Review of Indigenous Teacher Training Using Community-Based Adult Education: Implications for Technology and Outsider Educators

Abstract

Worldwide there are critical shortfalls of teachers, particularly in Indigenous communities. This article considers the use of nonformal education (NFE) in the form of community-based adult education (CBAE) for Indigenous teacher training to meet this need. Drawing on a literature search of Indigenous CBAE initiatives, some of the challenges and common characteristics are identified along with advantages with respect to Indigenous ownership, culturally based curriculum, and community empowerment. By its very nature, CBAE has implications for the Indigenous community's decisions about educational technology and for relationships with outsider educators. Discussion about this generates questions and guidelines to promote self-evaluation by outsider educators who, the author suggests, will find themselves in new roles and relationships.

Notes

¹Teacher quality is a universal concern. Indigenous communities want, and ideally would recruit, teachers who are formally trained but who are also from their community and have retained their cultural identity. However, in many communities worldwide legislation requires all teaching candidates to complete FE teacher training programs with academic entry prerequisites that have been difficult for Indigenous community members to achieve. Where the legislation permits, the community-based adult education (CBAE) approach may be implemented.

Most often NFE teacher training, particularly CBAE, emphasizes learning for personal development and community service, not for career advancement. Often teachers trained in such programs are not paid and they are relegated paraprofessional status by the dominant society, largely based on the lack of qualifications that they brought initially. Presumably because of this, the term professional development rarely appears in the literature on this subject.

²Approximately one-half of the world's countries, 96 out of 195, need to expand their teaching forces in order to be able to enroll all primary school-age children by 2015. … In total, these 96 countries will need at least 1.9 million more teachers in classrooms by 2015 than in 2007 to provide UPE [Universal Primary Education] of good quality. … Sub-Saharan Africa has by far the greatest need for additional teachers. … The number of primary teachers must grow to 3.7 million in the eight years remaining to fulfill the EFA [Education for All] commitment, indicating a gap of 1.2 million. For every two teachers teaching in 2007, there must be three in 2015. (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2009, p. 8)

³The author had expected to find examples of CBAE teacher training in sub-Saharan Africa, where the need is highest for teachers and where the approach has often been used in agricultural extension and HIV/AIDS programs. However, the literature revealed caution and resistance by many of the stakeholders, who hold fast to Western FE teacher training programs, fearing a loss of teacher quality.

⁴For the purpose of this article, outsider educators may be non-Indigenous expatriates or nationals; sometimes they may be Indigenous people of the country who no longer live in the community but have received Western training and become urbanized, losing much of their cultural identity.

⁵This learning and change in an educator is evidence of the mutual transformative learning that can come from the CBAE process.