teachers, and the actual positions of teachers’ tasks and roles in practice. This discrepancy assumably has occurred as a result of the complex burden of social, economical and managerial problems, which schools experience, and which makes the whole school project distance itself from the original intentions, namely a common project in which all actors – pupils, teachers and the state – could find a mutual starting point. On the other hand, the ‘typology study’ assumes that despite immediate deficiencies in economical resources, schools and teachers manage to deal with the problems – in some cases with a commitment and competency that seem to go beyond what canlogically be deducted from the somewhat resource-deprived physical, economical and socio-cultural circumstances, under which schools have to operate.

The identification of typologies simultaneously reduces the complexity of the ‘field’, and stigmatises teachers into possible targets for official interest and missions. But on the other hand the identification of life forms and school strategies might be helpful to find out more about the hindrances that teachers meet when struggling to perform their everyday teacher duty.

The study of teachers’ everyday lives and the identification of representative teacher typologies are findings that oppose conventional thinking of teachers as one big uniform group. It is neither appropriate nor effective to treat them as homogenous. There are many reasons for becoming a teacher, and there is also a multitude of strategies for teachers to handle their primary school tasks. These differences must be reflected in the way teachers become trained themselves, and how subsequently they become supported at the institutional level. Training practices and school guidelines for curriculum transfer in the Kenyan school is characterised by export of western scientification. Another way might be to start in schools with teachers and school children themselves and listen to their ideas about what proper schooling is.

References

Bassey, Michael. (1999): Case study research in educational settings. Doing qualitative research in education. (ed. Pat Sikes). Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Bech-Jørgensen, Birte. (1997): Når hver dag bliver til hverdag. (When every day turns into everyday). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.

Cohen, David William & Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. (1989): Siaya. The historical anthropology of an African landscape. London: James Currey Ltd. London.

Fuller, Bruce. (1991): Growing-Up Modern. The Western State Builds Third-World Schools. New York / London: Routledge.

Heller, Agnes. (1970): Everyday Life. London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Tedla, Elena. (1995): Sankofa. African Thought and Education. Studies in African and African-American Culture, Vol. 11. (ed. James Hill). New York: Peter Lang.

[1] Tedla (1995).

[2] A perspective proposed by Heller (1970). See for instance also Bech-Jørgensen (1997).

[3] Cohen & Odhiambo (1989).

[4] Bassey (1999).

[5] Fuller (1991).