Transforming Teacher Quality in the Global South: Using Capabilities and Causality to Re-examine Teacher Performance

A common story of teachers from the Global South portrays them as deficient, unreliable and unprofessional. However, this book uses an innovative Capability Approach/Critical Realist (CA/CR) lens to reveal the causal links between teachers' constrained capabilities and their 'criticised' behaviours.

Transforming Teacher Quality in the Global South first applies this analytical lens to a Tanzanian case study in order to show how issues concerning gender, leadership and daily survival are causally linked to actions such as absenteeism, distraction and lack of preparation. The second half of this book then uses the CA/CR lens to inform the design of interventions to address these and other issues, such as corporal punishment, teacher morale and female teacher deployment to rural schools.

The analyses from this award-winning research not only provide detailed explanations of teacher performance, but also offer nuanced and creative strategies aimed at improvements. This book will be of great value to anyone in education and international development who would like to see theoretical and academic rigour underpin practical strategies aiming to transform teacher quality.