Teachers in Kenya: Life style studies and educational practices
By: Kari K. B. Dahl, M.A. in Education, Ph.D
(Cand. Pæd.),
Introduction
What I will present for you is some results from a fieldwork in a rural area in a small village called
Lwak, which is situated in the Western part of Kenya. The fieldwork took place during a two-year
period from 2000-2001 and focused on teachers in primary schools.
At first I will speak shortly about the project, second about the study focus and analytical objects,
thirdly about the fieldwork and analyses, then come to results and finally outline some perspectives
on the questions, themes and topics, that this study raises on schools and the teacher profession in
Kenya.
Overview of the study
The study is part of a larger study about teachers’ lives and the way teachers become local professionals (see Dahl 2005). What I will present here is results from case studies of four individual
teachers. The purpose is to give a more close and precise look into exactly what it is at a microlevel, that constructs teachers as local professionals. Second the purpose is to explore, how teachers’ lifestyles draw traces in their school practice. In other words, how lifestyles has a connection to
how education is practiced.
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Teachers in rural Western Kenya are different than other people. They speak, dress, live and consume differently, they engage in social and political activities in other ways, and they feel they belong to a special and nearly secret “Club” or community together with other teachers from their own
and other schools. But at the same time they are also very different as individuals.
The study is an interdisciplinary work in the field between anthropology, psychology and education.
By working this way, it has been possible to find more nuanced and “reality-close” ways of looking
at and understanding the educational reality in a Third World country. It has also been possible to
identify ways, that goes beyond “mainstream thinking” about education in developing countries,
which often convey a standardised, simplistic and somewhat stereotypical picture of what is going
on in the class room.
The study of everyday life and teachers as primary school agents
Very few studies about schools in developing countries including studies in East-Africa focus on
teachers and their role in “making schooling”.
Most studies of schooling in developing countries focus on the macro-sociological consequences of
schooling, for instance quantitative measures. Other studies take a historical perspective, while yet
other take a starting point in certain pedagogical ideologies. Some studies take the perspective of
children and look into the social and moral consequences of schooling. But few studies - if any have looked into the role, teachers play, and looked from an educational angle. In this study the aim
was not to look at “good old days”, neither to look at education as an issue “from above” nor to
look at the social, professional or moral outcomes of education, for instance children’s socialization.
The aim was to explore schooling from teachers’ perspectives. In short the ambition was to explore
how teachers’ professionalism and school practice possibly was constructed between everyday life,
local school cultures and the larger education system. The analytical approach was to explore teachers lives from an “in-side out”, a “bottom-up” and an “around” perspective.
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Focus, analytical objects & ambition
Now I will say something about the focus in the study, the analytical objects and the overall ambition with the project.
The central questions, I ask in this study, are: How do teachers become teachers through their daily
life in and out of school? What did life and becoming mean for the educational practice that teachers conveyed in the classroom and school?
Lwak is situated in Bondo District in Western Kenya about 100 km East of Uganda and about two
hours drive west of Kenya’s third largest city, Kisumu. The village in many ways is similar to most
other villages in Sub-Sahara Africa - it has a catholic Western missionary complex, a market with
wooden stalls, and several primary schools in older clay and cemented buildings. The area is populated by Luo-people, which are the Third-largest ethnic minority out of Kenya’s about 350 ethnic
groups. The Luo-people are patrilineal, virilocal and for a great part polygamous, and the main area
of income is - as the majority of the rural population in Kenya - a subsistence agrarian economy.
From an outside perspective, the Kenyan education system - like many other Third World systems appears what Foucault (1997, 2002) would understand as a repressive system. In many ways the
education system was constructed to closely survey teachers’ actions, so that they did not differ
from the official rhetorics. Bruce Fuller (1991) describes, how poor countries can signal efficiency
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and modernity by establishing “look-alike” western education systems, based on tight bureaucratic
administration systems.
But did teachers actually capture the educational reality in so modern ways, as they system signaled? Were they at all a homogene and harmonic “mass” of human resources, as the authorities
suggested? Why did teachers not act according to what the ministries told them? What did the system do to teachers? What did their everyday life and the life in schools do? Which differences actually did made differences? These were only some of many questions, which I could ask in the process of fieldwork, and which in the flow of time and tense broadened out the view.
Fieldwork, methodologies and analyses
Now I will say something about the fieldwork and the methodological paths.
Inspired by Bourdieu (1977, 1986), data was collected in fields. The fields covered an area from the
international “donor” and “development” level, over ministries and administration untill teacher
staffrooms and classrooms at schools and everyday lives. The main area of operation took place in
the middle field of the scheme that is in the concrete everyday life in schools. It was also in this
sphere, where most methodological approaches could be employed. The central point is, that the
more I moved “up” in the scheme, the more visible and “put on formula” was the knowledge, I explored. The methods therefore also were more explicit, for instance document analyses and structured interviews. On the contrary, the more I moved “down” in the scheme, the more the knowledge
became tacit. Therefore methods also had to be more embedded, for instance observation and unstructured conversations.
During the fieldwork I had collected and generated many thousand pages of personal field notes,
several thousand pages of interview transcriptions and about fifty kilo of other field materials,
among other questionnaires, copies of correspondences between schools and authorities, video
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films, tapes and diaries. Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967) and participant observation
(Malinowski 1922) was an approach to generate and analyse the material, so it became close to the
reality and applicable on the problems of “the real world”.
How could the studies of life styles be captured analytically? How is it possible to come closer to
the subjects and their lives? To where shall the attention be directed? Fieldwork, theory and analyses are not just something, “which is there”. It is the result of a dynamic interplay between empirical data, analyses, methodology and theory. If the question was to gain an insight into people’s real
lives and the meaning, they attach to it, then the study of life styles could not be approached theoretically. It could only be approached empirically and analytically.
Four analytical themes could allow gaining a different and inclusive insight into teachers’ lives and
their school practices. The four analytical themes were “micro”, “power”, “room for possibility”
and “morality”. The point is that the four themes were mutually complementing, closely intertwined
and together reflected a certain understanding of reality.
The first analytical theme was ”micro”. Here were the subjects and the experienced and lived life in
the center of attention. Who were the subjects and how and why did they think, speak and act, as
they did? Micro was inspired by theory about every day life and a phenomenological approach.
(Heller 1984; Schutz 1973).
The second analytical theme was ”power”. With power the focus could be adjusted elsewhere than
towards the harmonic surface, which I at first was confronted with in schools. Teachers challenged
and dominated each other, and institutions and cultural communities in were rooted in certain social
orders (Foucault, 1997, 2002), which in different ways normalized teachers.
”Room for possibility” was the third analytical grip. With this theme I could - inspired by among
otherLave and Wenger’s (1991) concept about situated learning - catch the more contextualized
conditions for teachers’ learning and becoming. I could turn the attention to the social and psycho-
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logical context of teachers’ living conditions, because it often was here, and not at the individual
level, where the frames for becoming a teacher and practicing as one became demarcated.
With the fourth analytical theme “morality” I could take one more step into the lived teacher life. I
could look into the values and what the special “teacher-like” meaning and concepts were. What
made meaning and created sense to teachers? How were their actions and dispositions possibly connected to certain moralities, and were moralities part of a larger so-called “teacher-like” paradigm,
or were they just individual phenomenons?
Ultimately, life styles can not be studied. They have to be lived. Daily participation with the teachers, and the observation and critical reflection of these observations therefore was the most central
way to learn more about teachers. Life story interviews could give an insight into knowledge, which
are conscious or which reflect more one-dimensional aspects of their lives. But people are not always aware of how their lives and important aspects of them can be made explicit.
It is also not all knowledge, which subjects and informants will reveal in front of a stranger. In other
words, the success of the fieldwork and the degree to which you can get an insight into people’s
lives and ways of living it, depends on the degree of which you as a fieldworker are able to establish
rapport with people - and thus become able to feel their lives in your “body and soul”. Learning
about people’s lives is a process of participation, and to create a space for intimacy and confidence.
Are the subjects willing to invite you into their inner dreams and thoughts? Second, how is the researcher able to empathicly “read” the tacit actions and events, that often comes without words.
The personal teacher life
Now I come to the analyses of the four different teacher’s lives and the educational practices, connected to these lives.
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I located four teachers and followed them through a period of two years. This gave me a detailed,
nuanced and very unusual look into their lives.
The figure shows the four teachers’ different lives, and how they lived these lives in close connection to one school year. When teachers were at school, they were living one kind of “life”, in the periods where school was closed, they lived other kinds of “life”. The quality of these lives was very
different. Some teachers related themselves to school work as a salary work, others attributed other
meanings. Some teachers lived “farmer’s lives” in the periods, when they were out of school, others
lived “city lives”. There were also differences between the passages, which connected one kind of
life to another life in a teacher’s life. Some teachers had distinct and clear nearly borderlines between their lives, the passages between other lives were more liquid. By other teachers life, school
and everyday merged, and the differences between lives became blurred.
Maureen was a poor teacher and single mother for many, smaller children. Her difficult life conditions made her teacher life an economical necessity. Maureen was forced to use low-status time on
manual labour work in the field, and many other teachers thought of her as very “rural”, “traditional” and even very “backwards”. I referred to her as “working teacher underclass”.
Grace was a younger teacher, herself born and raised in a family of teachers. She was very explicit
about her teacher work, and she attributed it to a more personal, self-developing meaning. Grace felt
distanced to life in the village. She belonged to the inner-circle of the teacher community, because
she with her lifestyle in many ways made visible, what other teachers thought of as meaningful and
important - an intellectualized approach to the teacher work. Grace’s lifestyle could be conceptualized as urban middle-class life.
Amalla was a head teacher in a school. He was born in a polygamous family and had moved to
Lwak a generation ago, where he now lived with two of his on a total five wives in a big, concreted
house with children from all five marriages. Amalla had many personal connections and material
resources, and he was constantly on the search for new possibilities. He was feared, hated and ad-
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mired for his abilities strategically to exploit and turn possibilities into personal advantages. He became conceptualized as teacher life in the rural elite.
Otien was an older, respected teacher, who was born and raised in the local area of the school,
where he served as a teacher. The teacher work of Otien was like Grace’s characterized by qualitative different contracts with pupils and parents. But unlike Grace, he in the school-free time spent
time in his garden and mingled socially with other people in Lwak - also “non-teachers”. Otien
brought life outside school inside the class room. Through his reflective and social-emotional approach, his school practice in many ways managed to integrate school life with pupils’ every day
lives at home. Otien could be conceptualised as professional village teacher life.
The first figure shows, that different values were embedded in the different teacher lives. In other
words, there was a difference in, what the individual teachers thought of as right and important.
The second figure shows, how personal values became transferred into forms of capital that is ways
of gaining dominance. Life styles are not only different, they are also ranked and expression of
ways to decide, what in a given society is right and true, and therefore also what becomes legitimate. Life style is another expression of position, and capital for possibilities for maintaining dominance.
But not all values could dominate.
When a teacher like Grace is conceptualised as a teacher with cultural capital, then it is not because
other teachers did not have culture, only that they had other forms of culture. Grace’s villagedistanced and intellectual style to a higher degree represented the dominant taste. On the other hand,
a teacher like Maureen would had fewer opportunities to capitalise the field, because her lifestyle
with living in a straw hut, speak Dholuo language, be a widow and single mother of several smaller
children, earn a living by agrarian economy, summarized what many teachers experienced as “notteacherly”.
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But the possibilities for dominating were not unambiguous. Metaphysical values - for instance were for some teachers a certain capital, though many teachers kept it invisible. It was not in accordance with the official identity about being a teacher and member of the educational elite. When
Maureen could not make the metaphysical values explicit as a dominating value or capital, then it
was because of her marginalized status in the teacher community in Lwak. In this she was more
customer to other teachers’ conventions and forms of social orders, than she actively participated in
constructing them.
Life styles drew traces in the educational practice.
The four fields for navigation were rough categories, which alone and together could conceptualize
aspects and elements of the four teacher’s educational practices. The model illustrates, that a teacher
potentially could move within several fields at the same time.
A teacher like Grace would for instance be situated in the rational-intellectual field and the socialemotional field, because she at one side had a somewhat theoretical approach to teaching, but at the
other side at the same time would incorporate the educational formalities from her own education at
training college.
Maureen would “feel” her way through teaching and represented the near, quiet everyday life and
the close, physical contact. She moved within the social-emotional field and the field for life conditions. Her educational style fit well with the smaller pupils, for whom school represented a cultural
meeting in several ways.
A teacher like Otien would be situated in the social-emotional field with an emphasis on being there
“for somebody”. His life as a teacher would be occupied on sensitively to integrate life in the village with life at school. In many ways, he was a “cultural bearer” and constructed an experience of
“meaningfulness” by the pupils.
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Amalla would operate in several fields - the political, social and economical field with a main emphasis on political-strategical. His perspective would be “for himself”. The strategical maneuvering
sometimes appeared intimidating and overstepping, but at the same time represented enterprise Amalla made things happen.
The goal of categorizing practice was not to make some competencies appear “better” than other.
The goal was to produce an analysis, which could distinguish and make differences visible. The
many practices mutually supported and complemented each other, and were necessary in the complex school life.
In different ways teachers met important problems in school life, and caught it in another, more pluralistic and reality-close way, than what was written in the formal intentions.
Teachers’ lives were paradoxes with opposing and sometimes contradicting movements. “Gain
without society”, “the good taste without roots”, “self maintenance in resistance” and “mediator
without power” could all be titles for the four teachers lives. Each was in their own way build
around central double dynamics. On the one side it was about freeing personal potentials, at the other side to be restrained some special limitations in the surrounding world.
Some of the explanations for how teachers’ lifestyles could be conceptualised as paradoxical dilemmas was, that teachers got incompatible messages full of contradictions from the level above from the donor bodies, the ministries and the educational support organs. Many of these messages
were about democracy, how to promote participation and how to construct a “flat” structure in the
classroom, for instance between teachers and pupils. But the messages were contradictory, because
they did not fit in with the complex and often hierarchical everyday life. Teachers and other people
experienced the messages as being far from their reality and not addressing the real problems. The
messages were communicated in an ambience of bureaucracy and surveillance, and therefore they
became dismissed.
(Ny overhead:)
Incompatible messages
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Structural double binds
Contradictory lifestyles
Teachers’ lives were in many ways difficult lives, bounded in what I would call a structural doublebind. Double-bind is Vogel and Bell’s (1969) and Bateson’s (1956) concept for a situation, in which
a person receives opposing and incompatible messages from the same person or system. Teachers
received opposing and incompatible messages about how to prioritise in education from the system.
The structural double-binds, teachers were caught in, created difficult and dysfunctional frames for
their lives and becomings. Psychological double-binds potentially make people become passive,
frustrated, in some ways schizophrenic. But structural double-binds made teachers become resistant
and creating their own universes of meaning. My observations showed that teachers were not frustrated, passive and depressed.
All teachers in various ways made efforts to overcome these barriers. They acted in those fields,
where each of them attached importance. But teachers only to a higher or lesser extent succeeded to
change their lives. In spite of this, teachers did not evaluate their lives negatively. Rather they evaluated their lives with more optimistic conclusions such as “I always try, and I sometimes win”.
Teachers were not disillusioned, frustrated, pessimistic or resigning. In stead they grabbed life in
positive and often very imaginative ways, which became reflected in their teacher profession.
Conclusion
The most important result in this study is that teachers lived different lives, and that these lives drew
traces in school. Teachers were different, and so was their teaching. Teachers’ lives and their educational practices complemented each other, and became woven together in a complex web of school
practice.
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The teacher profession was challenged and people had many expectations to teachers. But teachers
did not resign, and teaching was not a “minimum job”. Teachers embodied their professions in a
distinct teacher identity, where they in the course of being teachers grew together with their profession. The teacher profession was a highly personalised issue and a profession, the individual teacher
committed him- or herself to, and which they never wanted to change. Teachers became teachers in
multidimensional ways, and this was reflected in practice. The result was a nuanced, faceted and
personal practice, more close to reality, than what the official curriculum suggested.
Perspectives on the school in Kenya
Which questions and perspectives does this study raise for the school in Kenya?
First, schools in Kenya are not unified schools, as it is reflected in the national regulations. Much
more they are schools in accordance with reality. Second, teachers’ work is not solely a question of
earning a salary. It constructs a personal identity for teachers, and becomes a lifelong mission, in
which personal identity and capacity mingles and merges with the professional identity. Even
though teachers’ salaries were low, and even though teachers’ status, prestige and social position in
the society was decreasing and the working conditions were poor, then teachers’ work was not “the
minimum denominator”. Teachers saw themselves as resources, they were one of few local professionals, who really could and actually did make a difference. It could be valuable to take a starting
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point in their opinions and commitments, in order to raise a more critical reflection. It made good
sense to listen to teachers and acknowledge their role as central actors. How could and was educational ideals transferred into practice? What might the future role of the school be - personal or professional? Preparing for life or socialising into academia?
Second, being a teacher is an expression for a very manifest and robust life style. That could not
immediately be changed. Life styles did not change with the same speed as schools or the educational system. They just continued. In the planning of education it therefore would make less sense
to focus on for instance attitudes or in-service training, and more sense to change the frames for becoming. What significance do the administrative structures in the education system mean to teachers? How could be worked with the rooms for possibilities - that is learning and changing processes
in the individual school cultures? How do schools respond to individual teacher’s personal approaches, life styles and teaching practices? What do teachers recognize as “proper working conditions” - socially, psychologically and politically?
Third, teachers’ psychological conditions and cultural and social ways of living and being were results of life, lived in contradictory everyday lives in schools and in structural double-binds. Personal
life stories in themselves were expressions of paradoxes. Could teachers release more educational
potential, if they did not at the same time experience to fight against structural limitations? Could a
teacher like for instance Maureen disengage even more educational potentials, if she did not at the
same time experience to struggle against poverty and social (self) suppression? Could a teacher like
Grace to a higher extent integrate her life with the school work, if she could experience a cultural
attachment and sense of belonging to the place and people of Lwak? Would Amalla be able to direct his attention towards the pupils and not - only - towards him self, if he could experience a sense
of community with teachers and others? Could a teacher like Otien through his informal leadership
influence other teachers to an alternative practice, if the idea of “quality education” and the emphasis on academic professionalism not to the same degree had been internalised among people as an
objective value?
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These questions are highly value-laden and reflect certain “ready-made” views on life and learning
in Lwak. It is about teachers’ individual codices of morality and private standards, and the practice,
which the bureaucratic system provokes and administratively tries to enroll and tighten teachers up
in. How could a dialogue between teachers and authorities at all levels in the best possible way assist in overcoming these differences? Or maybe should be asked the reverse question: Whether differences - that is varieties between individual schools and individual teachers - exactly is the issue,
which contributes to construct a school with a personal expression and which to a higher degree
might be able to handle the complex problems of reality?
The result of this study raises some questions and reflections, and it has not been the intention to
answer those questions here. Instead the ambition has been to suggest a direction for new discussions regarding teachers’ roles and practices in schools in other parts of the world.
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