Radical student participation: lessons from an urban government primary school in Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Recent policies in Ethiopia put students at the heart of school improvement through structures for peer leadership and school-level consultation, evaluation and decision-making. This article draws on an ethnographic study of a government school in Tigray, Ethiopia, to explore how the participation and influence of students is achieved and mediated by structures and processes in school. Three key contexts of student participation are explored: positions of peer leadership (monitor, ‘one-to-five’ network leader); public evaluation sessions (gim gima); and the Parent Student Teacher Association (PSTA). Recommendations are made for sharing and strengthening democratic practices and for future research.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• Ethiopia
• peer learning
• school improvement
• student leadership
• student participation
• student voice
• sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the students and staff of ‘Ketema School’ and the officials of the Tigray REB and WEO who supported this study. I wish to thank my supervisors, Professor David Pedder and Dr Alison Fox, and my former colleague Micheal Abraham, for their insights and support throughout the study. I am grateful to Professor Clive Harber, Professor Wasyl Cajkler, Professor Eva Poluha and the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. This research was made possible through a PhD scholarship from the School of Education, University of Leicester.

Notes

1. These reforms, introduced over the past decade as part of the Government of Ethiopia’s General Education Quality Improvement Package (GEQIP), are currently being evaluated through a major seven-year study as part of the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) project (see Rose and Tassew Woldehanna 2017).

2. Unusual, but not unknown. For example, Crossley et al. (2016) report that primary student involvement in teacher performance appraisal was recently introduced in Fiji.

3. Ketema (a pseudonym, meaning ‘town’ in a Tigrigna) is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.

4. According to national census data, Tigray is 96% Ethiopian Orthdox Christian and 4% Muslim (CSA [Central Statistical Agency] 2007). Ketema School is located halfway between a mosque and a church, and there are roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians in school.

5. Duneier (1999, 338) describes this as the ‘Becker principle’: ‘Most social processes have a structure that comes close to insuring that a certain set of situations will arise over time. These situations practically require people to do or say certain things because there are other things going on that … are more influential than the social condition of a fieldworker being present.’.

6. Many factors may contribute to the differences between Poluha’s (2004) findings at Birabiro School and those reported here. The Grade 4 class in Poluha’s (2004) study was made up of 105 students aged 9–15 from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Conversely, 7B was an upper primary class, ethnically homogenous (Tigrayan), with a narrower age range (11–15), and occupying less cramped conditions. Furthermore, the fieldwork for the Ketema study took place 15 years later, and thus further into the current reform period.

7. Further analysis of the PSTA’s remit is reported elsewhere (Mitchell 2017a, 2017b).