Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemPerceptions of teacher evaluation in Pakistan: a case study from Peshawar District( 2008)Profound changes are taking place in education including teacher evaluation and teacher effectiveness over the past few years. This signifies a paradigm shift from the traditional to more sophisticated `state of the art' approaches to teacher evaluation. Central to the debate on teacher evaluation have been the purposes it serves and the criteria against which teachers are evaluated. While review of the evaluation literature indicated widespread agreement on the importance of teacher evaluation, there was little convergence of views on the appropriate criteria and processes. To gain an understanding of the purposes, procedures and criteria of teacher evaluation, the study adopted a qualitative, case study approach. Interviews were conducted with secondary school teachers and principals in Peshawar district of the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan. A total of forty interviews were conducted, twenty five with teachers and fifteen with school principals in the case study district of Peshawar. The data analysis produced several key findings. First, the thesis reveals that teacher evaluation in schools in Peshawar is overwhelmingly used for accountability (summative) rather than formative purposes. Second, teachers are evaluated against generic criteria not based on any empirical research. Third, the processes adopted are messy and unstructured. Fourth, evaluation is not linked to career structure. Fifth, teacher pay has been linked to evaluation which is based on student outcomes. From these findings, an integrated model of teacher evaluation was developed. Although the study's findings are based on a single district, in a particular context, these are likely to be of use to school teachers, principals, educational researchers and policy makers in various contexts. It will contribute to the scarce discourse on teacher evaluation issues in Pakistan.
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ItemTeachers & curriculum: personal mythopoesis and the practical in pedagogy( 1996)This study explores the dynamic between the person of the teacher and work with curriculum. The person is taken to be constituted in narratives. I have, accordingly, utilised a language of myth in order to speak of personhood. Myth is the collective or individual operation of imagination whereby experience is able to be intensely owned. It is this operation of mind that I relate to the ways in which curriculum might be experienced. At issue in this process is the capacity of the person of the teacher to illuminate curriculum material, or to make curriculum a living experience for students. Though my focus is imaginational and mythic, I seek to show - through an intimate study of the inner worlds of six teachers at one school site - that it is at this impalpable level that 'the practical' in pedagogy becomes most significant as a curriculum consideration. By linking the subtle work of imagination to the 'practical intelligence' access is gained to the significance and meaning of personal agency and, in particular, the nature of critique in teacher work with curriculum. This introduces to the familiar theory/practice dichotomy that pervades curriculum thinking, and which tends to disempower the teacher voice, a new and incommensurable perspective. The practical emphasis, by being linked to the personal imaginational work of teachers, breaks out of an encapsulation within the classroom and the profession. Knowledge, represented in microcosm in the curriculum, is shown, via this reconceptualisation of the practical, in its living dimensionality. The imperatives of this living aspect of curriculum experience, identified in source, process, operation, and direction, stand against the different imperatives of instrumental conceptions of curriculum.