Teacher Professionalism in the Global South: A Decolonial Perspective

This short book aims to provide a decolonial critique of dominant global agendas concerning teacher professionalism and to propose new understanding based on the perspectives and experiences of a sample of teachers in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Rwanda and Tanzania. The book opens by setting out dominant conceptions of teacher professionalism as they appear in the global literature. It then uses Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s three dimensions of coloniality (namely, the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being) as a framework for considering the legacy of colonialism on teacher professionalism and setting out teachers’ ideas concerning the barriers to and affordances of their professionalism. The main arguments advanced in the book are that a decolonial lens is helpful for contextualizing the perspectives of teachers in the global South; the lived experiences and material conditions of these teachers are often neglected in dominant discourses; it is important to situate the perspectives of teachers in an understanding of local contexts and realities; and, in contrast to deficit discourses that predominate in the global literature, there is much that can be learned about teacher professionalism from teachers in the global South.