Concerning teacher recruitment: Coloniality and elementary teacher recruitment in Senegal

• In Event: Teacher as a profession: Measures to attract and retain more teachers

Proposal

Teacher recruitment is regularly presented as a policy challenge that is best understood through the economic concepts of supply and demand (Guarino, et al., 2006), creating fragmented and unstable social and economic experiences for teachers, their students, and their communities. In this paper, I disrupt this common framing by adopting an approach to critical policy analysis (CPA) that rethinks CPA with theories of de/coloniality (Pillow, 2017). Specifically, I analyze stories about the recruitment of elementary school teachers in Senegal and ask the question: In what ways do teacher recruitment policies and practices sustain coloniality? Through doing so, I seek to reframe recruitment policies and practices that have come to be seen as common sense - or as “matters of fact” - as “matters of concern” that merit critical examination by all involved in schooling (Latour, 2004; Simons, Olssen & Peters, 2009).

Centering this analysis of teacher recruitment on coloniality - or the continued forms of colonial ways of knowing, being, and relating that endure, including in contexts that have officially been decolonized (Quijano, 2007; Stein, et al., 2022) - draws attention to aspects of recruitment that have been forgotten, ignored, fragmented (Rhee, 2021). Beyond a narrow analysis of policy and economic changes, this focus on coloniality draws attention to how relational, affective, and intellectual dispositions (Stein, et al., 2020) are sustained through teacher recruitment.

Drawing on theories of de/coloniality and narrative inquiry (Kim, 2016), I “restory” teacher recruitment by analyzing stories about the recruitment process, including those found in official policy documents and those told in private and public about, to, and by future teachers. The stories examined in this paper come from ethnographic data generated from 2018 to 2020 (interviews and participant observation), as well as a variety of texts (policy documents, press releases, newspaper articles, and additional published literature). I then analyze these stories for explicit and implicit ways in which coloniality manifests in teacher recruitment (e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015; Dieng, 2023; Stein, et al, 2020). As a white, settler, US-American woman who was a teacher educator during the implementation of similar policies in another context, I position myself as an “unreliable narrator” of these stories and explore both my individual and shared complicities.

Through this analysis, I identify divergent stories of teacher recruitment. For example, many student-teachers said they decided to “try their luck” to secure a spot as a teacher, referencing the small percentage of applicants recruited in recent years and emphasizing the unpredictability inherent in the recruitment process. In contrast, education leaders - during interviews and in public spaces - regularly claimed that those admitted were the “crème de la crème'' among the applicant pool, often citing examples of applicants with academic credentials that greatly exceeded the minimum requirements. Teacher educators drew upon both of these narratives simultaneously as they described the various impacts of the shifts in teacher recruitment and teachers’ working conditions. Building on these and other recruitment stories, I trace how the content, sequencing, and structure of the competitive entrance exams and related practices (e.g., required applicant credentials, rankings of applicants, perceived quality of teacher education centers, etc.) sustain coloniality through both literal and figurative hierarchies within teacher recruitment. This includes analyzing connections between recent recruitment policies, historical examples of policies instituted by French colonial administrators as part of their “civilizing mission” (Barthélémy, 2003; Ly, 2009; Sabatier, 1977), how these shifted following independence (Diop, 2012; Mesli, 2013), and current practices. After decades of largely relying on civil service teachers, Senegal began recruiting elementary teachers on short-term contracts in the mid-1990s (Barro, 2009; Republic of Senegal, 1995) due to severe economic reforms required by the International Monetary Fund’s through its structural adjustment program (Traoré & Fonkeng, 2012). This practice has since changed; teachers are now recruited and hired into a liminal status for at least their first year of teaching, after which they can become civil servants upon passing an exam. The many forms of hierarchies created by these policies shape the affective, relational, and intellectual dispositions that are taught to and resisted by student-teachers during recruitment in ways that endure long after they become teachers.

By reframing teacher recruitment as a colonial technology (la paperson, 2017), this paper seeks to move normalized teacher recruitment practices from “matters of fact” into “matters of concern,” an approach created by Latour (2004) and adapted by Simons, Olssen, and Peters (2009) for the analysis of educational issues. Matters of concern, Simons et al. (2009) contend, “are things that create a public, not in view of finding agreement (on facts or values), but by gathering people for whom something is at stake” (p. x). While matters of fact are understood to be issues that have been normalized and are largely seen to be the responsibility of experts and authorities, matters of concern are issues of public concern, as no individual or organized entity is understood to be responsible for them. When we shift our analytic gaze away from supply, demand, and other matters of fact, and towards the meaning that is made and communicated through the stories people tell, we can recognize how teacher recruitment is already a matter of concern for many involved. By framing teacher recruitment as a matter of concern, this study recognizes how the “public” - including student-teachers, teacher educators, and others - are (re)engaging with the process of teacher recruitment by resisting dominant narratives and disrupting oppressive discourses and practice. This approach invites all involved in schooling to (re)consider what is at stake – both now and in the decades and generations to come - in teacher recruitment.

Author

• Rachel A. Lockart, Michigan State University