Re: Alternative definitions of educational success (fwd)

serpell robert n. (serpell who-is-at umbc.edu)
Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:09:17 -0400

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Bill.
Rural elementary (or primary) schools in Africa are often physically close
to their students' homes, but culturally they are even more sharply
segregated from the rest of life in the community than seems to be the
case for American inner-city schools. When a rural Zambian school is used
as a forum for local politics, it functions simply as a building, much as
US city schools serve as polling booths, and when it functions as a
library, the arrangement tends to be unofficial. Even evening classes,
which may be taught by the same teachers who teach the regular primary
school curriculum by day, are typically not linked in any explicit way to
the regular life of the school. My suggestion, however, is that these are
all cracks in the insulation that imply some permeability, and that
policymakers could open them up further and use them for facilitating more
effective community-school communication.

Presently, most attempts to "bring in" parents to contribute to the life
of Zambian schools fall into one or more of the traps described by
Fitzgerald and Goncu (1993) in their excellent critique of "parent
involvement" programs in the USA. I asked a sample of Zambian teachers in
the late 80s what they saw as the main functions of the parent-teacher
association, and it was clear the overwhelming majority view was that it
was there to recruit parents to solve problems faced by the school and/or
by teachers.

Like you, I attribute the weakness of the partnerships that
get established mainly to the unpreparedness of most parents for
"navigation" of the technocratic domain of the school.
I think your point about portfolios is excellent: a tangible, ostensible
referent for authentic communication between parents and teachers about
the child they both know - affording what Horton (1982) might call a
bridgehead of primary theory for initiating cross-cultural communication.

Regarding how schools are actually held accountable in rural African
communities, paradoxically the strongest actions are taken by local
communities against schools that fail to perform the function of
extracting talented youth from the community and propelling them off into
the distant, alien, but also powerful world of secondary schooling,
which is seen as an entry route to urban living and economic affluence.

This is getting too long already !

Robert

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Bill Penuel
wrote:

> <<Although most of the public basic schools in rural areas of Africa
> define their principal mandate in terms of the narrowing staircase model,
> many of them also perform additional local service functions as a
> community library, as a community forum for discussion of public affairs,
> and as a base for continuing education. I suggest that educational
> planners could profitably borrow from these existing practices the notion
> of schools as nodes in their planning models, in order to build local
> accountability into the public legitimation accorded by central
> administrative authorities to the activities of rural schools.>>
>
> Robert--
>
> What strikes me in what you write about schools in rural Africa is that
> the boundaries between school and community are not so strong as they are
> in the U.S. Even where schools have attempted to bring the community in,
> many times they fail for a host of reasons, especially because schools'
> policies, procedures, and spaces are often inaccessible to parents and
> community members who don't have the time or knowledge to navigate them.
>
> I think the permeability of schools to community functions is relevant
> to discussions of assessment. I would argue that the more permeable
> schools are to families and communities, the less the need for big,
> large-scale assessment. As many people working in the area of portfolio
> assessment have pointed out, student work can serve as a kind of "boundary
> object" for everyone (teachers, administrators, students, parents,
> community) to use as a thinking device for the quality of schools and as an
> indicator of the kind of learning that's taking place. On the other hand,
> I believe the relatively alienated relationship that most people have to
> various public entities like schools and local government means that when
> we want to know whether schools or governments are 'good' we quickly go for
> measures that sound more objective, that carry the weight of
> 'accountability.'
>
> I wonder how schools are in fact held accountable in rural Africa, in
> the eyes of community members there, aside from what policy-makers seem to
> be trying to do in building schools on the traditional Western model?
>
> Bill
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Bill Penuel, Ph.D.
> Research Social Scientist
> SRI International
> 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Mailstop BS116
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>
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>
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> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>

Robert Serpell tel: ( 410 ) 455 2417
Psychology Department 455 2567
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 fax: ( 410 ) 455 1055

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