An exploration of teacher professional development from educational stakeholders’ perspectives within the space of an educational reform.

Abstract

Educational Reforms (ER) are a global phenomenon, responding to a plethora of drivers for changes. Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is pivotal to achieving ER goals, yet its implementation often overlooks the kind of TPD needed by teachers under classroom conditions. This study explores the conceptions of TPD within the dynamic and landscape of the Nine Years Continuous Basic Educational Reform (NYCBER) to understand how teachers and key stakeholders experience and make meaning of TPD. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this study draws on dialogical interviews, document analysis and WordCloud to explore the lived-experiences of teachers, school leaders, lecturers of the Mauritius institute of Education and policymakers. For an idiographic account, the data was analysed using the Interpretive Phenomenological Approach (IPA) and hermeneutic circle. This analysis procedure facilitated double hermeneutics, offering a layered understanding that balances participants’ perspectives with the researcher’s insights. For a comprehensive structure, data analysis for the four clusters of educational stakeholders are categorised in four sections that are synthesized to discover broader themes. The analysis of data reveals that there is a plethora of nuanced conceptions of TPD within the space of an ER. How each cluster of educational stakeholders views TPD is uniquely informed by the space they operate in, eliciting a complex and entangled reality of TPD. The key findings highlight five overarching conceptions of TPD that emerged from the complex interplay of these realities namely: Situational dynamics, justification of knowledge of TPD, level of professional discretion of educational stakeholders, fluidity of the reform agenda and lastly emotional dimensions of the reform processes. The five concepts were interpreted using a hybridized theoretical framework informed by Brofenbrenner’s Ecological System Theory and Barad’s Intra Action Theory. Informed by the hybridized theoretical lenses, the thesis realized “Bounded-Temporality” and “Bounded-TPD-Contexts” as two novel perspectives for an updated conceptualization of TPD within the space of an ER. What seems downplayed in the crowded complexities of the ER is that “time” is bounded, suggesting that the progress and sequencing of the ER is relative to the kind of PD teachers require at specific “times” of the ER; and “TPD-contexts” also is bounded suggesting that different micro-bounded-contexts operate within the bigger and broader ER context, and within that “bounded-ness” that TPD is conceptualised. Therefore, the study not only contributes to the theoretical discourses about the interplay of TPD in a reform context but it also offers practical guidance for designing TPD programs that are adaptive to the “bounded-temporality” and “bounded-TPD-contexts” needs of teachers.