School-based teachers’ professional development through technology-enhanced learning in Bangladesh

Abstract

To promote significant pedagogical change, the most successful teacher education programmes for the global south happen in the school context. This paper is based on a pre-pilot intervention study of an international education development programme in Bangladesh. Technology-enhanced learning, in this case the use of the Apple^® iPod^® (iPod touch^®), was used to support teachers’ teaching and learning in their school contexts. This paper presents evidence to demonstrate how such school-based technology-enhanced support systems impact on classroom practice and help teachers’ professional development. Using the case of a pre-pilot intervention in the Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programs schools, it explores the teachers’ professional development by analysing interviews with the teachers who were participating in the pre-pilot intervention programme, and draws the conclusion from the collected data that school-based teachers’ professional development through technology-enhanced learning is contributing significantly to in-service training in a resource-constrained context.

Keywords:

• school-based
• teachers’ professional development
• UCEP-Bangladesh
• technology-enhanced learning
• hand-held device

Acknowlegments

The authors would like to thank UKAID for funding the EIA programme and the UCEP Bangladesh authority for allowing them to carry out the research in schools. They are also very thankful to their colleagues from the EIA Base Office in Dhaka, Bangladesh who supported them enormously during the fieldwork. The authors are also very grateful to two colleague TDCs from EIA Base Office, Mohammad Arifuzzaman and Yeasmin Ali, for working with the lead author during fieldwork. They also thank the school administrators and, most of all, the teachers who took part in research activities and helped us to start to understand their professional development contexts.

Notes

1. The head of the UCEP school is called School Administrator, though the head of the school in the mainstream education system is called the head teacher.

2. Teacher Development Coordinators are the main implementers of the EIA intervention. They have been trained by the Open University EIA team to train the teachers.