The Pluto Problem: Reflexivities of Discomfort in Teacher Professional Development

ABSTRACT

This article utilises narrative inquiry as a means to explore reflexively our roles as two scholars/teacher educators with extensive experience in education and international development initiatives in East and Southern Africa. It focuses on a teacher professional development program in Tanzania we helped initiate and facilitate for more than five years whose aim was to promote more critical, learner-centred approaches to teaching across the country’s secondary school curriculum. We narrate several key incidents from the program that led us to examine our complicity in establishing and maintaining the very hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination the program sought to challenge. Throughout, we engage reflexively with postcolonial theory in an effort to provincialise the Anglo-American assumptions about pedagogy implicit in learner-centred approaches to teaching that form a key aspect of contemporary global education reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative inquiry
• postcolonial theory
• pedagogy
• teacher professional development
• international development
• teacher education
• comparative and international education
• Tanzania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The names of the Tanzanian teachers and teacher educators are pseudonyms.

2. There is no straightforward terminology to capture the distinction we are making between the institutions and individuals privileged by enduring colonial relations of power and those who are marginalized by them. There are Tanzanians who have studied in the North/West/First World whose views on Western knowledge are little different from those born in these regions, and our perspectives have been strongly influenced by years of living and working in the South/non-West/Third World. Following the lead of others (Khoja-Moolji, 2017), we use each of these terms throughout the article even as we acknowledge their geographical, intellectual, and political limitations.

3. Exploring the nuances between concepts such as ‘postcolonial’, ‘neo-colonial’, ‘decolonial’, etc., is considerably complex and beyond the scope of this specific paper. Moreover, as Williams (2019) notes, ‘the prefix “post” in postcolonial may be deceptive in that it blunts the capacities of independent nation-states in recognizing how dependencies still exist’ (p. 2). Its problematic elements notwithstanding, we use ‘postcolonial’ in this piece to reflect the broader history and body of postcolonial theory upon which we draw, not to suggest that colonialism/imperialism has ended.

4. The Teaching in Action program was produced and co-facilitated by many individuals over nearly a decade. While any attempt to name all of the contributors would be impossible, it is vital to note that the program progressed due to the commitments of these collaborators.

5. The Ministry of Education and Culture has since changed its name to the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.

6. The Teaching in Action program is now completely facilitated by our Tanzanian colleagues. This reflects the original design and intent of the program: Tanzanian ownership and facilitation increased as reliance on external donors and facilitators decreased. We believed this would help improve the sustainability of the program and its potential benefits for the teachers, teacher educators, and the institution hosting the program.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Comparative and International Education Research Network, Sydney School of Education ans Social Work, University of Sydney.

Notes on contributors

Matthew A. M. Thomas

Matthew A. M. Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Education and Sociology of Education at the University of Sydney. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota and an MA from Columbia University, Teachers College. His research examines educational policies, pedagogical practices, and teacher and higher education.

Frances K. Vavrus

Frances K. Vavrus is a Professor in Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota and served as a Visiting Academic at The University of Sydney. Her research and teaching interests consider the transformative potential and limitations of education in sub-Saharan Africa. She is the co-author of Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach (2017), Teaching in Tension (2013), and author of Desire and decline: Schooling amid crisis in Tanzania (2003/2007).