South-South partnerships in STEM teacher education - Knowledge creation, adaptation and dissemination

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel will discuss the South-South partnership, Connected Learning for STEM (CL4STEM) among four higher education institutions engaged in teacher education in South Asia and Africa, to address the quality of teacher professional development in Science and Mathematics. The partners are Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University (IBBUL) Nigeria, Samtse College of Education (SCE) Bhutan, Open University Tanzania (OUT) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) India. The partnership involves piloting and researching the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx), an innovation for teacher professional development that was developed and implemented to address the quality of secondary education in India, to the new country contexts of Bhutan, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The programme’s technical design for under-resourced contexts deploys interactive STEM OERs and subject teacher CoPs on mobile devices. The project harnesses ICT and Communities of Practice (CoP) to ensure continued academic support to teachers beyond the project period. The partnership focused on designing high-quality OERs for a few critical STEM topics from the secondary school curriculum of Nigeria, Tanzania and Bhutan, to address the pedagogical content knowledge of newly qualified teachers in these countries and prepare them for inclusive classroom practice.
Weak subject content and pedagogical knowledge, and poor quality of pre and in-service teacher training are central problems of teacher development, particularly in the Science and Mathematics subjects, in the contexts of many countries in the global south (KIX 2019). Tikly et al (2017) establish a strong need for enhancing subject content and pedagogic knowledge of teachers and note that there are currently limited opportunities for maths and science teachers to upgrade their knowledge. The quality of STEM learning is an area requiring improvement in several countries as evidenced by student learning data and teacher knowledge (Dundar et al,2014). With respect to teacher education, Leutwyler, Popov and Wolhuter (2017) point out that appropriate internationalization needs to be developed for teacher education, especially in light of global policy borrowing and local regulations. Teacher education is a crowded space where the interests of multiple distinct entities need to be taken into consideration when knowledge is produced (Tatto, Richmond & Andrews, 2016). Key interventions that have hitherto attempted to support teacher professional development in Africa and South Asia have largely been led by countries of the global North. Researchers have highlighted the skewed nature of such interventions in terms of the hegemony of northern knowledge and the need for balance and mutual respect in the north-south partnerships (Martin, 2011; Chasi, 2019). Knowledge creation and dissemination become especially problematic, given that editorial control rests with the North and “these controlling processes usually exclude Southern people” (Graves,2007:69).
The panellists will describe and reflect on the participatory and localised ecosystem approach to knowledge creation, adaptation and dissemination being used in this South-South partnership to support teacher professional development in the partner countries.
The objectives of the panel discussion are to address the following questions:
1. Why is the partnership forged? What are some of the needs at the systemic, institutional and individual collaborators’ levels that the partnership attempted to address? How different is this partnership from others that the individual institutions have with institutions of the global north?
2. What is the nature of challenges in teacher professional development that the three countries face? How was the CL4STEM project conceptualized to addressed them? What are the key learnings from the partnership in the design and implementation of the project?
3. What are the processes that emerged from the partnership for creating, adapting and disseminating knowledge, based on the local contexts and resource availability? What were some of the opportunities and challenges offered by the virtual mode of collaboration? How were the opportunities harnessed and how were the challenges addressed?

Sub Unit

• Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession SIG

Chair

• Mohammed Tajordeen Mustapha

Individual Presentations

• Knowledge creation, adaptation and dissemination: Partnerships, Processes and Products - Vikas Maniar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

• Challenges of Scaling Education innovation in the global South - Edephonce Nfuka, Open University of Tanzania

• Technology Adaptation for Teacher Professional Development - Abdullahi Abubakar Kawu, IBB University, Lapai, Nigeria

Discussant

• Padma Sarangapani, Tata Institute of Social Sciences