| Popis: |
The status of school teachers in much ofrural Sub-Saharan Africa has a dual nature across many different countries. At the local level they are influential social actors, respectable people who are expected to provide a positive role model to their pupils and the wider local community. Within the national civil service, they are not often treated as very important - sometimes paid intermittently and frequently problematised as lacking in the capacit to deliver ambitious education-led national development strategies. In this paper we report on the results of a pilot study in rural Malawi, which sort to investigate the tacit knowledge and pedagogical skills of primary school teachers using participatory visual methods. Around a three week participatory video exercise with teachers from two schools, a combination of participatory action research, participant-observation, semi-structured and photo-elcited interviews and group reflection was analysed to understand how different data-gathering and analytical techniques could combine to surface and valorise the teachers' knowledge. Rather than a lack of skills and capacity, the data instead showed the range of skills and personal characteristics involved in the teachers' practice. Cognitive mapping on a subset of the data showed that the concept of active learning operationalised independently at two schools was (i) consisten, (ii) informed sophisticated practice, and (iii) was richer than that embedded in much external expert knowledge about teaching |
