The Pluto Problem: Reflexivities of Discomfort in Teacher Professional Development
Abstract
This article utilises narrative inquiry as a means to explore reflexively our roles as two scholars/teacher educators with extensive experience in education and international development initiatives in East and Southern Africa. It focuses on a teacher professional development program in Tanzania we helped initiate and facilitate for more than five years whose aim was to promote more critical, learner-centred approaches to teaching across the country’s secondary school curriculum. We narrate several key incidents from the program that led us to examine our complicity in establishing and maintaining the very hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination the program sought to challenge. Throughout, we engage reflexively with postcolonial theory in an effort to provincialise the Anglo-American assumptions about pedagogy implicit in learner-centred approaches to teaching that form a key aspect of contemporary global education reform.
Date
01/01/2019
Citation
Thomas, M. A. M., & Vavrus, F. K. (2019). The Pluto Problem: Reflexivities of Discomfort in Teacher Professional Development. Critical Studies in Education, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2019.1587782
The University of Sydney, Sydney School of Education and Social Work | University of Minnesota, Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, & Development