I was led by my colleague across a dusty school playing field under the baking mid-morning sun in a poor suburb of Asmara. At first, it seemed that the school was deserted, as almost all schools in Eritrea are on Sunday mornings. But as we approached the classrooms, we began to hear voices inside. We approached one classroom quietly and peered in. Two students were standing in front of fifty or so others, the dismantled parts of an old broken computer on the desk before them. They were explaining to their classmates about the various parts of the computer and how they worked, while the latter quietly took notes and sometimes asked questions. Our arrival hardly disturbed them. These students were used to visiting tsadas.Footnote 1 We sat at the back and watched a whole lesson taught by these two ‘tutors’. After the presentation came groupwork, in which the students discussed and compared notes on exam-type questions that one of the tutors had written on the board. Then the tutors paused the groupwork and began questioning elected group members, often probing them for further information and testing their understanding. Occasional mistakes were corrected by classmates or tutors in a spirit of discovery rather than criticism. The lesson concluded with the tutors inviting any further questions from peers. This was one of three classes of over 150 students in total, all of whom voluntarily came to school on Saturdays and Sundays, and had learnt to teach each other under the guidance of their teacher, Matiewas Ghebrechristos, who we subsequently found sitting quietly at the back of one of the other classrooms. His weekend ‘science club’, now in its fourth year, included lessons in almost every subject on the curriculum and many that were not (e.g., ‘green club’ and ‘drama club’). Matiewas is well known – during my two years in Eritrea as a volunteer teacher trainer, I was one of many who was taken on the pilgrimage to his school. To some extent, he was the tsada’s model teacher – evidence that a learner-centred pedagogy could work in Eritrea, at least in extracurricular education. Yet there were many other effective teachers across this financially poor country – not all were learner-centred in their approach, and very few known about. These teachers taught me two valuable lessons during my time there: that effective teachers are not exclusive to the global North, and that they are not all alike…
1.1 Why This Book?
It is a self-evident truth that teacher quality varies in any educational system. There are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere. It is also self-evident that documenting and sharing knowledge about the practices of good teachers – the key focus of teacher expertise studies – is of use, in multiple ways, to educational systems around the world. This is particularly true of low-income countries in the global South (Nordstrum, Reference Nordstrum2015; Pryor et al., Reference Pryor, Akyeampong, Westbrook and Lussier2012; Westbrook et al., Reference Westbrook, Durrani, Brown, Orr, Pryor, Boddy and Salvi2013), where improvements in quality in education are often urgently stressed by Western bodies as priorities in the battle to reduce poverty and support both social and economic development (e.g., UNESCO, 2014). Despite this, and despite the huge sums of development aid invested into quality-related interventions every year, it is a surprising reality that ‘there is remarkably little good evidence on the effectiveness of different pedagogical practices in developing countries’ (Muralidharan, Reference Muralidharan, Banerjee and Duflo2017, p. 377). As Pryor et al. note:
The knowledge base of successful teaching in low income contexts is not sufficiently developed. Much research has concentrated on the deficiencies of teaching in low income countries and we therefore have accounts of poor practice and pupil failure. What we do not have are detailed descriptions of teachers’ good practice in contexts that are challenging. There is a need for research to seek out examples, to theorise them and to make them available as a resource for teacher education and policymaking.
In this book, I offer evidence to support two claims: that there are many capable teachers working in the global South and that we can learn a great deal from them. Neither claim should be surprising, but the fact is that attempts to improve the quality of education in the global South have systematically overlooked these teachers for decades, if not centuries, due to biases prevalent in both assumptions and prejudices concerning the global South and in preconditioned beliefs concerning what good teaching is, and what it looks like in the classroom. Matiewas Ghebrechristos is an extremely hard-working and effective teacher who stands out (to me) due to his dedication to his science club and also possibly because he teaches in ways that reflect prevalent Northern beliefs concerning what good teaching is (I chose his example above to illustrate a point to those who share these beliefs). Other examples of ‘outstanding’ teachers working in the global South as identified by Northern organisations include three of the seven winners of the Global Teacher Prize to date (Hanan Al Hroub of Palestine, Peter Tabichi of Kenya and Ranjitsinh Disale of India).Footnote 2 As impressive as these teachers are, this book is not really about them. It is more about the many teachers who have reached a level of expertise such that we can learn about appropriate good (not ‘best’) practice from them, help others (if appropriate) to emulate them, and identify achievable, sustainable thresholds of expertise for the majority of teachers in an educational system such that achieving them would improve the quality of learning for large numbers of learners (Hattie, Reference Hattie2015).
As a teacher educator who has spent much of his career working in low-income countries (discussed further below), I have learnt that whenever these initiatives originate in local practice, they are more likely to be successful than if they are ‘imported’ from other contexts – the latter often resulting in what Holliday calls ‘tissue rejection’ (Reference Holliday1994, p. 134) for numerous reasons, including feasibility (e.g., logistically), appropriacy (e.g., culturally) and sustainability (e.g., cost-wise).Footnote 3 There is an extensive body of literature stretching back over 100 years supporting Holliday’s claim that it is neither possible nor desirable to transplant aspects of pedagogy in such ways (see, e.g., Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah1999; Sadler, Reference Sadler1900; Tabulawa, Reference Tabulawa1998; Vavrus & Bartlett, Reference Vavrus and Bartlett2012). Yet, when good practice originates in the context in question, such innovations are more likely to succeed for the same reasons in reverse (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2007). As Verspoor (Reference Verspoor and Johnson2005, p. 38) observes, ‘would it not be preferable to design innovations … that do not deviate too far from existing practice, that can be adapted and applied by a large number of teachers without too much difficulty…?’ I would go further and argue that it is preferable to source such innovation in the existing practice of local practitioners – and for this, we need to identify expert teachers and document their practices.
This book examines key questions that enable us to do just this: questions concerning the nature of expertise as an appropriate measure of quality in the classroom, questions investigating what we already seem to know about both teacher expertise and effective teaching in low-income countries, and methodological questions underpinning any attempt to research teacher expertise in the global South. It presents the findings of an example study conducted in India that offers a feasible, replicable and ethically appropriate means to document such practices, thereby not only answering Pryor et al.’s (Reference Pryor, Akyeampong, Westbrook and Lussier2012) call for studies of good practice in contexts that are challenging but also providing a means for such studies to become more widespread. While the study in question involves only one subject (English) at one level (secondary) and in one national context (India) (three limitations to the scope of my own research that must be acknowledged) the findings are presented with a focus on general, rather than subject-specific, expertise and are systematically cross-referenced with evidence from prior research. Based on this combination of both primary and secondary evidence, a differentiated framework for understanding teacher expertise is proposed: one that is inclusive of all teachers in all contexts, not just the global North or South. The book also offers a wider framework for research and teacher development that enables teaching communities around the world to build their own feasible, appropriate and sustainable evidence base of context-specific teacher expertise.
1.1.1 Defining ‘Global South’
There are two complex and contested terms used in the title of this book, both of which require clarification. Chapter 2 offers extensive discussion of ‘teacher expertise’ as a construct and justification for my choice of it as a measure of quality. The other key term ‘global South’ is discussed here.
The terms ‘global South’ and ‘Southern’ are primarily used in this book to refer to national educational contexts that, using World Bank data (2019a), fall into either low-income or lower-middle-income categories. This choice derives from the focus of this book on understanding teacher expertise in the most challenging educational contexts worldwide; contexts where attempts to support and scaffold educational change and ‘improvement’ are most frequently directed in international development initiatives. It is well established that the primary influences on the quality and challenges of educational provision and uptake around the world are, at root, financial (Clemens, Reference Clemens2004; Huisman & Smits, Reference Huisman and Smits2009; Lee & Barro, Reference Lee and Barro2001). This includes both direct investment into the education system itselfFootnote 4 and income levels and financial precarity across the population attempting to access and benefit from education. Such issues of income and investment have real social and practical implications, not only in schools (e.g., class size, infrastructure, availability of resources) and teacher education but also for a child’s school readiness, nutrition levels, access to education and family support during schooling (see Section 4.1). Importantly, it is these influences and the resulting conditions and challenges that constitute the key shared characteristics of educational contexts across the global South, much more so than, say, a post-colonial predicament.Footnote 5 With only occasional exceptions, prior research reviewed in this book separates countries according to this distinction. The original data presented in this book comes from India, a country classified in the bottom half of lower-middle-income countries when data was collected (World Bank, 2019a). It shares numerous financially influenced challenges with other low- and lower-middle-income countries (Anderson & Lightfoot, Reference Anderson and Lightfoot2019; Wiseman & Kumar, Reference Wiseman and Kumar2021; see Section 4.1), and therefore is, in many ways, representative of these financially poor Southern states. At times, particularly in Chapter 4, I will also use the term ‘developing countries’ to refer to these same national contexts, particularly when reporting on studies that use this term.
In making this definitional choice, I do not wish to underplay the complex differences in educational experience within a given state (Southern or Northern), nor to argue that all Southern contexts experience the same challenges. As others have argued (e.g., Grech, Reference Grech2015), in some senses there are many global Souths, not one. Further, I am very much aware that other authors, particularly in the social sciences, understand and use the term ‘global South’ very differently, as ‘more than a metaphor for underdevelopment’ (Dados & Connell, Reference Dados and Connell2012, p. 13), seeking to use it to refer to disadvantaged or marginalised social groups around the world, including in countries in the global North (e.g., Grech, Reference Grech2015; Pennycook & Makoni, Reference Pennycook and Makoni2020; Santos, Reference Santos2016). On occasions when I reference these alternative understandings of the South, this will be made clear in the text below, including in Chapter 11, where I discuss Southern Theory.
1.1.2 My Background as Author
The introductory vignette for this chapter introduces two important themes in this book. The first is the discourse on teaching quality that constitutes its primary focus – what is meant by ‘quality’, what it may look like in the global South and why it is a key priority in development in education today (e.g., UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality education). The second is the background, bias and positioning of the observer or writer – whose vision of quality is being presented, where this vision comes from and the multiple dangers associated with ethnocentrism. As such, I feel a compelling need to introduce myself to the reader before progressing further.
Having started my career as an English language teacher in the 1990s, I was privileged by my English-native-speaker background to benefit from the opportunity to travel to and teach in a number of countries around the world; first in Europe (Ukraine, UK, Italy, Turkey), where my experience was mainly in the private English language teaching (ELT) sector, and then as a volunteer teacher educator in Africa (Eritrea, Rwanda, Kenya), where, despite not having the required training and only limited relevant experience, I was expected to be(come) an ‘expert’ in basic (K12) education, and was thrown into primary and secondary classrooms that could hardly have been more different to those I had taught in myself. As the vignette above reveals, I had arrived in Eritrea with biases; beliefs and values that I could not see beyond, particularly concerning learner-centred education and, in ELT, communicative language teaching (CLT). Four years of living and working in these countries provided opportunities for me not only to understand how conceptions of quality in education are inextricably linked to sociocultural values (Alexander, Reference Alexander2000; Bruner, Reference Bruner1996; Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2007) but also to witness and then learn about alternative visions of teaching quality beyond those I had been enculturated into, thanks to the expertise of numerous teachers I had the privilege to work with (see Anderson, Reference Anderson2015b). This learning has since continued over many years working as an educational consultant, researcher and materials designer in numerous countries worldwide, the majority in the global South. This experience has provided me with well-contextualisedFootnote 6 opportunities to look at issues of quality and culture from different perspectives, and to become reflexive concerning my own biases as a teacher educator (see Edge, Reference Edge2012). Today I am very much aware of the origins and sociopolitical connotations of approaches in education typically referred to as ‘progressive’ or ‘learner-centred’, and their dangers as what Schweisfurth calls ‘travelling policies’ (Reference Schweisfurth2013b; also see Tabulawa, Reference Tabulawa2003). Yet I retain critical interests in them that the reader should be aware of (see e.g., Anderson, Reference Anderson2019a; Anderson & Kamaluddin, Reference Anderson and Kamaluddin2015); these interests are inextricably linked to a concern with wider issues of quality in the classroom – what constitutes ‘good teaching’ – that underpins my work as a teacher educator and my motivation for writing this book.
1.2 What We Don’t Know about Teacher Expertise
Over 100 empirical studies have been conducted investigating aspects of the cognition and practices of teachers identified as experts since the 1980s, when scholars such as Gaea Leinhardt (e.g., Reference Leinhardt1983) and David Berliner (e.g., Reference Berliner1986) began their work in this area. While research on experts in many other fields of social practice was well established at the time and relatively uncontroversial, this was not the case concerning ‘expert teachers’ (Berliner, Reference Berliner2004), and some resistance to this phrase still exists to this day, due to the association between the notion of expertise and that of exclusivity (something teachers frequently distrust; see Goodwyn, Reference Goodwyn2017), rather than seeing the expert as a manifestation of professional competence, as it is typically perceived in other fields (e.g., legal practice, healthcare and engineering; Goodwyn, Reference Goodwyn2017).
Since this early research, methodological frameworks have emerged for identifying and studying expert teachers. Generally speaking, for inclusion in an expertise study, a teacher typically needs to have a professional qualification and sufficient experience for expertise to develop (at least five years) as baseline prerequisites (Palmer et al., Reference Palmer, Burdenski and Gonzales2005). In addition to these, researchers seek to identify teachers who seem to stand out in some way as leading practitioners within a given community. The most common means for finding such teachers has tended to be nomination by school inspectors, teacher educators and school headteachers, although a wide range of other criteria have also been used, often in combination, to select teachers for expertise studies. These include the possession of advanced teaching qualifications (e.g., National Board Certification in the USAFootnote 7) or teaching awards, evidence of additional roles as teacher educators and mentors for colleagues, and evidence of higher student achievement than comparable peers (see Palmer et al., Reference Palmer, Burdenski and Gonzales2005); these are reviewed in detail in Section 5.5.
Once identified, expert teacher studies have investigated aspects of their cognition, their beliefs, their pedagogic practices, their professionalism and their personalities, sometimes in combination, and with both specific and generic focuses on different aspects of expertise (Tsui, Reference Tsui, Burns and Richards2009). These studies have involved a wide range of approaches, including case study (Sorensen, Reference Sorensen2014), ethnography (Traianou, Reference Traianou2006), lesson observations (Smith & Strahan, Reference Smith and Strahan2004), phenomenology (Patterson, Reference Patterson2014), laboratory studies (Crawford et al., Reference Crawford, Schlager, Toyama, Riel and Vahey2005), the use of specific research tools, such as eye-tracking cameras (Wolff et al., Reference Wolff, Jarodzka, van den Bogert and Boshuizen2016) and stimulated recall interviews (Leinhardt et al., Reference Leinhardt, Weldman and Hammond1984). Of particular interest in these studies has been the comparison of expert teachers with either novice teachers or so-called ‘experienced non-experts’ (e.g., Hattie, Reference Hattie2003; Tsui, Reference Tsui2003) to identify potentially important differences, either in their performance or development.
However, there is a strong bias in the contexts of these studies. The majority have been conducted in the USA, and the remainder tend to originate in Western Europe, Australasia and, more recently, East Asia, including several studies conducted in the more affluent provinces of eastern China (Anderson, Reference Anderson2021). As a result, we know almost nothing about expert teachers working in the more challenging contexts typical of the global South.Footnote 8 This has meant that the literature on teacher expertise and any reviews of it (see, e.g., Sternberg & Horvath, Reference Sternberg and Horvath1995; Stigler & Miller, Reference Stigler, Miller, Ericsson, Hoffman, Kozbelt and Williams2018) describe teacher expertise with very little awareness of the typical contexts of many teachers around the world today, often assuming that teacher expertise is primarily a product of effective organisational contexts or wider teacher communities, and hypothesising as a result that it is unable to develop or exist in more challenging contexts. For example, Stigler and Miller (Reference Stigler, Miller, Ericsson, Hoffman, Kozbelt and Williams2018), in their discussion of this issue, argue that ‘an expert teacher in a dysfunctional school system’ might be either an ‘oxymoron’ or ‘a waste of human resources’ (p. 434).
In view of these opinions, there is an urgent need not only to identify and document the practices of expert teachers working in the global South (simply to prove to some sceptics that they exist), but also to understand how teacher expertise may develop outside of formalised support networks. However, perhaps more importantly, teacher expertise studies in Southern classrooms are needed simply because they are capable of showing other educators working in comparable contexts potential ways to be effective, even when the conditions and constraints of practice are operating against them. In this sense, then, we have no models of appropriate effective practice for teachers working in the most difficult contexts to learn from today, something that could be seen to be a striking neglect of the international educational research community (Alexander, Reference Alexander2015; Muralidharan, Reference Muralidharan, Banerjee and Duflo2017; Pryor et al., Reference Pryor, Akyeampong, Westbrook and Lussier2012).
Research that sheds detailed light on the pedagogic practices of expert teachers working in the global South is also of particular use because of the relative lack of focus on aspects of pedagogy in international research into education and development. Alexander (Reference Alexander2015) has even called this neglect of pedagogy the ‘missing ingredient’ (p. 254) in comparative education research. In this regard, studies of Southern teacher expertise enable us to shed light into what many econometric and statistical researchers of education in developing countries characterise as the ‘black box’ of the classroom (e.g., Aslam & Rawal, Reference Aslam, Rawal, Dixon, Humble and Counihan2015; World Bank, 2016). Indeed, Alexander (Reference Alexander2015) notes that ‘the striking feature’ of the global monitoring reports (GMRs), for example, ‘is that they do not so much engage with pedagogy as circle around it’, leaving it ‘securely locked in its black box’ (p. 253).
Finally, while there are numerous studies identifying similarities among cohorts of expert teachers (e.g., Gross, Reference Gross2014; Li & Zou, Reference Li and Zou2017; Marten, Reference Marten2015), an area that has been comparatively neglected in expertise research is systematic comparison of the differences between expert teachers to understand exactly how experts do differ, along what parameters and why. The assumption has tended to be that it is the similarities that are most important, yet these can only be understood relative to the differences.
1.3 Overview of the Book
The original research data presented in this book derives from my UK ESRC-sponsoredFootnote 9 PhD study, conducted between 2018 and 2021 (see Anderson, Reference Anderson2021), investigating teacher expertise within the field of English language teaching in Indian state-sponsored secondary education. Since defending the thesis, I have conducted further literature research (particularly for Chapters 3 and 4), performed additional analysis of the data collected (Chapters 7 and 8) and developed a number of theoretical frameworks that are here presented for the first time, particularly in Chapters 10 and 11. While the PhD thesis presented three detailed individual case descriptions and included more extensive subject-specific discussion, this book looks primarily at the wider (non-subject-specific features) of teacher expertise and includes only one individual case description (Chapter 6) to allow more space for discussion of wider literatures of relevance as well as more extensive discussion of, and theorisation from, the findings. Readers interested in reading other such case descriptions may access these directly in the thesis itself, available online (Anderson, Reference Anderson2021).
This introductory chapter concludes in Section 1.4 with discussion of paradigmatic concerns, particularly my rejection of the paradigm divide between positivism and constructivism and my interest in bringing together and critiquing all possible sources of evidence within a critical realist framework. This is justified through the need for high-quality qualitative research to be more widely recognised alongside large-scale quantitative research (e.g., econometric studies, meta-analyses and regression analyses) in influencing both future research agendas and evidence-based decision making in international development fora and local national contexts.
Chapter 2 discusses the construct of teacher expertise, initially considering the challenge of defining expertise and reviewing a large number of definitions of expertise in the research and theoretical literature. It identifies four types of conceptualisation, two of which are norm-referenced and two criterion-referenced, and argues that while there is a ‘fuzzy core’ at the centre of both everyday understandings and academic definitions of the term ‘expertise’, in many cases the term is often used ambiguously, and as a proxy for other measures of quality, such as effectiveness or experience. I argue that teacher expertise is a more appropriate measure of practitioner quality than either teacher effectiveness or experience, neither of which is sufficient to capture the breadth and complexity of the impact and influence of highly valued educators within their professional context. The chapter concludes by offering a working definition of teacher expertise that recognises it as both competence-based and community-referenced (i.e., situated), while allowing sufficient flexibility for local interpretations around its core features.
Chapter 3 introduces Sternberg and Horvath’s (Reference Sternberg and Horvath1995) expert teacher prototype – a key construct in this book – as a potentially appropriate means to bring together the findings of expertise research thus far, one that avoids a ‘best practice’ approach (rejected in this book due to its implicit connotation of universal relevance). After outlining the systematic, replicable approach to the extensive and original literature review conducted for this study, and identifying the Northern-centric bias in this literature, Chapter 3 presents an updated overview of the prototype itself, summarising the most frequently reported findings from teacher expertise studies concerning the knowledge base, cognitive processes, beliefs, personal attributes, professionalism and pedagogic practices (i.e., teaching) of expert teachers.
In order to counter the Northern-centric bias in teacher expertise research of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 attempts to bring together findings from a wide range of evidence sources in the literature concerning effective teaching in low-income contexts around the world. Before it does this, it discusses the circumstances and challenges of teaching in the global South as appropriate contextualisation for reporting the subsequent findings; the use of the term ‘effective teaching’ in this chapter is also clarified. The review begins with two important general findings in this literature: that teacher quality is an important influence on learning outcomes in developing countries and that effective teaching is deeply contextual in its nature. It then summarises findings from this literature using similar categories to Chapter 3 (albeit slightly amended to reflect the different focus of studies involved): teacher knowledge and beliefs, teacher professionalism and pedagogic practices. Chapter 4 concludes with brief comparison of the findings of these two review chapters, followed by important critical reflections. I observe that a large proportion of the studies conducted in low-income contexts tend to involve exogenous interventions, and that those that do involve research on extant practices in Southern classrooms nearly always focus on identifying (perceived) problems and deficits in these practices. As such, they tell us very little about teacher expertise in the global South, as Pryor et al. (Reference Pryor, Akyeampong, Westbrook and Lussier2012) also note.
The next five chapters report on the original research carried out for this book. Chapter 5 begins by identifying several important methodological challenges in studying teacher expertise in the global South, particularly those relating to how participants are identified, how their practice is studied and how data is interpreted – challenges of particular importance for a researcher like myself with a personal background in the global North. It identifies five design elements that I felt my study needed to include. It then presents the design solution adopted, discussing the seven phases of the study chronologically and how it was made participatory at a number of these stages – from the preparatory exploratory research conducted for the project, through initial theorisation of expertise, recruitment of participants, participatory planning of the project, data analysis and writing phases to the final outputs of the study, which included the participant teachers’ own publication alongside the PhD thesis. Details on the eight participant teachers’ profiles, indicators of expertise and contexts of practice are provided here, as are statistics on data collected and the research questions adopted as a result of the participatory planning process. Chapter 5 concludes by offering a much-needed updated review (since Palmer et al., Reference Palmer, Burdenski and Gonzales2005) of participant selection criteria used in teacher expertise studies over the last forty years.
Chapter 6 offers a portrait of teacher expertise through an ethnographic account of Nurjahan Naik Khwaja (not a pseudonym), an expert teacher working in Maharashtra, India. It introduces her context and challenges, describes her personal background, discusses her key beliefs about teaching and learning and then offers detailed insights into her practices as a teacher. These include her interpersonal practices, her languaging practices, how she manages curriculum coverage and planning, and her classroom practices. I offer extensive description accompanied by numerous quotations from Nurjahan herself, extracts from her lessons and images. Insights into her knowledge base, reflective practice and professionalism then build upon this detailed portrait, leading into a closing discussion of the evidence presented in this chapter of Nurjahan’s extensive and multifaceted expertise.
Chapter 7 draws upon Stake’s construct of the ‘quintain’ (e.g., Reference Stake2006) as an appropriate means to bring together findings in a comparative case study of this sort; Stake’s quintain is here seen as analogous to Sternberg and Horvath’s (Reference Sternberg and Horvath1995) expert teacher ‘prototype’ as similar means to understand the fuzzy core of context-specific expertise. It goes on to provide a detailed account of the research findings with regard to all eight participant teachers in my project, focusing primarily on the similarities found across their beliefs, interpersonal practices, languaging practices, curriculum coverage and planning, classroom practice, knowledge, reflection and professionalism. Like Chapter 6, this chapter includes extensive quotations, lesson extracts and other data sources (images, quantitative data analysis, etc.) to ensure that the description, particularly of pedagogic practices, is sufficiently detailed to be informative for practical purposes. The chapter concludes with an attempt to contextualise the quintain, looking at how the practices of the eight teachers reveal how they overcame, addressed or mitigated challenges that are frequently reported from across the global South, thereby offering useful insights for those working in contexts where comparable challenges exist.
Chapter 8 offers a detailed analysis of the difference among the eight expert teachers in my study. It draws upon two intersecting continua (conception of subject and degree of control) that became evident during data analysis as a means to understand the differences involved and ‘plot’ the teachers and their varying practices on a pedagogic field of sorts. Similarities between these continua and some of Bernstein’s constructs, particularly classification and framing (e.g., Reference Bernstein2000) are also explored. The chapter describes how these two continua were able to account for many of the practices that varied, particularly when contextual differences among the eight teachers were also taken into account. It concludes with a number of critical reflections on Bernstein’s sociology of education, particularly how the highly complex distribution and movement of power and influence at multiple levels within Indian educational systems is not amenable to analysis through his notions of ‘official’ and ‘pedagogic recontextualising fields’.
Chapter 9 presents discussion of the findings of my research relative to the prior research reviewed in Chapter 3, into (Northern) teacher expertise. Twelve areas of cognition, pedagogic practice, professionalism and personal attributes are each addressed systematically to identify both similarities and differences between the participant teachers in my study and those from prior expertise research. While the similarities are numerous and important – pointing towards potential core components of teacher expertise – the differences are also insightful, and frequently found to relate to teachers’ contexts and challenges. The final part of this chapter addresses the extent to which the participant teachers’ practices were consistent with conceptions of learner-centred education, concluding that the rich and complex profiles depicted cannot be reduced to this single (albeit multifaceted) construct, and noting that many of the effective practices documented in their classrooms are not typically associated with learner-centred practices.
Chapter 10 brings together the findings of previous chapters through a differentiated teacher expertise framework. The framework summarises core components of teacher expertise as identified in studies from diverse contexts around the world – not prerequisites or universal features, but elements of the ‘family resemblances’ of expert teachers. It also identifies variable factors (those that seem to vary depending on context, with indications of the variables involved) and includes potential additional components of Southern expertise, the latter offered contingently given the limited evidence available. The framework is presented only as an initial ‘skeleton’ that may be tested, contributed to, and amended if required – a working model for development through usage. The closing section of this chapter explores how the framework may be used in different areas of research, curriculum development, teacher education and international development.
Chapter 11 attempts to take a step back from the potential practical contributions of my research and this book to examine two broader questions of interest to social scientists and educational researchers, respectively. It begins by acknowledging the importance of ongoing discussions in social science regarding ‘Southern theory’ (e.g., Connell, Reference Connell2007) – ways of thinking and understanding that do not originate in, or depend upon, Northern epistemologies and conceptual frameworks. I argue that there is an urgent need for what might be called ‘practical Southern theory’ to assist teachers and other practitioners in areas of applied social science to solve the urgent problems of practice that communities, organisations and systems across the global South face on a daily basis. I provide examples of several theoretical constructs as potential examples, one established in the wider literature, one involving an under-theorised phenomenon and one emerging as important in my research. The second half of Chapter 11 offers one vision for how teacher expertise studies can contribute to a wider, sustainable framework for building context-specific expertise within educational communities around the world that does not depend on the input of exogenous practices and approaches from, for example, the global North. The framework brings together research and practitioner professional development through collaborative inquiry between varied members of educational communities.
Chapter 12 reflects briefly on the findings of my research and recaps on a number of the key arguments presented in this book – noting how teacher expertise is always adapted to context, highlighting the high ecological validity of expertise studies, emphasising the need for further appropriate research on Southern teacher expertise and arguing ultimately that without an understanding of expert teachers in diverse contexts worldwide, we cannot fully understand teacher expertise itself.
1.4 Paradigmatic Concerns
The pursuit of science seems to place the highest value on the generalizable, and the pursuit of professional work seems to value the particular most, but they both need both.
Any work interested in investigating good practice in education needs to address questions of paradigmatic positioning carefully, particularly with regard to what is often called the paradigm divide (or even ‘war’; Gage, Reference Gage1989) between two traditions in the social sciences, which are often characterised as dichotomous and irreconcilable (e.g., Guba & Lincoln, Reference Guba, Lincoln, Denzin and Lincoln1994), a characterisation that I would like to avoid in this book. I prefer to discuss these traditions as ‘tendencies’ on a continuum between which individual pieces of research, and many of us, as researchers, are able to move between projects. I do so partly because of my own background with a foot in both traditions (a proud mixed methods ‘pragmatist’; see Teddlie & Tashakkori, Reference Teddlie, Tashakkori, Denzin and Lincoln2011) and partly because of my related personal belief in the importance of insights that work in both traditions can provide – evident in the wide range of research and theory discussed below. After introducing and critiquing both tendencies, particularly in their most extreme forms, I outline my own paradigmatic position, linking this carefully to the aims, ambitions and sources drawn upon in this book.
The first tendency, typically associated with quantitative research and (post-)positivist epistemologies, is a tendency towards generalisation – to look across large bodies of data in order to identify commonalities that may be of use. In education, such commonalities, if found reliably, are potentially extremely useful, as they can advise educational policy and practice in a wide range of contexts. Perhaps the most obvious example of works that do this are systematic reviews such as meta-analyses (e.g., Hattie, Reference Hattie2009, Reference Hattie2012; Marzano, Reference Marzano1998) and metasyntheses or metasummaries (e.g., Anderson & Taner, Reference Anderson and Taner2023), all of which attempt to summarise the findings of multiple studies to identify what practices, interventions, factors or influences lead to more learning. Comparable attempts to ‘essentialise’ the findings of what are typically referred to as ‘robust’ research are frequently offered by powerful organisations supporting this tendency (e.g., the Institute of Education Sciences in the US and the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK) and promoted by them as ‘evidence-based’ practice. The biggest challenge, and most frequent cause of error within this tendency towards generalisation, is the need for both primary researchers and secondary analysts to make complex, often surprisingly subjective value judgements across different studies when deciding whether to lump them for the purpose of generating effect sizes or summaries. This is particularly true when decisions are made as to whether different studies constitute examples of the same thing (e.g., ‘cooperative learning’, ‘formative assessment’ and ‘synthetic phonics’, which all have multiple, varying manifestations), but also true with regard to implementation of an intervention, comparability of participants and how outcome measures are assessed and calculated in varied studies. In the complex realities of education, there is often a surprisingly large difference in how the constructs underpinning studies are operationalised, even in randomised controlled trials, which necessarily undermines the validity of any attempt to generalise across these studies. The second, perhaps more obvious risk, which applies more in the extrapolation beyond the studies (an issue of validity), is that of overgeneralisation – the assumption that something that has been found to be effective or useful, either in one study (no matter how large-scale), or through meta-analysis, is likely to be effective in all contexts. Very often, an aggregated positive (or negative) effect size conceals much greater variation between individual studies, such that, without awareness of important contextual factors influencing outcomes, an intervention that is known to have generated a positive effect size in some studies may be implemented in a context where evidence indicates that it more often has a negative impact. See, for example, the case of English-medium instructional approaches in language-in-education research, which, despite positive results from higher-income contexts, are more likely to inhibit learning across the curriculum in lower-income contexts (see Mahapatra & Anderson, Reference Mahapatra and Anderson2022; Simpson, Reference Simpson2019).
The second broad tendency, typically associated with qualitative research and more constructivist or interpretivist paradigmatic positions, is a tendency towards particularisation. Researchers working within this tendency typically employ small sample sizes and provide abundant, useful information about aspects of context, relationships and personal experiences – the so-called ‘thick description’ that enables us to understand the relationship between a phenomenon, practice or influence, and its context. Quite often, such researchers depict their participants as inhabiting ‘multiple realities’ and argue that extrapolation is simply not possible with regard to normative conclusions, more abstract theoretical generalisations or even (at times) carefully hedged recommendations for comparable contexts. Why, some might ask, is this a problem? Because here, too, there is a fundamental danger, one that is less often apparent to those within the somewhat insular echo chamber of academia to whom this tendency is almost entirely limited. Despite the fact that such research is potentially able to shine crucial light into what is frequently typified as the ‘black box’ of the classroom (see Alexander, Reference Alexander2015, discussed above), because it is unwilling, and, as a result of its research designs, largely unable to generalise beyond its own participants, research within this tendency is rarely able to interest those who make key decisions concerning educational policy and practice in the wider world. As a result, this important role is left primarily to researchers within the generalising tendency, who themselves are – paradoxically – largely ignorant of what happens in the mysterious black box that particularising researchers know so well – even when they believe they are ‘delving into’ it (e.g., Aslam & Kingdon, Reference Aslam and Kingdon2011). As such, I would argue that the most fundamental error of this second tendency is not simply a lack of generalisability but a lack of ambition among many (not all) such researchers for their research to take its rightful place beyond academia, alongside the generalising tendency, in informing wider practice in the field of education.
Historically, these two tendencies are often perceived to be divided by incommensurable paradigmatic differences (Gage, Reference Gage1989; Guba & Lincoln, Reference Guba, Lincoln, Denzin and Lincoln1994) that have traditionally led to a lack of engagement between them, particularly in academia. In this book, both as a result of pragmatic concern (my intention to contribute useful guidance for education) and my own personal beliefs (consistent with those of Maxwell, Reference Maxwell2012), I adopt a critical realist position that enables my research questions to dictate my methodology, recognising both the possibility that generalisable good practice in education may exist and be desirable, and the inevitable dangers that an uncritical, naïve realism brings with it. Consistent with this, in order to maintain contact with both the generalising and the particularising tendencies, rather than seeing these as dichotomous, I perceive a continuum along which qualities vary by degree (see Figure 1.1), also recognising the validity of research located in the ‘no-man’s land’ between these positions. This perspective explains both my interest in medium-sized (‘mid-n’) samples that facilitate both contextualised understanding (what Gerring calls ‘hypothesis generation’; Reference Gerring2007) and opportunities for tentative generalisation (Gerring’s ‘hypothesis testing’) and my interest in drawing on all prior research findings and related theory, regardless of tendency, as potentially able to inform inquiry.
Figure 1.1 The continuum between generalising and particularising tendencies
Note. ‘n’ = number (in sample).
The continuum is of particular importance throughout this book because of two urgent needs resulting from the absence of prior research identified above: firstly, the need to understand more of how varied contexts in the global South differ from those in the North (i.e., the need to spend time inside the black box), and secondly to offer useful guidance for those who work in Southern contexts, which may come through identifying potentially generalisable facts, either about expert teachers in all contexts, or those working in the South. As such, I report the findings of my study below by moving mainly from right to left along the above continuum, beginning with a portrait of one Southern expert teacher in Chapter 6, then moving towards the ‘mid-n’ position in Chapters 7 and 8 as I identify similarities and differences among eight participants in my study. In Chapter 9, I compare my findings to those of the systematic literature review conducted in Chapter 3 as transparently as possible in order to identify similarities and differences within this wider ‘sample’ of expert teachers. Then in Chapter 10, through the differentiated framework, I propose both tentative generalisations that seem to hold true across expert teachers in the majority of contexts involved and – equally importantly – variable factors, as areas where such generalisations are not possible – a need to retain the particular. This movement is hardly new or unique in research reporting but is conducted here in a way that is systematic, replicable and consistent with the above positioning.
