The African teacher and other such discourses of deficit

I went to an interesting presentation today – organised by TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Sahara Africa) a unit at the OU (http://www.tessafrica.net/) – five teachers representing Kenya, Sudan, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria told the mainly white British and European audience (save for myself and three other PhD students from Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria respectively) about their lives as African teachers. I couldn’t help by wonder - especially when the South African teacher spoke of the decline of student discipline as one of the problems he encountered as a teacher, especially in the teaching environment today where children have too many rights and teachers are no longer allowed to enforce discipline via the good old fashion method of the cane, while the audience nervously chuckled along - if there was a different way to represent these teachers so that the ubiquitous discourse of deficit, problems and endless neediness and reliance on the West by Africa could be challenged. Maybe this wasn’t the place for such an engagement – it was about promoting the ‘good work’ of the TESSA project (they are going to get an award by the Queen - nogals), showing how it had ‘transformed’ the lives of the teachers and the pupils and communities they served (and in all fairness it probably did!).  

But I still couldn’t help by wonder – if the format, content and representation of these teachers through this presentation wasn’t helping to reinforce and perpetuate implicitly held prejudices and stereotypes, rather than foster real, deep and nuanced understandings of not only the challenges of being a teacher in Africa, but how it is fundamentally and importantly different from teaching in Europe in all its positive and negative glory. Maybe I’m being overly critical and disparaging, but I just can’t help but wonder. Interestingly my thoughts tie up with previous insights about ideologies implicit in notions of academic writing and literacy that result in the assignment of privilege, status and power to certain kinds of writing and literacy and not to others.