Educational Research of Consequence for Teachers and Students in the Global South

• In Event: Formative Interventions for Justice, Futurity, and Sustainability

Abstract

Objectives
This study sought to promote teachers’ agency in the Global South. We aimed to identify systematic contradictions hampering pedagogical practices, and to identify feasible low-and-no-cost means to overcome them. Participants were from Nepal and Bhutan. Nepal, in particular, suffers from legacies of the influence of British use of education as a means of colonial control (Shrestha, 2017), with present system criticised as deeply unequal and culturally decontextualised (Luitel, 2009).

Theoretical framework
The study uses and advances Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT seeks consequence by closing the gap between what is and what ought to be. Within CHAT, the study draws on the theory of expansive learning (Engeström, 2016) through which culturally new practices, artefacts and concepts are created. Increasingly complex understandings of the object of activity create new possibilities for acting. The object here was high-quality, culturally contextualised, equitable teaching. The principle of transformative agency by double stimulation was incorporated: the mechanism whereby people intentionally break out of conflicting situations (Sannino 2015), a ‘liberating achievement of agency formation’ (Engeström, 2007, p. 374)

Methods
Change Laboratory methods (Engeström, 2007) were adapted to the opportunities and constraints of the study. Eight workshops were held during the 14 participants’ 2-week visit to Australia.

Data sources
Ethics consent was not given to record and transcribe workshops, but notes were taken, and records of all artefacts produced during them kept as data. Following the workshops, regular email exchanges with participants over 18 months added to the data, alongside copies of lesson plans, students’ work, and other documents. Ten interviews with teachers were audio recorded and transcribed. Tracing the emergence of participants’ agency, analysis upheld CHAT principles of following the object, identifying systemic contradictions, expansive learning actions, and use of artefacts in double stimulation. Change was analytically located in the evolution of cultural artefacts and the relationships participants had with them.

Results
The main contradiction was between heavy curriculum content demands and desired pedagogical practices that educators felt required time to implement in crowded, diverse, resource-poor classrooms. Participants co-developed eight principles that could address these: growth, playfulness, liveliness, designing for praise, setting up for success, inclusiveness, journeys between abstract and concrete, and using stories about learning. These were developed into concrete models for implementation, including an idea of MicroProjects – compact activities taking <30 minutes. One group of participants worked with teachers from a school in Kathmandu to implement MicroProjects across subjects from Grades 1-12. New artefacts were produced to support is sustaining in practice. Three years later, MicroProjects were still in use across the school.

Significance
This study shows Change Laboratory methods can be adapted and deliver strong results despite methodological constraints in this study. The approach enabled teachers to close the gap between what is and what ought to be, enacting pedagogies that were previously deemed impossible. That these were explicitly developed as low-or-no-cost approaches for time-poor teachers in resource-poor environments holds significant promise for similar success in other contexts of the Global South.

Author

• Nick Hopwood, University of Technology Sydney
  Presenting Author