Between Respect and Respectability: How Cuban Primary School Teachers Assert their Role in Society

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Between Respect and Respectability: How Cuban Primary School Teachers Assert their Role in Society

“Teachers don’t produce but we create. What doctor, engineer, etc. do you know that didn’t have a teacher?” Responses such as these were common in my long-term ethnographic research in Havana, Cuba March 2019-2020 during which I utilized participant observation and open-ended interviews to explore the experiences of women primary school teachers during the contemporary teacher shortage. While teachers are rhetorically revered by politicians and in everyday speech, much of the work on Cuban education emphasizes the quantitative successes of the Revolution but fails to address the lived realities of educators who facilitate these accomplishments. I argue that teachers fill the gap between reverential rhetoric and the material constraints of their lived reality by asserting their social significance utilizing a “reflexive political economy” in which their “self-perception and self-making practices [were] related to their place in local, national and global dynamics” as well as highly informed by their familial histories (Ulysse 2007:10). This research and its findings will contribute to our understanding of teacher’s self-making practices. It will shift our focus from what teachers “create” in terms of future professionals and place our attention on how teachers “create” themselves and assert their overall significance in society.

Author

• Angela Crumdy, The Graduate Center, CUNY