Schooling, Teaching, and Learning in an Uncertain World
Frances Vavrus talks about her new book and her reflections on teaching and learning in Tanzania
Written by: Matthew Schuelka
We ought to be far more skeptical about cognitive and noncognitive skills as the primary engines producing certainty through schooling. Gender, race, nationality, and social class continue to matter no matter how gifted or gritty one may be.
Frances (Fran) Vavrus, Professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Minnesota, wrote the lines above in her new book Schooling as Uncertainty. In this book, Fran ruminates and reflects on her thirty years of experience in teaching, learning, and conducting research on education in Tanzania. The book itself is part longitudinal ethnography, part personal memoir. Last month I had the opportunity to speak with Fran about her book and her experiences as a teacher and researcher in Tanzania. As part two of our ‘teaching in contexts’ series, I will discuss some of the main themes in Schooling as Uncertainty and share my conversation with the author.
The aspirational myth of schooling and society
The reasons that we go to school are numerous. I do not have the space in one issue of EdPop to go through all of them, unfortunately, but some of the main narratives around the purpose of schooling are centered around learning basic literacy and numeracy, learning to be informed democratic citizens, putting children somewhere other than manual labor, and allowing parents the space to be economically productive (in theory). However, perhaps the biggest narrative that we tell ourselves on the purpose of schooling is that the act of going to school is directly equivalent to a better life – to a better rung on the socio-economic ladder of society. Schooling builds the human and economic capital of the nation. Going to school leads to certainty in our lives and life outcomes.
But what if it doesn’t?
Schooling as Uncertainty explores this question both in what Fran observes in Tanzania, as well as what Fran observes in her own life. She probes the question by examining the experiences and trajectories of her Tanzanian students and research participants and finds that numerous factors – both predictable and unpredictable – influence the effects and outcomes of schooling. A student may have to drop out of school because of school fees, or a sudden death in the family, one bad exam mark, or a lack of opportunities for further schooling or employment, for example. There is an uncertainty to schooling that we all must reckon with; as well as that schooling itself can create ‘uncertainty’ rather than ‘certainty’ in our life trajectories. ‘Uncertainty,’ as defined by Sandra Calkins, is “the limited ability to predict even the immediate future – that is, to engage it prudently and with foresight.” On uncertainty in schooling, Fran writes,
Without question, schooling has the potential to mitigate uncertainty, but it is not always a reliable prophylactic; instead, schooling can become a source of uncertainty itself.
Teaching and learning in Tanzania
Fran’s experience in Tanzania began as a teacher and a student of Swahili, and then has oscillated between intermingled research and teaching experiences in the years since. In terms of her own initial culture-shock moments as an American teaching in Tanzania, Fran says that “Corporal punishment was the area in which my colleagues and I had the biggest differences of opinion. Very few teachers – and students, for that matter – were opposed to corporal punishment … Caning was often used during the class … this is where I was struggling – students missed class anyway so often and then we’re pulling them out of class to do punishment. Some teachers would say, ‘But then that’s good, that’s double-punishment.’ I was saying, ‘They can’t improve their scores when they’re out of the classroom and they’re likely to get caned again for poor performance.” Fran elaborates on this more significantly in Chapter 6 in Schooling as Uncertainty.1
Another cultural dissonance moment, according to Fran, was the difference between teacher-centered learning and student-centered learning. Fran says that, “The [Tanzanian] teachers that went to school during the latter part of the socialist period [approx. the late 1970s–early 1990s] where learning and teaching resources were limited, they didn’t see [student-centered learning]. They were taught how to teach with a stub of chalk and a blackboard.” She goes on to discuss the skepticism of the ‘co-construction of knowledge’ educational philosophy amongst some Tanzanian teachers who feel that it subverts their authority and the authority of the knowledge they were teaching.
Fran later established a longitudinal project called Teaching In Action (TIA) which worked with Tanzanian teachers in a teacher’s college to explore their own pedagogical approaches.2 “In seeing how secondary teachers were prepared,” explains Fran, “I realized that the gap between policy and the teacher preparation curriculum and the national exam were just so great. The most responsible teachers, by virtue of getting more students to pass the exam, will always teach to the test. That’s how they’re going to be valued, incentivized, respected. Then all of the sudden the policy changed. So now it was all about active, participatory learning. The syllabus for different subjects, almost all of them began with ‘Brainstorm,’ ‘Brainstorm,’ ‘Role-play,’ ‘Brainstorm.’ The student teachers – when I had them develop model lessons – they would throw in brainstorming, maybe on the third or fourth day into a unit on a topic. It showed me that they didn’t fully understand what the purpose of brainstorming was. It’s not something that you do once you’ve taught the students what you want, it’s about them generating questions and possibilities for learning in a unit to come, instead of a way of testing their knowledge.” Fran continues, “The difference between method and philosophy of education needed to be addressed, so that anytime we’re teaching future teachers – or even current teachers – about a new method there has to be a concomitant explanation as to why a teacher might want to do [a new method]; attention to the sequencing of it in relation to a unit, or daily lesson, or entire semester. What’s the connection between this method and the student’s ability to perform well on the national exam? Even those of us who dislike national exams, they matter in countries where it determines your progression through the school system.”
Fran also questions and criticizes the notion of ‘best practices’ in education. Both in our interview, and in her book, she raises the point that notions of childhood, or infancy, for example, are not universal. In our interview, Fran shared an experience when she was teaching in Tanzania when she introduced what she thought was at least a ‘good’ practice in her classroom: competition. “I thought it would fun at the end of a week if I divided the class into two teams,” says Fran about her grammar class, “I thought it would be active and I brought these little hard candies. The students got really excited, they were making a ton of noise and the windows are non-existent, so I was disturbing everyone in the school. The kids were so excited about free candy that they started grabbing it in the air, chairs were knocked over, desks were falling – it was complete mayhem.” After the class was over, Fran’s colleagues approached her and asked if she was okay, “They were very polite, but they were trying to educate me to say: that sort of activity was not appropriate for their school … the more I reflected on it, these were kids raised in a socialist environment and competition, what we think of as a ‘universal’ way to get kids active, maybe was not appropriate. Maybe the thing to do was more cooperative learning.”
‘Cruel optimism’ and the price of failure
In our conversation, Fran and I discussed the increasing penalty that students pay for school failure. I spoke on my own ethnographic longitudinal work in Bhutan, and Fran spoke on her longitudinal work in Tanzania. Fran notes, “As secondary education opened up in Tanzania there was more pressure put on kids to get into secondary school. When kids failed the primary school leaving exam, there was a greater sense of being a failure … Today, the policy [in Tanzania] is that all students are supposed to go to school through Form 4. There’s not supposed to be high stakes exams … but it’s so blurry. What I sense now is that if you don’t get into secondary school there’s an element of shame, but what is even more devastating is the kids that do pass but then they are unable to continue because of inability to pay fees … there are also lost wages and lost labor for that child to be in school.” In the interview, Fran continues:
It’s not as if ‘uncertainty’ is always negative. It can be generative. If I believe that going to school for years and years may still not lead to the outcome I want – I hope it will, that’s why I’m going to school – but I have an understanding that there are so many other forces at play. Then if I don’t pass, or if my family has to pull me out, then it’s perhaps not quite as devastating.
We also spoke about the disappointment of educational aspirations that do not pan out relative to what school or the global economy projects as being ‘successful.’ “One of the great delusions is that we can educate ourselves out of precarity. If the pandemic has taught us anything, is that certainty can be quickly reversed. We really don’t know what the future holds. To just assume that any path – the path of schooling, the path of financial success – will lead to an inevitable outcome is the ‘cruel optimism’ that leads to pain for us when we cling to a certain future that doesn’t really exist.” Fran writes further on the notion of ‘cruel optimism’ in her book, which is an idea originally developed by Lauren Berlant.
Recommendations for Global Education Engagement
In terms of what Fran recommends for international educational research, development, and teaching, she strongly advocates for long-term engagement in communities wherever they may be, starting with your own. Fran suggests that this can slowly build trust and understanding, and that only time can help facilitate this. The most important thing to understand in any community is to seek out where there is a desire for change, and what it is that they want for their community.
For Next Week…
Try as we might to reduce, simplify, analyze, and understand educational systems, we must admit that educational systems are complex and, in some ways, inexplicable. Next week on EdPop, I will share some of my own work in trying to both acknowledge – and understand – education as a complex system. I will use the case of educational values in Bhutan as an example.
Fran also talks more about these experiences, and a particularly instructive cultural moment that has to do with spoons, in her interview on the Fresh Ed podcast: https://freshedpodcast.com/vavrus/
The book Teaching in Tension: International Pedagogies, National Policies, and Teachers’ Practices (Sense, 2013), edited by Fran Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett, is a specific look at the TIA project.