A study of teacher voice and vision in the narratives of rural South African and Gambian primary school teachers

Int. J. Educational Development, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 393–403, 1998 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reservedPergamon Printed in Great Britain

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A STUDY OF TEACHER VOICE AND VISION IN THE NARRATIVES OFRURAL SOUTH AFRICAN AND GAMBIAN PRIMARY SCHOOL

TEACHERS

TANSY JESSOP AND ALAN PENNY

King Alfred’s University College, School of Education, Sparkford Road, Winchester SO22 4NR, UK

Abstract — This paper is aimed at eliciting teacher views on teaching, their sources of motivationand the conceptual frames out of which they conduct their work. While the research contextsdiffered in rural South Africa and in The Gambia, common questions arose about ownership,participation and the divide between ‘experts’ and ‘practitioners’. A ‘missing discourse’ emergedon the process of making meaning from the curriculum and teaching it. Teachers failed to contestthe ground of their teaching, or question it in relation to their own experience, knowledge andexpertise. Teachers effectively abdicated responsibility for exercising agency over what they taught,to whom, how and for what reason. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

INTRODUCTION

…the teacher is the ultimate key to educational changeand school improvement. The restructuring of schools,the composition of national and provincial curricula, thedevelopment of benchmark assessments — all thesethings are of little value if they do not take the teacherinto account (Hargreaves, 1992, p. ix).

The increasing recognition being given to theimportance of the role of teachers as key playersin changing the educational world is reflected inthe growth over the past 10 years in the numberof studies on teacher voice, teacher narrativeand teacher biography (see for example Ball andGoodson, 1985; Goodson, 1992; Casey, 1993;Connelly and Clandinin, 1987; Nias, 1989;Clandinin and Connelly, 1995; Thomas, 1995).Few would disagree with Hargreaves’ view, andwould also probably wish to concur with Fullan(1991), who argues that one of the main reasonsfor the ‘spectacular lack of success of changeinitiatives’ within the field of teacher develop-ment may be traced to the neglect of teachervoice, vision and theory. Goodson (1992)further suggests that this neglect arises out ofthe fact that those with power to define the edu-cation system (politicians, bureaucrats andadministrators) are often reluctant to relinquishthat control, and in so doing remove the foun-dations for effective learning and change. Inboth the so-called ‘developed world’ and the‘two-thirds world’ the impact of this workremains problematical in spite of a growth in

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the use of such strategies as participatoryappraisal to inform policy-making. The omis-sion of teacher voice in policy-making continuesto represent a failure to understand and takeaccount of endogenous value systems, and torecognise that teachers themselves have explicitand implicit theories about how to achieve sus-tainable educational change and development(Chambers, 1997; Farrell and Oliviera, 1995;Smyth, 1995). The implications of this failureare considerable, not least that to expect radicaland fundamental change in teachers’ beliefs andunderstanding is unrealistic when a primarycondition of sustainable development is notbeing met.

The settings for the studies upon which thispaper are based were the two geographicallydistinct contexts of The Gambia and a rural areaof South Africa, the midlands of KwaZulu–Natal. Initially, it was thought that they wouldprovide data for two independent studies.Indeed, on the surface, the two national contextsare radically different. South Africa is a rela-tively highly industrialised country, with amatching infrastructure. In contrast, the basis ofthe Gambian economy is tourism with peasantsubsistence agriculture dominant outside of theBanjul conurbation. Although both researchcontexts are rural, even here there are major dif-ferences. The most obvious is that the generalinfrastructure and communications within ruralSouth Africa are considerably more sophisti-

394 TANSY JESSOP AND ALAN PENNY

cated than those within The Gambia. Moreover,modern commercial farming dominates evenrural areas in South Africa. However, whencomparing the data gathered in both situationsit emerged that not only were there many simi-larities in what teachers were saying and think-ing, but there were also implications for edu-cational change and policy-making which gobeyondthese case studies in their African set-tings. Common questions arose about ‘owner-ship’, ‘participation’ and the great dividebetween ‘experts’ and ‘practitioners’, who areoften the reluctant implementers of plans,whether devised in Pretoria, Whitehall or Ban-jul. Also common to both cases were issuesrelated to what Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982)term the ‘spread of normalisation’ and the impo-sition of a single cultural, and in the case ofeducation, professional model. There was alsothe seeming over-simplification of issuesthrough the assumption of the existence of neu-tral and objective truths, residing especially inthe discourse of dependency and the separationof ‘them’ and ‘us’. For Gambian teachers thiswas largely encapsulated within the symbolicand technical frames of an externally funded aidproject, while for the rural South African teach-ers, it resided within a strongly held view thatall action and ‘largesse’ emanated from Pretoria.Finally, there were a series of common pro-fessional ‘multiple realities’, framed within anessentially ‘white’ western knowledge systemand professional discourse.

BACKGROUND

AimsThe aims of both studies were similar, and

were primarily an attempt to elicit teacher lifehistories, their sources of motivation and theirviews on teaching, and thereby to discover theconceptual frames out of which teachers con-duct their lives and work. It was hoped that ineliciting these ‘stories’ the studies would add tothe growing body of scholarship in this area, aswell as influence the shape and direction of edu-cational policy-making.

The Two Study ContextsThe South African study took place in the

rural midlands region of KwaZulu–Natal. It isan area widely recognised as being disadvan-

taged, and is one in which thousands of peoplehave died during the pre- and post-1994 electionstruggles between supporters of the rurallydominated Inkatha Freedom Party and the moreurban based African National Congress. Manyschool buildings are in a state of collapse,schools are under-resourced and staffed by ill-trained and/or underqualified teachers who lackthe confidence and/or skills to teach effectively(Motala, 1995). It would be difficult to disputethe resemblance of rural Kwazulu–Natal teach-ers to the following depiction of the poorlytrained and unmotivated teaching corps in thetwo-thirds world:

Most teachers lack adequate general preparation, bothnew and experienced teachers lack many pedagogicalskills, and motivation and professional commitment toteaching is low (Lockheed and Verspoor, 1991, p. 90).

The other study was conducted in The Gam-bia and arose out of work being undertaken aspart of a British Government funded teacherdevelopment project.1 The features described byLockheed and Verspoor prevailed here too, butthere was one major difference. In South Africaconsiderable differences exist in educationalprovision between former ‘white’ schools andthose for other ethnic groups. While in TheGambia there were memories of earlier mission-ary endeavour, an exclusive and well-resourcedurban-based school system did not develop.Nor, of course, was there the history of racism,political exclusion and the trauma of apartheidwhich has been part of the experience and defi-nition of each South African teacher.2

Methodological ConsiderationsThe principles of building theory from the

voices and narratives of teachers necessitatedthe use of research strategies which wouldenable the researchers to theorise from the data.To this end, the studies were conceptualisedwithin a framework of ‘grounded theory’(Glaser and Strauss, 1967), while recognisingthat the quest for meanings is also about one’sown perceptions of the ‘other’ (Said, 1993), andthat frequently these can be little more than ourown self-understandings.

If the key principle of grounded theory istheory generation, then its main vehicle is com-parative analysis. In these studies, comparativeanalysis operated through theoretical samplingwhere the researchers selected multiple com-parison groups over a period of time, according

395A STUDY OF TEACHER VOICE AND VISION

to their capacity to generate theory. Methods ofdata elicitation were also comparative, andincluded a range of techniques such as inter-views, surveys, participatory workshops anddocument analysis. The purpose of comparativeanalysis is ‘in order to discover categories andtheir properties, and to suggest their inter-relationships into a theory’ (Said, 1993, p. 62).These different slices of data enabled theresearchers to search out the connections in thisarea of study through comparative analysis.

In doing comparative analysis, data wascoded according to categories, and theresearchers wrote analytical memos on ques-tions raised by the data. Through a system ofcoding, categories were then compared acrossthe data, and refined until only the most substan-tial of the categories were allowed to stand.These were called core categories. The stage inthe data analysis process where categories hadbeen tested across slices of data to a point wherethe researchers felt confident to base theory onthese concepts is known as saturation. Theseprocedures aimed at ensuring that there was a‘chain of evidence’ leading towards the theoreti-cal outcome of the study (Tesch, 1990, p. 88).

The comparative analysis on which this paperis based consisted of 68 interviews with teachersin rural KwaZulu–Natal, 10 in-depth interviewswith teacher developers in the same province,and an analysis of policy documents. In asecond phase of theory-generation and refine-ment, four participatory workshops were con-ducted with inspectors, teachers advisers andacademics in KwaZulu–Natal. The period oftime over which the South African data werecollected extended from January 1996 throughto August 1996. In The Gambia, 47 interviewswith teachers across the country were under-taken. This was supplemented with a survey of135 teachers in May 1997, and comparisons offindings made with the findings of an inde-pendent evaluation (Blondell, 1997) and aresearch study evaluating aid relationships inThe Gambia (Page, 1997).

The primary style of the interviews in bothstudies was ‘dialogical’ (Siraj-Blatchford,1995), in that the respondents’ frames of refer-ence were probed, while the researchers did notseek to presuppose the primacy of their ownframes of reference. While ‘in theory’ this iswhat the researchers endeavoured to ensure, inpractice this was not always so easy to achieve.

In both studies the interviewers were ‘white’Anglo Saxons from ‘abroad’, and it is clear thatthe implicit and explicit power relationsinvolved in the interviews worked to contain theauthenticity of this dialogue. There is a powerin the dominant discourses heralded by thearrival of highly qualified ‘experts’ which is dif-ficult to circumvent, and which gave rise to arange of unanticipated and varying perceptionsin the course of the interviews. It necessitatedthe use of various strategies of cross-referencingand triangulation both within and without theinterviews in order to encourage and enable therespondents to recognise and challenge theseorthodoxies.

KEY THEMES IN THE TEACHERNARRATIVES

A number of key themes emerged in theteacher narratives. These included the contradic-tions between tradition and modernity in ruralschools; the notion of career choice; and the pre-dominance of two different but intersecting pro-fessional outlooks, manifest in teachers’ viewson teaching, job satisfaction, motivation andmorale. In more abstract terms, these themes allcriss-crossed issues of change and resistance tochange, and positioned teachers at variouspoints along a structure–agency continuum.

Teachers were ambivalent about the impact ofmodernity on schooling. There was considerablenostalgia among older teachers for an imaginedgolden age, in which children respected theirelders, and certainty prevailed. Disillusionmentwith today’s pupils who ‘have no view of thefuture’, who ‘are rude’, and who ‘don’t see theneed for education’ was coupled with nostalgiafor bygone days when teachers had status: ‘Ooh,hoo, it was very nice… we respected theteacher… now, they are not interested in the tea-cher’. For some South African teachers, nostal-gia for the old order, imagined or real, wascoupled with suspicion towards the new batteryof urban-biased, democratic, and politically rad-ical values that have accompanied the collapseof apartheid and the coming of modernity. Therewere also difficulties in reconciling the contra-dictions of the breakdown in traditional values(‘a bad thing’) being experienced at the sametime as the collapse of apartheid (‘a good thing’)was being heralded. In The Gambia, similarcontradictions emerged where teachers saw the


provision of education offering an escape frommarginalisation and poverty in an environmentwhere the possession of literacy and numeracyis assumed increasingly to be vital, but whichalso draws young people away from their cul-tural and rural roots. Working at home or in thefields is seen as a lost opportunity for childrenin spite of the fact that the majority of schoolleavers do not find waged employment. Theseideological tensions were exacerbated by thefact that virtually all teachers regarded tech-nology and the tools of modernity in a positivelight, as was reflected in one South African tea-cher’s sense of wonder: ‘And this year the prin-cipal tried and got for us a photocopier, so weare making things now. We are making won-ders.’

The disjuncture between the modern worldand the remote tribal enclaves made teaching asyllabus conceived in Pretoria or Banjul, out oftextbooks written in English by city-dwellers, anextremely frustrating and difficult task for someteachers. Nonetheless, many expressed implicitsupport for modernity in the ways in which theyconceptualised the aims of education. So, forinstance, one person reasoned that she becamea teacher ‘to broaden the mind of that poorchild, so that that child will be in a position tohave more skills so that that child would beearning a good sum of money’. Equipping chil-dren for the demands and rewards of partici-pation in the modern economy appeared to beone way in which education for transcendencebeyond the ‘restricted everyday world’ of tra-ditional society was valued (Avalos, 1992). Thequestion of whether teachers in extremelydeprived settings would be able to equip chil-dren for modernity was obviously more difficultthan the verbal assent which many gave to theconcept. Poverty undermines the possibility, asthis teacher suggested: ‘As I’ve told you, we arestill teaching with 60, 70…. But even here atthis moment, we simply just teach, using thechoral teaching method, because we can’t payindividual attention’. Sadly, the hope of tran-scending the traditional rural world may wellturn sour as people experience the dream ofmodernity deferred.

Another key theme clustered around thenotion of career choice. In South Africa therewere two distinct trends in the way teachers per-ceived their career choice. More than half of theteachers interviewed attributed instrumental

reasons, related to salary, status, the desire tourbanise and the attainment of qualifications, totheir choice of teaching as a career. This echoesLortie’s finding in America that socioeconomicfactors played a significant role in attractingmembers of the working class to teaching(Lortie, 1975). For a second, smaller group ofteachers, a career in teaching was viewed as anavenue of service, a noble profession to whichpeople are called. The language of upliftment,nation-building, love of children, and cit-izenship permeated the responses of these teach-ers. About a third of the South African teachersfell into this category. Similar instrumental andidealistic motivations were present in TheGambian narratives. However, in contrast,idealistic and service dimensions were prizedabove the instrumental. In general the responsesreflected a mixed and contradictory approach tocareer choice, with idealism running alongsidemore instrumental motivations. The choice ofteaching was often a tangled web of idealism,ambition, desperation, the desire for socialmobility, a love of children and the perceptionthat teaching was an easy option.

The notion of career choice itself was chal-lenged by the interview data. The idea of a pro-fessional as an autonomous person who makeschoices and takes initiative in his or her choiceof career was tempered by a reading of the data.Instead, it appeared that the teacher was a per-son whom socioeconomic circumstance hadconspired to choose. Only about a quarter of theteachers in the South African sample reportedteaching as their first choice as a career, whilenearly a half stated that it was their secondchoice. In the Gambian sample, nearly 80%chose teaching as their first choice, but nearlyall of these qualified this by stating that otherprofessional career options, beyond joining thepolice or military, did not exist for them. It wasalso perhaps significant that fewer than half ofthese indicated that they would choose tobecome a teacher again if given the choice.

A further major theme pervaded teacher dataon the nature of teaching, job satisfaction,motivation and morale.

In analysing these themes it was possible tocontain them in two distinct but sometimesintersecting frames of understanding aboutteaching, an instrumental frame and arelational frame.


The Instrumental FrameThe first frame wasinstrumental. In the class-

room, the practice of an instrumental paradigmwas manifest in teaching and learning as ‘ruleswithout reasons’, memorisation, and a fixedview of what constitutes knowledge. It thereforesupports a concept of the teacher and textbookas repositories of expert knowledge, which needto be passed on to pupils unproblematically.Pupils are expected to absorb ‘knowledge’ in apassive manner, and when assessment demandsit, to squeeze facts out of their sponge-likebrains. The focus for pupils and teachers is toknow ‘the facts’ without relation to the reasonsfor knowing them; essentially, instrumentalismwas to knowwhat, without knowing how orwhy.3 In the Gambian study in particular, theinterviews revealed a lack of discrimination andjudgement over what may be appropriate in anyone teaching and learning situation. The rhetoricof ‘child-centred learning’ was strong, but tea-chers generally failed to point to activities thatmight lead to improved pupil learning evenwhen prompted to do so. There was an assump-tion that effective learning takes place simplybecause certain teaching methods are used.

For the many instrumentalist teachers in bothstudies, the meaning of teaching appeared to liein executing the mechanistic plans of ‘experts’,thereby reducing the process of schooling to aset of time-honoured rituals and forms, the mostimportant of which was the transfer of knowl-edge.4 Thus, teachers spoke of needing ‘to haveenough knowledge to dish out for your kids’, ordescribed a good teacher as one ‘who must beable to transfer the knowledge to the pupils’, oreven talked of ‘installing knowledge’ into thepupils’ heads. In some cases ‘delivering’ knowl-edge was conceived as a mechanical process,over which the teacher had absolute control andauthority, as in this case: ‘when (the teacher)goes to the classroom she knows exactly whatshe is going to say, or what she is going to do’.The implications of the transmission model ofteaching were captured in another teacher’sexpression of dissatisfaction, ‘…being a teacheris you talk every day, from eight until three’.

Teacher life histories, given the ‘apprentice-ship of observation’ (Lortie, 1975, p. 67) theyhad served as pupils, students, and ‘recipients’of in-service training, were likely to have madethe adoption of teacher-centred models of teach-ing almost inevitable, as the dominant model of

practice they themselves had experienced. Peda-gogical choices were further circumscribed bythe realities and constraints of the environment,such as poor resourcing, low morale, inadequatetraining, inspectorial control, overloaded syllabiand overcrowded classes.

The outcome in practice is a perception ofeducation as a ‘delivery system’, which can beimproved by the ‘provision of better tools,resources and environments’. Teachers gener-ally externalised school problems, locating themin the realm of resources. Indeed, the languageof physical resources dominated to the extentthat it virtually excluded discussion of the cur-riculum, teaching approaches and methods,learning and critical reflection. In assessing theproblems facing schools, teachers in the SouthAfrican sample gave much greater weight toimmediate physical resource needs, and rela-tively higher weight to community problemsthan to issues of teaching and learning. By con-trast, while in the Gambian sample the languageof physical resources also dominated, concernsover teaching morale, curriculum and learningand the need for greater support from inspec-torial and advisory services were given a rela-tively higher weight than were concerns withissues of violence, community breakdown,discipline and security. Nonetheless, withininstrumental statements of educational intent,teachers often went on to explore other notionsof teaching and learning. So, for instance, ateacher who described good teaching as ‘toinstall knowledge to pupils’ heads’ went on toqualify this by reasoning that this was ‘so thatyou can be able to confront all the problemswhich are around us’. Similarly, another teacherregarded her role as being ‘to fill people withknowledge’, but went on to reason that this was‘to help pupils have a better insight in life, andan understanding, and a meaning, so that peoplecan have meaning in life’. In contrast, it wasmarked that very few saw their professionaldevelopment as their own responsibility, as thefollowing teacher did: ‘I think that professionaldevelopment is something that a person in a pro-fession should seek out without waiting forsomebody to bring it to his or her own doorstep,because really, if you are in something, and youwant to progress in what you are doing, I thinkyou must find all the necessary means…’.

Beyond the classroom, instrumentalism wasevident in responses to questions about job sat-


isfaction, motivation and morale. This wasmarked by the valorisation of external rewardsof the profession such as salary, status, and hol-idays, even where these rewards had disap-pointed teacher expectations: ‘I thought I wouldbe a millionaire if I were a teacher. But not achance. Not that’. Clearly, salary and othermaterial incentives were key motivating factorsthroughout, being both a great impetus to enterteaching, and, ironically, sources of great dis-gruntlement once within the profession.

The Relational FrameThe second frame of teaching in the data

could be described asrelational, in that the pro-cess of constructing meaningful pedagogicaland collegial relationships of influence withpupils and teachers was considered a centraldimension of teaching and learning. This framehas similarities to what Carr and Kemmis(1987) describe as thepractical view of edu-cation, which asserts that education is a fluidsocial process which cannot be reduced to tech-nical control. For the relational teacher, edu-cation is a moral activity which takes place ina socially complex and fluid environment,where the process is fundamentally a humanactivity, rather than a technical enterprise. Themeans are more important than the ends. In thisview, learning is seen as a process in whichpupils actively engage while the teacher guidesor facilitates this process. Teaching thereforeinvolves moving beyond knowingwhat the cur-riculum requires, to knowinghow best to teachit, and finally to knowingwhy it is being taught.The implications of knowingwhy may or maynot include a critical view of the historical andpolitical location of education.

Relational teachers stressed a view of learn-ing as an active process ‘where you must com-municate with the child, where the childrenmust be more active than the teacher, not likeour traditional ways where the teacher wouldstand and teach and teach until you becamedrowsy’. In this view, the background thatpupils bring to the classroom was consideredvaluable, as this teacher intimated: ‘…the chil-dren must talk, and give us more about theirbackground, the knowledge they have from theirhomes… so they must develop themselves’.Models of good teaching encouraged discoverylearning: ‘She didn’t tell us things, but shewanted us to discover things on our own’. For

relational teachers, education had a moral basis,and rested on the principles and ethics of thosewho taught: ‘A good teacher should be a personof high morals, because we are teaching youngpeople who have got problems’. The packageof moral values articulated by teachers includedcaring for the wider community, treating chil-dren with dignity and fairness, and being pro-fessionally accountable. Beyond these values,relational teachers expressed the view that tea-chers should ‘be an example in all aspects, inteaching as well as studying’, laying stress onthe fact that teachers are life-long learners whohave the responsibility of ‘planting that cultureof learning in the child’.

For relational teachers, the rewards of teach-ing were also to be found within loving, nurtur-ing and caring relationships with pupils. A quar-ter of teachers in the South African interviewsample, and over a third in The Gambian sampleexpressed these relational aspects of teaching,constructing a language of parenting as the basicmetaphor for primary teaching. Loving childrenwas regarded as the single most important qual-ity of a good teacher by nearly two-thirds ofteachers interviewed in both the KwaZulu andThe Gambian sample. In different contexts, bothCasey (1996) and Nias (1989) have argued forgreater value to be placed on the nurturing sideof teaching as opposed to the prevalent rationaldiscourse of teacher-as-authority and expert. Inthese studies, however, it sometimes appearedthat the language of love and nurturing maskedteacher insecurities about the curriculum, meth-odology and teaching on the basis of inadequatetraining with few resources. Elsewhere, the dis-course of teachingas caring has also beencalled into question as reducing teaching to achild-minding exercise. In a different context,Hargreaves (1994) has cautioned againstlovingpedagogy taking precedence overlearningpedagogy:

…there is evidence that a narrow or exclusive orientationto teaching as personal care can lead to less rather thanmore. When teaching is seen as an extension of the kindsof caring and nurturing relationships that typify parent-ing, this diminishes teachers’ valuing of pedagogycourses and professional attitudes (Hargreaves, 1994,p. 146).

The presence of ‘love’ in the vocabulary ofmany primary teachers in the interview samplewas problematical for another reason, in that itsuggested that teachers lacked a professional


vocabulary for talking about pedagogy. Jackson(1968); Lortie (1975); Hargreaves (1994) haveall referred to the fact that many teachers lacka technical vocabulary, a factor which was com-pounded in these cross-linguistic interviews, inwhich respondents were operating in theirsecond, or third language.

A Missing FrameBoth the relational and instrumental views of

teaching were suggestive of gaps within teacherframes, and when combined in any one narra-tive, they were held together in contradictoryways. In these cases there was an espousal ofthe value of potentially meaningful pupil–teacher relationships on the one hand, whilethere was an implicit denial of this within abroader frame of instrumentalism, on the other.Gaps in teacher frames were reflected in thepaucity of teacher voices onthe process of mak-ing meaning from the curriculum. Very few tea-chers appeared to have a sense of ‘ownership’over the curriculum or the process of teachingit. There was little reflection on methodology orthe meaning of ‘knowledge’ as espoused by thetextbook and the syllabus, with the consequencethat these authoritative texts were accepted asrecipes for classroom practice. The fact thatmany teachers failed to contest the ground oftheir teaching, or question it in relation to theirown experience, knowledge and expertise meantthat teachers had effectively abdicated responsi-bility for exercising agency over what theytaught, to whom, how, and for what reason.Between the instrumental and relational framesof teachers lay a missing frame, where thedimensions of ownership and reflective actionwere absent. Figure 1 represents a way of the-orising teacher data according to this missingframe, in which the missing frame or ‘gap’ isrepresented by the shaded oval, and the pre-dominant instrumental and relational frames bythe unshaded ovals.

Within the gaps, tensions and contradictionsin the voices of teachers as evidenced in thethemes of modernity and tradition, careerchoice, and the two dominant frames of teach-ing, lie the ‘real crunch’ issues for teacherdevelopment policy-makers. If these are theoperating frames of rural teachers, to ignoretheir implications and particularly that of the‘missing frame’, which they suggest is to adoptthe foolhardy approach of prescribing remedies

without reference to the realities. Ironically,many teacher development and policy initiativesaddress themselves to this ‘missing frame’,using a language of change which has little orno resonance in the hearts and minds of teach-ers. The result is often therhetoric of reflective,child-centred, activity-based pedagogies, ratherthan thereality.

In reviewing the evidence, it is worth notingthat there may be discrepancies between whatteacherssayin an educational context, and whatthey do in the classroom (see Keddie, 1971). Ina more recent work, Thomas (1995) has arguedthat teacher narratives are difficult to validate,‘We have no way of ascertaining the story’s linkwith actual events’ (Thomas, 1995, p. 19). Atthe same time, there is considerable supportingevidence in the literature to show that instru-mental patterns like rote learning prevail inmany rural primary classrooms (Christie andGordon, 1992; Hartshorne, 1992; Motala, 1995;Jessop, 1997; Page, 1997; Penny and Hayter,1997). Perhaps all that can be concluded withany certainty is that in this study the search formeaning insinuated itself into teachers’ instru-mental discourses in a way which made it diffi-cult to classify and categorise teachers simplyaccording to an instrumental paradigm. The nar-ratives provided more complex and contradic-tory definitions of good teaching, which may beboth ‘to give information’ and to discoverknowledge through a process of social interac-tion.

DISCUSSION

Unlike the political situation in The Gambia,where in spite of a military coup and subsequentelections in 1996 there has been little overtpolitical change, the South African experiencehas been one of massive change since 1994. InSouth Africa, this has been reflected in edu-cation policy, but has generally not proceededbeyond documents and promises for most teach-ers and pupils in rural schools (Hartshorne,1992, p. 334; Christie, 1996, pp. 77–80; Parker,1996, p. 2). Change in education has been con-centrated largely in the policy arena, whilewithin most rural schools continuities with thepast have persisted, and there has been no deeptransformation of the education process or,indeed, of pedagogic practice (op. cit.). Simi-larly, policy change in The Gambia in response


Fig. 1. Oval diagram: the gap between instrumental and relational frames.

to teacher development initiatives like RESETThas been minimal. This is not surprising, fortwo reasons.

The first is the philosophical axiom that ‘con-tinuities exist through the most radical and pro-found phases of social transformation’(Giddens, 1979, p. 216). The expectation that anew democratic order in South Africa wouldusher in a new education system, and similarlythat RESETT would change the education land-scape in The Gambia, almost automatically, isprofoundly naive. Central to this contention isFullan’s aphorism that ‘change is a process, notan event’ (Fullan, 1982, p. 115). Similarly, con-tinuity is a process, embedded in the sedimentedand taken-for-granted ways of believing and act-ing of most teachers. Necessarily, changeinvolves conflict between old and new ways,and therefore the process of change is ‘charac-teristically ambivalent’ (Fullan, 1982, p. 7).While it is beyond the scope of this paper topursue the philosophical implications of change,nonetheless the researchers would position theiranalysis against a broader canvas where knowl-edge is perceived to be conjectural, personaland political.

The second reason for the failure of educationreform initiatives in South Africa, The Gambia(or, for that matter, anywhere) is embedded inthe technical, expert-driven and centralised nat-ure of education policy and change initiatives.In South Africa, for example, policy directed atchange has been firmly located at the centre, in

the hands of national and international scholarsand policy-makers.5 In The Gambia this hasbeen no less so, and the distance of policy-mak-ing from the realities of life in classrooms is asgreat. This phenomenon has been describedrather aptly (if anachronistically) as the ‘decidedin Moscow, and telegraphed to the provinces’model of teacher development (Schwab, cited inLittle, 1992, p. 197). Crucially, the centralisednature of policy-making and teacher develop-ment practice has ignored the ‘purposes and per-sonalities’ of individual teachers and the con-texts in which they work (Hargreaves, 1994, p.253), in favour of delivering a ‘rhetoric of con-clusions’ (Clandinin and Connelly, 1995, p. 7).In South Africa, this is reflected both in edu-cation policy documents that tend to be decon-textualised, technical analyses of the situation,such as the COTEP6 document (1995), and theNational Teacher Audit (1995), as well as in theprevalence of pre-packaged, short-course in-ser-vice which is deliveredto teachers.7 In TheGambia an attempt was made to break this top-down model of teacher development by locatingRESETT largely outside of the Education Min-istry, and some would argue that this gave theinitiative its greatest chance of success. The dif-ficulty now is that with the withdrawal of exter-nal technical assistance, the successor ofRESETT has had to be institutionalised into aministry that continues to exercise top-downcontrol. Clearly the development ideologyimplicit in RESETT was not owned explicitly


within the ministry, and now poses a threat toit. While Blondell (1997); Page (1997); Pennyand Hayter (1997) all acknowledge that teacherperceptions have undergone real shifts as aresult of the RESETT project, there remains theview among most teachers that educationalchange is initiated from above. Indeed, teachersexpress the fear that the pedagogical changesinititated by RESETT are unlikely to be sus-tained once technical assistance for this initiat-ive formally comes to an end.

Centrally, this paper is arguing that the‘teacher-as-person’ needs to inform policy-mak-ing and teacher development if educationchange is to be sustained. There seems littledoubt that making it happen, merging educationpolicy and the teacher-as-person, is what Harg-reaves (1994) terms the ‘real crunch’. As hesays:

The real crunch comes in the relationship between thesenew programs or policies and the thousands of subjectiverealities embedded in people’s individual and organis-ational contexts and their personal histories.(Hargreaves, 1994, p. 43)

The authors have argued that the rediscoveryof teacher voice, narrative and theory by teach-ers and teacher developers is one such strategy,based as it is on the conviction that for changeto be implemented and sustained, teachers needto own the educational innovation and the pro-cess of change. Moreover, educational develop-ment is cultural and ideological, tied as it is topeople’s perceptions of knowing, doing andworth. The word ‘ownership’ connotes believ-ing in, understanding, and seeing enough benefitto invest sufficient personal energy in it. Thedifficulty, of course, is that teachers are a het-erogeneous group of professionals, and there islikely to be significant divergence of under-standing among them. Clearly, the implicationsof teacher ownership as a principle are that mostof the change process needs to be located in,devolved to, and steered through the school andlocal community.

What is interesting about the concept ofteacher ownership is that it collapses thedivision between those who conceptualise andthose who implement. When teachers areregarded only as implementers of other people’splans, the power of pedagogy is lost to techni-cism. Teachers become technicians, and insteadof being responsible for developing the curricu-lum, they are simply its deliverers. Recovering

teacher voice in policy-making is an importantway of collapsing this division, and re-openingthe debate about what matters to teachers.Invoking teacher voice begins to invite teachers‘back out of the shadows’ (Goodson, 1992), andinitiates a dialogue across the divide betweenthose who plan changes with the rationality ofdistance, and those who, as a result of a complexof factors, are often the reluctant implementers.Without a rediscovery of voice, teachers areunlikely to articulate a theoretical position oneducation. However, as Ellsworth (1989) hasshown, to idealise the articulation of ‘voice’ asa profoundly empowering and transformativeprocess, is misguided. In fact, the process of dis-covering the partial and contradictory ‘knowl-edges’ that are part of any teacher’s subjectivitymay disappoint those looking for coherentanswers. Ironically, given the opportunity forvoice, teachers may defer to the view that the‘truth lies outside themselves’ (Keiny, 1994, p.157), and therefore perpetuate their own voice-lessness.

In summary then, the paper shifts theorisingabout educational change from the arena of pol-icy to the arena of teacher beliefs and their lifehistories. In so doing, it recognises that academ-ics, education planners, teachers, parents andchildren all have implicit theories about howeducation should work. However, in seeking torecover and formaliseteacher theory, theresearch begins to make explicit some of thepresuppositions upon which teachers in adeveloping world context base their work inclassrooms. If the focus of implicit theories gov-erning policy has been to change teaching fromwithout, then the focus of this grounded theoryof teacher development is to bring about changefrom within. In similar vein, Hargreaves (1994)makes a distinction between root and branchchanges, whereinbranchchanges represent sig-nificant, specific changes of practice in theclassroom, thus changing the surface features ofa teacher’s practice, whereasroot changes hap-pen when teachers’ beliefs are affected and theirunderstandings of the social organisation ofteaching undergo redefinition, and thus changeoccurs at a deeper level and is more likely tobe sustained (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 6). It is thecontention of the authors that suchroot changeswill only occur once teachers are able to articu-late, reflect on, and defend their theories of


teaching. To this end, the recovery of teachervoice and vision becomes critical.

Acknowledgements —The assistance of Ken Harley, JohnHayter and Gillian Penny with the interviewing is grate-fully acknowledged.

NOTES

1. The RESETT Project aimed to enhance the teachingability of selected classroom teachers in four core sub-ject areas, to improve teacher performance throughenhancing subject knowledge, increasing familiaritywith syllabi and textbooks, focussing on teachingmethodology and facilitating material production.

2. It is beyond the scope of this paper to engage in adiscussion of this, although as will emerge in the dis-cussion section of the paper, the trauma of apartheidis a ‘country of the mind’ and provides both a parti-cularly acute frame for the teacher narratives and alens through which to interpret these narratives.

3. In the literature on development this has been termedformalism. Characteristic of formalist approaches toeducation are: rigid adherence to syllabi, the use oftextbook teaching, tight discipline, inspection, and theneglect of socio-emotional aspects of pupil develop-ment (Beeby, 1966, 1986).

4. Paulo Freire (1972) described this as the ‘bankingmodel’ of education. Education is like the transactionof depositing money into a bank. It implies an emptyaccount (pupils), passively receiving money(knowledge) from the teacher who is expert or well-endowed with the knowledgecurrency(Freire, 1972,pp. 46–47).

5. Examples of some recent policy statements and analy-ses which have been drafted centrally, and often withinternational input, include: NEPI (National EducationPolicy Initiative) (1992); CUMSA Document(Committee of Heads of Education in South Africa)(1991); An Agenda of Possibilities: National Policy onTeacher Supply, Utilisation and Development (1996);COTEP Document (Committee on Teacher EducationPolicy) (1995); and The National Teacher EducationAudit (1995).

6. Committee on Teacher Education Policy Document(1995). This was a precursor to the Audit Document.

7. The National Teacher Education Audit records thatsome 240,000 teachers, that is more than half of theteaching corps, underwent in-service by short-courseduring 1994.

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Documents

A study of teacher voice and vision in the narratives of rural South African and Gambian primary school teachers