“A contribution to my country”: professional lives of teachers in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

International attention to improving learning outcomes has increasingly focused on the impact of teachers, those that directly implement national education goals. For small, resource-poor countries where communities have minimal schooling experience, the role of the teacher in building academic knowledge and skills is even more valued, to both support that community and the nation as a whole. Yet governments and other stakeholders may not know much about their teachers’ lives: why they teach, what keeps them motivated and what makes the education system vulnerable to teacher attrition. This paper seeks to understand the lives of the teachers, in this case, in Timor-Leste. This paper reports on the findings from a recent survey of Timorese primary school teachers, finding while the challenges are many, there is a strong sense of personal contribution to the nation’s development evident in teachers’ work, something that the local education ministry might consider in supporting the work of its teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• teacher attrition and retention
• Timor-Leste
• primary education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The name of the government ministry charged with the responsibility for formal school education has had various names, currently Ministério do Educação, Juventude e Desporto. In this paper the term “Education Ministry” will be used to refer to any iterations of this body.

2. The Educational Management Information System (EMIS) is the Education Ministry’s statistical database. Figures quoted here were provided in April 2019, dated July 2018.