Quality Teaching and the Capability Approach ─ Evaluating the Work and Governance of Women Teachers in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa

The global challenge to provide every child with a school place is one of the major educational problems of the twenty first century. Recruiting, educating and retaining sufficient teachers is equally challenging: in most developing countries there is a significant shortage of qualified teachers. Millions of unqualified teachers are being employed and most of these are women. While developing countries have made significant progress on access to education, quality remains a concern at local, national and international levels. Teachers – what they think and what they do in classrooms – are at the core of this concern.

This book, drawing on a wide range of recent and award-winning research, provides an analytical exploration of the condition of teachers working in expanding school systems across the world. Focussing on women teachers and rural communities, it looks beyond contemporary official portrayals of teachers’ lives to understand the actual contexts in which teachers live and work.

With a particular focus on the lives of rural women teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa and by drawing on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach the book considers official documentary evidence alongside ethnographic evidence from rural, remote and under-resourced schools in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Sudan. It proposes a concept of professional capability for teachers, and examines female teachers’ agency to pursue and achieve professional capability in their schools and classrooms. This examination challenges existing notions of ‘quality education’ and reveals insights into the international focus post 2015 and the broader purpose of schooling for rural communities.

Teachers Professional Capabilities draws the threads of quality, gender, rurality and capabilities together to provide insights into how female teachers working in the most remote and under-resourced schools experience the teaching profession - and the impact these experiences have on the quality of education they deliver. As such, it will be key reading for educationalists and researchers in education concerned with development and teaching, students of development courses, and those involved in development, particularly policy makers concerned with education and development.

Alison Buckler has a Masters Degree in Gender and Development Studies from the University of Birmingham and a doctorate from the Open University. She worked as a Researcher on the award-winning Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Programme - an international consortium concerned with the production, distribution and supported use of open educational resources for teacher education and professional development.