Communicative space and working locally: A report of a participatory action research project in a remote rural school in Bangladesh

Abstract

Teachers’ professional development is a top priority in education of Bangladesh, but the literature reports existing models of teaching are unsatisfactory. This article reports a participatory action research project in a remote rural secondary school in Bangladesh, and discusses how a locally focused process enabled teachers to create a communicative space in which they could explore their understandings of teaching and evolve as a learning community. It argues that improvement in teaching can occur at local level, despite constraints of poverty and lack of resources, when local teachers are enabled to challenge themselves and each other to better meet the needs of students within their community.

Keywords

Participatory action research teachers’ collaboration communicative space importance of local context rural education

Introduction

In Bangladesh’s programme for improving education, a core element is the development of teachers’ capacity to create student-centred learning environments (Bangladesh Ministry of Education, 2005). However, research studies repeatedly highlight both failings of teachers (Podder, 2013) and absence of systems that might encourage them to critique their own practice and to assume agency in stimulating students’ curiosity (Alam, 2013; Thornton, 2006). In addition, rural schools in Bangladesh are reputed to show less student achievement than urban schools (Alamgir, 2015), and teachers in rural schools often perceive existing in-service training as centrally developed and top-down and so not aligning with their experiences and needs. Therefore, effective processes for teachers’ professional development are a high but elusive priority.

This article reports aspects of a doctoral project based in a rural school in Bangladesh in which teachers incrementally took responsibility for developing their own capacity for creating student-centred learning. Thus, it offers an alternative to the deficit view of Bangladeshi teaching that is dominant in published literature and it points to a possible alternative pathway for national teacher development. Therefore, this article focuses on two interrelated aspects of the project:

Development of a communicative space and how that enabled teachers to discuss and critique their work and strategically plan change,

Importance of a localised ground-up approach to professional development and its value for Bangladesh.

The community and the school

The school, where the project was undertaken, is situated in the outskirts of Thakurgaon, the northern district of Bangladesh. Agriculture is the main economic activity of the community. Most of the people who send their children to the school are either peasants or day labourers. The majority of the community are Muslims and some are Hindus. More than 50,000 people live in the greater community. Though there are differences in religion and economic conditions, historically the community people share a culture of strong intergenerational relationship. People in the community are connected with the district town for selling their agricultural products, getting better health care, and ensuring higher education.

Because of a government decision to expand secondary schooling in rural areas in 1990s, most of the present teachers and community people spent their labour, sweat, money, and land to build the school. The school started its journey in 1994. It follows the centralised national school curriculum. Initially, the teachers served the school voluntarily with a hope that it would eventually come under the national revenue budget system, and that happened in 1998. In 2013 the total student population of the school was 360, of which 195 were girls and 165 boys. The average teacher–student ratio is around 1:29. This ratio is supportive of managing effective students’ engagement in learning. Including the head teacher, the total number of staff in the school is 17. Recent Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exam results suggest that the school has achieved an above average pass rate. The impact of rural poverty on the community and teachers’ low salaries mean that teachers have to find supplementary income, either by farming or offering private tuition, and so have little motivation to try out alternative approaches to teaching. However, after getting professional development training during 2006–2007, the school has gradually started to rethink its approaches to the school curriculum, but classroom teaching, as is often the case in rural areas of Bangladesh was still predominantly authoritarian and reproductive. I understood that if change was to occur it had to begin with teachers’ own understandings and intentions, and this led to the choice of a PAR approach and the development of a communicative space. This also informs my epistemological approach in presenting this account.

Review of literature

Top-down and examination-oriented teaching and learning is dominant in Bangladesh (Al Amin & Greenwood, 2018; Rahman, 2013; Sarkar, 2013; UNESCO, 2011). This dominance motivated my research and its focus on how communication and collaboration among teachers, and between teachers and students, can improve the teaching and learning environment in a rural secondary school in Bangladesh. While national education policy (Bangladesh Ministry of Education, 2010) demands educational excellence, higher order thinking, analytical ability, and application of knowledge to real-life contexts, very limited help is given to develop teachers’ capacity in these areas.

Thornton (2006) suggests that teacher development programmes in Bangladesh do not enable teachers to collaborate, reflect on their practice or respond to the varying educational needs of students. My own experience as a teacher and as a former national project administrator affirms Thornton’s conclusion. Hoque, Alam, and Abdullah (2011) argue that, through collaboration, teachers can review their practice and develop awareness of possible change. To develop this awareness, teachers and administrators in Bangladesh need to know how to develop space and networks for communication, collaboration, and enquiry.

Penetito (2009) emphasises the value of situated learning, explaining that it occurs in the relationship between forms of social participation, engagement and cognitive processes of learning. In this regard, Kemmis and McTggart (2005) suggest that ‘research and action converge in communicative action aimed at practical and critical decisions about what to do in the form of exploratory action’ (p. 595).

Yet detailed studies of how improvements in practice can be made are rare, and absent in the rural Bangladeshi secondary school context. Moreover, while there is potential usefulness in strategic adaptation of western, northern, and other external approaches, which are dominant in literature about pedagogical change (Greenwood, 2018), there is also need to develop epistemological perspectives and procedures that suit the community needs of Bangladesh.

Researchers who promote indigenous perspectives (Durie, 2001; Smith, 1999) make three fundamental assertions about knowledge: what we understand as knowledge is dependent on culture and history; the act of researching people from the outside without considering their own ways of knowing the world is an act of on-going colonisation; research should build on what already exists in local communities to build further knowledge for the well-being of those communities. These principles informed my approach to this localised participatory action research (PAR) project. I also draw on the work of Thakur (1908), who identified need for a Bengali-based approach to knowledge and learning, asserting that first we need to understand and draw on our own history, language and culture, and only then can we usefully engage with the knowledge and culture of others.

Methodological approach

The project used a PAR approach and set out to explore how teachers in a rural school in Bangladesh could develop new pedagogical approaches to meet the needs of their students.

While some may be inclined to see PAR as a western methodological construct, its fundamental bases are more universal: it builds on an integration of action with critical examination of the consequences and future possibilities for action, and it allows participants to own the investigation and challenges that arise. A number of scholars have re-interpreted PAR in terms of indigenous perspectives and utilised it in their local contexts (including Brydon-Miller, Karl, Maguire, Noffke, & Sabhlok, 2011; Te Aika & Greenwood, 2009). I have sought to explore how such a participatory approach can be developed, if it is rooted within a rural Bangladeshi context. An initial basis comes from the very common village practice whereby people sit down together, take tea and talk, and discuss local politics, farming problems and family issues. From this practice, I found a ready transition to the way Kemmis and McTaggart (2005) identify the opening of a communicative space as a primary goal in PAR, and argue that the creation of circumstances ‘in which people can search together collaboratively for more comprehensible, true, authentic and morally right and appropriate ways of understanding and acting in the world’ (p. 578) is itself a tangible outcome. The concept of a communicative space provides a western parallel to our Bangladeshi-orientated processes of sitting and talking and so grounds our work in our own experience and understandings.

My role was a fluidly emergent one. While I initially intended to be a non-directive facilitator, the teachers repeatedly disrupted my non-directive role. I acknowledged that a hands-off approach was indeed contradictory to our cultural habits and I responded as I saw needs unfold, noting that many theorists reject the notion of neutrality of the facilitator. Smith (2014) emphasises the importance of the researcher bringing something useful to add to the local community. Mackew (2008) explores how facilitators need to embrace paradoxes in their role, finding how to move between listening and telling people what to do. I found myself carefully navigating between teachers’ honest requests for direction and my determination to not impose critiques.

Because of government pressure to increase the pass rate in national examinations, I wanted to choose a school that already had strong emphasis on doing well in examinations but was also prepared to explore the more complex expectations of the curriculum and to actively examine the needs of students. My initial meetings with the head teacher suggested that this school had these characteristics.

I entered the community and the school through a warm invitation from the head teacher. In my first face-to-face meeting with him, I learned that all the 12 teachers wanted to participate in the project. The head teacher informed me that the teachers thought me an expert in Science and Mathematics and they were very keen to learn something new from the project. This was their original motivation. Initially, my plan was to work with six subject teachers. After the first in-person meeting with the head teacher, I had to leave my initial plan. I decided to be open and work through the teachers’ enthusiasm. When I first met the teachers in the school, we discussed purpose, duration, and possible working strategies. Through several informal and formal conversations, we agreed to begin. After his initial gatekeeper role, the head teacher monitored the teachers’ feelings about the progress and impact of the project. In the final stage, he evaluated the overall outcome. I use pseudonyms to name participants.

The project lasted seven months: from the end of March to October 2013. The broad sequence of inquiries fell into three stages around holiday breaks. Stage one was from the end of March to the middle of May and involved all the teachers in explorations of their initial understandings of good teaching, and opening up of classrooms for shared observations and discussion. Stage two, from the middle of June to the third week of July, involved a meeting between teachers and students and further involved five selected teachers in an intensive workshop exploring ways that the concept of quality education could be translated into classroom practice, followed by a period when these teachers explored ways to implement the actions they had planned and critically reflected on their practice. The final stage, from the middle of July to the third week of October, involved individual teachers in further explorations of change in their practice, individual and group reflections and evaluation and wrap-up of the project.

Although they were separated by time, the stages of the project flowed into each other in recursive cycles of planning, acting, and critically reflecting.

The data I draw on consists primarily of recorded discussions at regular stages of the project, together with my videoed observations and reflections in my field journal. Discussions were in Bangla. Translations are my own, and I have sought to maintain some of the flavour of local speech and the style of interpersonal exchanges. Analysis is in terms of emergent themes, focusing particularly on participants’ shifts in willingness to examine their own and one another’s practice and in exploring new ways to shape their teaching and their relationship with their students.

Process of the project

The first collaborative research the teachers agreed upon was classroom observations with post-class debriefs. There were differing suggestions about observing teaching and debriefs. Some teachers proposed pair observation and debrief and others suggested it might be useful to involve the whole group. I reminded them to consider their workload and not to disrupt the daily class routine. Finally, they decided for subject-based observation – teachers of the same subject observing each other, but kept it open for other configurations. The decision by the teachers to open their classroom doors to each other was itself a brave innovation in the context of rural Bangladesh and a mark of the extent to which they were prepared to engage with the project. What was even more courageous was the ways they were prepared to allow critical discussion by others of what they had done and to join in that discussion, despite the emotional and attitudinal challenges involved.

Initially the main purpose of our collective observations was to develop a shared basis from which we could examine and discuss what was actually happening in classrooms and how the teachers understood their teaching. Over time teachers began to use their reflections to understand their practice rather than aligning it with some kind of conceptual template. In the debriefs, we sought to reflect on and make meaning from what we observed. We gradually came to focus on the kind of relationship teachers had with students and the nature of students’ participation.

Searching for a way to open up space for professional communication

Although my reception in the school was welcoming, I quickly realised that the teachers had little experience in critically reflecting on their own practice and that they were expecting me to tell them what to do, in a similar way to what they had experienced in training sessions. I needed to find common ground on which we could talk more collaboratively. We talked generally first about what we saw as important contemporary national issues. A few days prior to our first meeting, a multi-storeyed building, Rana Plaza, had collapsed. More than 2000 garment workers were trapped and died. This incident touched the emotion of the whole nation, including me and these teachers. They were shocked, angry, and feeling helpless. We explored the implications of the incident for education and for our role as teachers, examining what we as teachers can do, and cannot do. The conversation took many directions, but it converged on one evolving awareness: that we, teachers, our national leaders and Rana, are all part of the same society, and had all received education from our schools. For example, in response to my question about the role of schooling in shaping the society, Nahar, a social science teacher, reflected, ‘The whole society is responsible.’

What was important about the discussion was that it began to open a space where all of us could share our emotions as well as our ideas and where we were beginning to find ways to agree, disagree, and together search for more understanding. The creation of this open space occurred over the first few weeks of the project through many formal and informal conversations. However, the creation of this open space was a first and vital step in helping us become a community that could learn together.

The communicative space was further developed as we talked about motivations to enter the teaching profession. The teachers talked about the hardships of their life in a rural village community, the expectation of their parents that they should stay and contribute in some way to the village, the lack of opportunity to find other careers, the low salaries they received and the lack of resources. They also talked about their hope that they could give something of value to students they teach, the respect they receive within the community, and the joy they feel when students understand something new and when they do well in examinations. Some referred to their own school experiences as the model for their current teaching. Some acknowledged, in varying ways, that to be an ideal teacher they would like to know more, to have more to offer their students.

What emerged in these discussions was an acknowledgement that although most of the teachers had come into teaching through the pressure of circumstances rather than by choice, they felt a pride in being teachers and, perhaps without analysis of what it might involve, they would like to be better able to serve their students. This sharing of personal stories created a foundation of values and expectations for the explorations we would undertake. It also further developed our preparedness to talk with one another and together explore the purposes of teaching.

Opening up the classroom door

The teachers agreed to start with observation of one another’s teaching. Nandan spoke on their behalf:

We are not afraid of or overwhelmed by our affectionate younger brother Safayet… I respect his educational experiences… We will try our best to get something from him. I expect him to share with us.

Nandan’s speech highlights the goodwill of the teachers and also the expectation that I would provide direct leadership. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the assigned role of educational expert, but I welcomed that of younger brother. I emphasised that our observations would be academic, not evaluative or administrative, so we could talk directly and honestly.

The immediate outcome of the discussion was that Nuri opened up her classroom door for us.

Identifying problems

Nuri taught social science to a Grade 8 class. The lesson was on government and was based on a chapter of the official textbook. A pattern emerged whereby Nuri would ask a question, students would give chorus answers, Nuri would reject them and offer her own answer which would then be echoed by the students. A short example of the pattern is cited below:

Nuri: What specific thing do we require, if we want to do something or administer any activity?

Many students replied together and it was hard to understand their replies. Nuri rejected answers by waving her hand and head.

Nuri: We need a system. It can be for a machine as well as for a human being.

A pause in which students were silent.

Nuri: What is the machine of a man?

Students: (six or seven together, softly) Our head.

Nuri: What is the engine of a human?

A student: (strongly) Head of a man.

Nuri: (satisfied, and restating the answer) Head is the engine of a human.

After the lesson, we returned to the small teachers’ common room to debrief. Kusol, a science teacher, opened the discussion by focusing on content:

Thanks for your bravery in allowing us to observe you during teaching… I have some suggestions. You initiated the learning topic, but students could not capture the relationship. You could have brought examples from family.

Others joined the discussion, arguing with the idea that Kusol had put on the table. Then Aaron, an English teacher, offered a comment about teaching purpose:

A teacher must think what to teach before entering the classroom. Who are my students? Am I going to teach in Grade 1 or 2 or 4? Finally, a teacher needs to think how to teach.

We then talked about how important it is to think about why we will teach something, for example, why the concept of government is important for the students.

Finally, the teachers requested Nuri to give a final comment. She looked depressed and tired, and spoke with a frustrated voice:

What will I say? It is a very hard and true talk for me. I understand my shortcomings. I will try my best to develop.

While we were moving into increasingly honest and rigorous reflection on the processes of teaching, it was not without pain. Because she had volunteered her lesson, Nuri had become the most vulnerable. At this stage, I wondered if we had pushed her too far. The other teachers had been respectful, but it was her teaching that we had critiqued and she clearly felt somewhat crushed at this point. She showed she was resilient, as the episode that follows reveals. Both the raw vulnerability and willingness, on all our parts at various times, to face that vulnerability were recurring features of our work.

In itself, this debrief did not indicate a clear shift to teachers’ belief in themselves as learners, or in understanding students’ educational needs. Rather it showed them starting to discuss one another’s practice and finding confidence to give one another feedback, and to receive it. As a facilitator, I became more aware that I had to recognise both the constraints teachers experienced in their context as well their motivation to improve their practice, and that we needed to build on their current experience, rather than rely on abstract idealism.

Developing a communicative space that allows exploration

At the end of the first month of the project, we were working within a space that allowed us to explore problems, their causes, and of what might be done.

As the teachers observed one another’s lessons and listened and responded to one another’s feedback, they began to see themselves as learners and the group discussions as support structure for their learning. For example, Arman, a physics teacher said:

I learned a technique through our on-going discussions. If a student says something wrong, we need to say fine first and then we can help to elaborate the answer differently by giving a clue. Thus, we can help students to understand.

They also wrestled with a number of conceptual and attitudinal issues, particularly with the tension between a sense of inadequacy and a desire to do better, with habits of looking at surface features of teaching and a latent awareness that the learning they hoped for was not occurring, habits of reproduction and hopes for engagement, and, as the discussions progressed, a growing awareness that attention was not the same as engagement, and that for engagement to occur both teachers and students needed to find ways to move beyond reproduction of knowledge. The teachers still continuously turned to me as a mentor. I had to think about reciprocity. I was asking the teachers to work together to examine their practice and they were asking me to freely give my advice. We were learning together and finding authentic ways to critically reflect on our practice and to plan changes to better meet students’ needs.

Listening to the students

After the initial five weeks of teaching observation and debriefs, we agreed to form four subject-based clusters – Bangla, English, Social Science, and Science and Mathematics. Teachers of the four clusters met at different times over the sixth week to crystallise their initial understandings and make a future plan. I facilitated the cluster meetings. In the cluster meetings, we examined the possibility of meeting with a representative group of students to talk about their life goals and their thoughts about education. It needs to be noted that such meetings do not commonly occur in Bangladeshi schools. There had been some initial disagreements within the group about the meeting. Some were afraid that it might become a form of evaluation by the students and Arman expressed this fear: ‘Of course we have weaknesses, but we do not want our students to know that. On behalf of the group I am making it open.’ This honest acknowledgement of vulnerability was a strong indicator of the growing effectiveness of the communicative space: individuals could be honest about their thoughts and emotions and were becoming trustful of others to talk through their concerns. After reservations had been talked through, the group agreed to ask students about their personal learning challenges.

The students were first shy and politely appreciative of their teachers.

We enjoy everything in our school.

Our sirs give lessons properly, tell us stories and try to make us laugh when they teach.

Then, when they found their teachers were really listening, they began to speak more openly. For example:

If our teachers teach us with pleasure or tell us something different than what is written in the textbooks, we become curious… When our teachers just read out from textbooks, we lose our attention.

We learn step by step. If we fail to understand in a particular segment, we cannot understand anything in the successive process of learning.

Sir, I am weak at trigonometry. When my teacher teaches in class I become fully attentive and I feel I have understood. But afterwards I can’t remember and I forget when I go home.

Sir, actually I am in fear of English writing. I can’t remember the meaning of words. After being told the word meaning, I read and then I understand. But later I forget.

I have problems in science. My teacher explains but I cannot understand. Some words seem very hard to me. For example, cytoplasm is a very hard word.

We get intimidated to ask teachers questions when we do not understand.

Across the threads of discussion, the teachers also began to ask the students questions. These included:

Could you give us any idea about what else we could do so that you can gradually overcome the challenge of English writing and learn the meaning of words?

What can we do to make you more attentive?

What can we do so that you can draw geometric shapes at home?

What do you mean by when sirs teach nicely? Can you explain it by example?

At this stage of the project, the teachers were not just passively listening; they were asking questions throughout and calling for further explanation from the students. Their questions indicated their engagement and desire to understand their students’ learning needs. Both teachers and students sat together in a single classroom and simply started to explore a common space where they could share views about teaching and learning. The communicative space was now expanding. Freedom to express ideas was evolving into a dialogic process whereby the exchange of sometimes oppositional ideas was forming a basis for further exploration of ways to genuinely engage with all the needs that were expressed.

The meeting with the students created opportunity for sharing. How this sharing would translate into action would depend on how the teachers would reflect, collectively and individually, on students’ educational needs and suggestions and on how they would transform their planning into practice.

Transforming dialogue into action

During the period of the school examinations, the teachers arranged invigilation to free a group of five to participate in an intensive workshop about what quality education meant in terms of this school in this community, to translate emerging ideas into achievable indicators, and to then plan for specific changes in classroom interaction. The five were selected by the whole group, based on willingness and trust that they would later share their discoveries. I took part as a participant as well as a facilitator. I report fragments of participants’ discoveries that indicate how they used the evolving communicative space. For example, there were discussions about how to cover the curriculum and yet invite student curiosity:

Kusol: I have been wondering how I will manage students’ questions and whole lot of other activities. Now slowly I am getting the feeling that it is possible, if I start working through the students’ questions. If we allow students to exchange their questions, that would be a different kind of group work; a possible and simple way to be interactive.

There were also discussions about the need to actively teach students to ask questions:

Aaron: Nandan sir has mentioned earlier that some students might not write questions… We need to watch closely and very gently ask some little questions.

As the workshop drew to an end, the group reflected on the productivity of working collaboratively.

Kusol: We need facilitation like the way we have been working here. Perhaps this is why the curriculum never reaches us. The government sends it to us, and we lock it in our drawers.

After the workshop, I left the field for a time and the five teachers individually trialed the changes they had decided on in their own classrooms. They then reported on their discoveries.

Kusol reported he felt challenged initially, but having begun to experiment within his own classroom, he was beginning to see desirable results:

As a teacher, I would have never gone as deeply as the students provoked by bringing me their written questions. The students engaged their brain critically and they went through line by line and point by point. And they have got the benefit. I am satisfied that they did it successfully.

He then shared what he saw as an unresolved challenge:

The questions are good for those with talent but tough for the weaker ones. I need to be more helpful to the weak students [although] when their peers are throwing questions and participating in discussion, they are also thinking how to ask questions.

Nandan reported a shift in classroom relationship but acknowledged that he had further exploration to do:

Actually, I have to go much closer to the students… Of course, I will continue [but] I will continue this approach in my own way.

Polash invited all the teachers to observe his social science class. After the class, students were invited to talk about their reactions to the lesson. Their feedback included:

Sir, the way we have been asked to bring questions was new. We had to think what we actually want to know.

Sir, if we do not practice at home, we will not be able to ask question.

Sir, the main point is that there is no limit to learning. There are many instances when we cannot answer critical questions.

Polash himself reflected:

As a whole, this is a new approach. Though we got training, we had never been asked to try this way. Actually, the teacher is not the only knowledgeable person. As long as I am in the teaching profession I have to believe that I can learn from the students. If I work through the students’ questions I can learn.

Arman invited observation of a physics lesson. At the end, he shared his thinking about the changes in teaching style with his students:

As a teacher, I am alone, but you are forty students in the class. Some of you understand very quickly, some take time. Those who are good can bring different examples. I as a teacher can bring only one example. When you share your examples, we can all learn.

He later talked with me about what he considered his most significant professional development:

They asked me some questions for which the answers were unknown to me. I had to explore them. I read reference books and I took help from you. Not only that, I also had to explain in the classroom. So both the students and I got the benefit. The most important learning for me was that I had thought they understood when they were silent, but when they submitted questions I realised I had been wrong in my thinking and that there were gaps in their understandings …. But this does not mean that my delivery will be 100% effective. I can get confidence [through practice] and feel comfortable in teaching. To me this would be the most pleasing aspect.

Relationship between local context and evolution of communicative space

The project as a whole had a wide range of outcomes, not the least of which were the continuing engagement of the teachers in interrogating and changing their practice and the emergence of a culture of students asking questions. These outcomes are similar to those proposed, but not often achieved, in the national training programmes that are being developed by donor-appointed consultancy firms. What made the difference, I argue, is that in this case we worked from the ground up, acknowledging local constraints as well as the perceptions and understandings of the teachers involved. As I came to realise through the project, working within a local approach to knowledge is not only about awareness of the responsibilities contained within Islam or Hinduism, though these are a constant and largely unspoken influence on the teachers and the community as a whole. Nor is it only about using local ways of speaking, though this is important because it makes big ideas accessible. Primarily it is about talking about the things that matter to the people involved, such as the tragedy of Rana Plaza, their concerns about their low wages and their desire to honour their parents and help the children of their community, and about accepting the realities of their current practice and their current understandings. It is also about accepting that new, critical thinking and change in practice can come from the local people themselves as they gain confidence in exploring possibilities.

The developing of opportunity to talk about their own and one another’s concerns, the evolution of a ‘communicative space’, needs to grow out what already exists locally. This careful and honest attention to local place is currently missing within our national training plans, and that is most apparent when these rely on initiatives of fixed term consultancy firms.

One of the significant elements in this project was the way my facilitative role was shaped by the transactions within our communicative space. Sometimes I was called on to listen without making judgement, sometimes to overtly give advice. I found that sometimes I needed to begin from different bases than I planned. I learned how to argue when I thought it was needed. But I did not give advice or argue as an outsider; I did so as part of the community that was operating within the evolving communicative space. I have come to understand that is how trust developed in this project: not through contracts or trust-building exercises, but through all of us being willing to stay within the space of respectful but honest communication.

When we reflected on the project at its end, Arman emphasised the importance of its collaborative nature:

You could have imposed the approach we used in the final stage, right from the beginning. In that case, we would have thrown it out after you leave the school. But you kept patience, and now we cannot leave out what we have learned ourselves. This is a big learning for me.

I would argue that if this can happen in one school, it can happen in others. What we need to develop in Bangladesh is not necessarily new, different teacher development projects, but rather an orientation towards engaging teachers in actively talking about and gradually, collaboratively critiquing their own practice. We also need to give them opportunity to trial changes in environments where they feel supported and not afraid to make changes, as Nandan said, in their own way.

A communicative space that grows

In the beginning of the project, I had seen the development of a communicative space as a first step in engaging participants in critical reflection on practice, like the first cycle of a somewhat mechanistic model of action research. It turned out that an expanding pulsating model would be a better image of how the communicative space grew. As I have outlined in this brief account of the project, it extended to allow an unstructured, open forum between teachers and students, a radical event in a Bangladeshi context. It further stretched to allow not only student questions, also far too uncommon in Bangladeshi classrooms, but also classroom dialogues between teachers and students about the usefulness of questions and the limitations of the teacher’s knowledge.

In the final evaluation of the project, along with the 12 teachers the head teacher articulated that he noticed teachers were becoming less shy in inviting students’ questions, and that students were gradually overcoming their own shyness. And Nuri, who had been constricted in her role as authoritative teacher during our first observation, stated that she now engaged so deeply with students’ questions that she would forget about time. ‘I want to be able to give the students more time’, she said. ‘Now I am experiencing this [different] kind of dissatisfaction.’ Both statements highlight the change towards student-centredness that were occurring throughout the school, and also indicate that the communication process had become part of the school culture. Nuri was not one of the five in the workshop who had evolved the strategy of encouraging student questions; she picked up what her colleagues shared and tried it out in her own classroom. And the head teacher who had largely stood aside from discussions, in order to limit his authoritative influence, was listening to what the teachers believed they had achieved and was honouring it.

Conclusion

To conclude, I examine implications for improvement in educational practices in Bangladesh. The communicative space that developed enabled both teachers and students to reflect on teaching and learning. Through dialogue and reflection, they developed an awareness of the consequences of their decisions and a commitment to continue engagement with each other and to improvement of practice. Therefore, their practice became grounded in increasingly better understandings of each other’s needs and intentions. This was particularly evident in the way the dialogue between teachers and students led to teachers’ commitment to promoting students’ curiosity in the classroom.

The development of communicative space fosters the development of ethical citizenship in Bangladesh. By recognising the value of their colleagues and their contribution, teachers become more capable of professional dialogue that can enable a groundswell of improvement in both the style and content of teaching, a democratic rather than policy-dependent means to improve education. When their voices are heard in the classroom, students evolve understanding of themselves as active contributors to society with a responsible role to play in creating change. This project revolved around the creation of respectful relationships and that experience in itself is a necessary component in developing understandings of citizenship that are active and empowering as well as critical and dialogic.

A further implication of this study for education development in Bangladesh is that it shows the value of grounding teacher development within the localised experiences and aspirations of teachers themselves. If the act of researching people from the outside without consideration of their own ways of knowing the world is an act of on-going colonisation, then it is important to enable teachers to investigate their own practice. If research is to build on what already exists in local communities to build further knowledge for the well-being of those communities, then the evolving of spaces for honest and increasingly multi-directional dialogues is vital, so participants can come to recognise, use and develop what already exists and can better understand what well-being may involve.

The challenge remains for us in Bangladesh is to turn such aspirations into practice. We need to find ways to create communicative spaces at the national level and at the level of our local grounded communities.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Safayet Alam is an assistant professor in Physics in the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2016, he obtained the PhD degree from the University of Canterbury. Currently he is working as an assistant director at the National Academy for Educational Management (NAEM), Dhaka, Bangladesh. His research interest is in the area of curriculum studies, pedagogy, neoliberalism and education and participatory action research.

References

Alam

(2013). Operational curriculum and citizenship: An exploration of what happens in the Bangladesh secondary school classrooms. In Greenwood

Everatt

Kabir

, & Alam

(Eds.), Research and educational change in Bangladesh (pp. 17–33). Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.

Al Amin

Greenwood

(2018). The examination system in Bangladesh and its impact: On curriculum, students, teachers and society. Language Testing in Asia, 8(4), 1–18.

Alamgir

(2015). Rural urban disparity in education persists. New Age Report, May 31, 2015. Dhaka: New Age, The Outspoken Daily. Retrieved from http://newagebd.net/124884/rural-urban-disparity-in-edn-persists/

Bangladesh Ministry of Education. (2005). Project proforma. Dhaka. Retrieved on February 13, 2010 from http://www.tqi-sep.gov.bd/

Bangladesh Ministry of Education (2010). National Education Policy-2010. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/58413771/National-Education-Policy-2010-Eng-PDF-Final#scribd

Bangladesh Ministry of Education (2005). Project proforma. Dhaka. Retrieved from http://www.tqi-sep.gov.bd/

Brydon-Miller

Karl

Maguire

Noffke

Sabhlok

(2011). Jazz and the banyan tree: Roots and riffs on participatory action research. In Denzin

Lincoln

(Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 387–400). London: SAGE.

Durie

(2001). A framework for considering Māori educational advancement. Opening Address. In N. Durie (Ed.), Hui Taumata Mātauranga (pp. 197–211). Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers.

Greenwood

(2018). The where of doctoral research: The role of place in creating meaning. Environmental Education Research, 24(1), 129–144.

10.

Hoque

Alam

Abdullah

(2011). Impact of teachers’ professional development on school improvement-an analysis at Bangladesh standpoint. Asia Pacific Education Review, 12, 337–348. DOI: 10.1007/s12564-010-9107-z

11.

Kemmis

McTaggart

(2005). Participatory Action Research: Communicative action and the public sphere. In Denzin

Lincoln

(Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 559–603). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

12.

Mackew

(2008). Facilitation as action research in the moment. In Reason

Bradbury

(Eds.), The Sage handbook of action research: Participatory inquiry and practice (2nd ed., pp. 1–22). London: SAGE.

13.

Penetito

(2009). Place-based education: Catering for curriculum, culture, and community. New Zealand Annual Review of Education, 18, 5–30.

14.

Podder

(2013). English Aural-Oral Skills Assessment Policy and Practices in Bangladesh secondary schools. In Greenwood

Everatt

Kabir

Alam

(Eds.), Research and educational change in Bangladesh (pp. 53–67). Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.

15.

Rahman

(2013). Changing teaching perceptions and culture of professional practice: A case of secondary science teachers’ professional learning in Bangladesh. In Greenwood

Everatt

Kabir

Alam

(Eds.), Research and educational change in Bangladesh (pp. 153–171). Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.

16.

Sarkar

(2013). Bangladeshi Science teachers’ perspectives of the promotion of scientific literacy. In Greenwood

Everatt

Kabir

Alam

(Eds.), Research and educational change in Bangladesh (pp. 135–152). Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.

17.

Smith

(2014). Social Justice, transformation, and indigenous methodologies. In Rinehart

Barbour

Pope

(Eds.), Ethnographic worldviews: Transformations and social justice (pp.15–20). London: Springer.

18.

Smith

(1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

19.

Te Aika

Greenwood

(2009). Ko tātou te rangahau, ko te rangahau, ko tātou: A Māori approach to participatory action research. In Kapoor

Jordan

(Eds.), Education, participatory action research, and social change: International perspectives (pp. 59–72). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

20.

Thakur

(1908). Shikkha (education). Kolkata: Bishwavaroti.

21.

Thornton

(2006). Teachers talking: The role of collaboration in secondary schools in Bangladesh. Compare, 36(2), 181–196.

22.

UNESCO (2011). World data on education (7th ed.). Bangladesh, Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/links.htm